In a recent post entitled Spiritual Transformation: Part 4, Mark Waltz, Pastor of Connections at Granger Community Church, writes about what could be called a “discipleship dilemma” facing the church. What is this dilemma? A growing number of “mature” believers are still dependent almost solely upon the church for their spiritual health. Perhaps an analogy is in order.

Imagine you are in the park on a warm spring day. The wind is blowing, the leaves are rustling and the birds are singing. As you jog by the bench that usually holds the new moms, you see something that catches you off-guard. Somewhere in the midst of strollers and bottles is a 30 year old man, being burped by his not so young mother. While the image may be quite amusing, or scary depending on how you pictured it, it is all too easy to draw the corollary between this (hopefully) imaginary scene and the church.

Perhaps the mother didn’t want to let her son go. Maybe she wanted him to stay young forever, they are so cute at that age. If this is the case, then surely the church is guilty of the same thing. We’ve been too afraid to let our “babies” in Christ grow up. To go out on their own, to leave our protection. There are a lot of reasons why we do this: fear for their “spiritual” safety, fear of losing their tithe and fear of them leaving our church, just to name a few. Although there are probably many more reasons, I would wager that 98% of them revolve around fear. We have been afraid too long. Afraid to give away responsibility, fearing that the very person we helped bring into the kingdom will decide they don’t need us anymore.

How do we fix this? Well, I don’t claim to have all the answers, I’m just a wet-nosed pup compared to some of the Godly role-models in my life, but I do know this: The church has to get over itself. We have to get over the fear that drives us to hold on, to try and maintain control, we have to learn to let go. Sure it’ll be hard, especially since there are so many people to “kick out of the nest”, but it has to be done. How? Creating opportunities for responsibilties. Wow, that rhymes. Lay-led small groups, self-taught Bible studies and time-outs are a great place to start.
I know this isn’t an easy answer but, look on the bright side, if we can start now we should have this problem fixed in just a few “generations”.