This failure is related to the second . . .
2. A failure to teach.
Part of the Great Commission is once we “go and make disciples,” we are supposed to “… Teach these new disciples to obey all the commands I have given you …” How have our leaders done at this responsibility to teach? Just this past week, yet another article was published about a recent study revealing that a majority of Christians — not unbelievers, but Christians — say they don’t know what the Great Commission is. Other studies reveal that most Christians are biblically illiterate, don’t hold a biblical worldview, don’t believe several of the core tenets of the Christian faith, don’t know the great doctrines of the Bible, and don’t even know what “theology” means.
I believe one huge aspect of church leadership failures was giving up use of biblical terms — dumbing down teaching — in favor of replacing key biblical terms with rambling paragraphs of wordy explanation with the excuse that non-Christians don’t understand “Christianese.”
Then teach them!
Many ministers think it’s easier to teach a doctrine with many words as an explanation or description than teaching the meaning … of a single word! For example, you rarely hear a minister use the word “propitiation” because they think that word is too “Christianese,” but they’ll expect people to learn a long explanation of it. How do people remember explanations or meanings? By attaching a single word to it! But because so many leaders have been afraid to use more biblical language, many Christians couldn’t tell you what atonement, ransom, reconciliation, redemption, adoption, justification, sanctification, or propitiation mean because they haven’t been taught the word. It’s much harder to be taught a concept that isn’t attached to a word than it is to introduce a word and then teach the meaning of it.
Simply put, adequate teaching has been among the key church leadership failures.
