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I have a confession.  The other day I actually watched almost a full episode of King of the Hill.  While I do find the show moderately funny, this is way out of the norm for me.  Typically, if it does not involve ESPN I am not interested in the TV, but this show caught my attention.

As you may know, Hank works at Strickland Propane and is passionate about his job of selling propane and propane accessories.  After seeing an ice cream store that appeared to be a fun place to work, Hank’s boss, Buck, decides to make a few changes to the store in an effort to make it a “fun” place to work and for people to shop.  In order to do this he forces his workers to wear costumes to work, have sleepovers in the office, use stupid selling jingles, ring a bell and sing a song when some buys a tank of propane, and sell the propane in three sizes: Like it, Love it, Blow Your Hair Back It’s So Big.   In this episode, Hank’s job is to somehow convince his co-workers that their boss has gone mad and that people have forgotten why they work at Strickland Propane in the first place.  For Hank, it’s not about the extra stuff, but the propane. 

As I read and write, I often feel like Hank Hill in this episode.  If I could only have the hours of my life back that I have wasted learning stupid church sells tactics.  We have missed the point.  Somehow in the process of “doing church” we have missed God and we have taught other people to do the same. 

As the summer comes to a close and the school year begins I want to suggest that maybe the church needs to go back to school. 

I am weird, but I miss it.  This week many young men and women will get the opportunity to go back to school and I won’t.  The year marks the second year since I was five that I will not be in school and I don’t like it.  Now granted, I did not like school in middle and high school, but when I finally got to the point that I actually cared, school became a lot of fun.  I loved learning, loved reading, and loved challenging myself. 

And this passion carried over to the church.  As a young man beginning to walk with the Lord I found myself consumed with learning all I could about my newfound faith in Jesus. However, it was quickly apparent that this was not the case for everyone.  People did not seem to desire to know God.  They showed up for Sunday School, survived church, and enjoyed the week, only to repeat the process again the following week.  They did not know their Bibles, much less how to apply them to their lives.   And to make it worse, many of these people I observed had been Christians for 30-40 years.  I have to agree with Alan Bloom when he says “As the respect for the Sacred - the latest fad - has soared, real religion and knowledge of the Bible have diminished to the vanishing point.” (The Closing of the American Mind, p. 56)

Now most people would not admit it, but they are more than satisfied with some various emotional experiences and a pervasive lack of knowledge of God.  However, when you look at Scripture, this is foreign to the Biblical discussions of what it means to love God.  In fact everywhere you look, Scripture connects love for God with obedience to his commands.

• “If you love Me, you will keep My commandments” (John 14:15)
• “If you abide in My word, then you are truly disciples of Mine; and you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:31-32).

And these statements are not hidden in Scripture.  The need for the church to love God with their minds is even found in the two “great” statements in Scripture: the great commandment and the great commission.

The Great commandment states that “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength” (Mark 12:30).  Did you see it?  You are to love him with your heart and soul, but also with your mind and strength. Clearly, loving God is not just a heart thing, but a head thing as well.

And the second “great” is the Great Commission in which Jesus says, “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:19).  Now this verse is a little more difficult to see the point I am trying to make.  We are told to go, make disciples, and baptize them, and then what?  We are to teach them to do everything that God commanded us to do.”  While this passage is often cited as providing the foundation of the mission of the church, many churches fail to work towards the accomplishment of the task of teaching people to do everything that Jesus commanded, a failure Dallas Willard calls the “great omission from the great commission.”[1]  Os Guinness, in his marvelous work Fit Bodies, Fat Minds, points to a condition he calls anti-intellectualism in the church, which he describes as “a disposition to discount the importance of truth and the life of the mind.”[2]  Unfortunately many Christians and churches fail to love God well with their minds and do not associate learning with the love of God. 

Charles Malik, speaking at the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College, poignantly says: “I must be frank with you: the greatest danger besetting American Evangelical Christianity is the danger of anti-intellectualism.  The mind, as to its greatest and deepest reaches, is not cared for enough.”[3]  Granted, knowledge of God is not an end in and of itself.  But knowledge of God leads to proper worship of God, which helps to fight against gospel substitutes. 

So over the next few days (or weeks or months) I am going to ponder some of the reasons for the overwhelming lack of knowledge of God in our world and in our churches.  If you have some suggestions, I would love to hear them.

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[1] Dallas Willard, The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus Essential Teachings on Discipleship (San Francisco: Harper, 2006).

[2] Os Guinness, Fit Bodies, Fat Minds: Why Evangelicals Don’t Think and What to do About It (Grand Rapids: BakerBooks, 1994), 9.

[3] Quoted in Guinness, Fat Minds, 11.