Caught Before Taught

A sunny Friday afternoon in April 2011 found me sitting on the lawn at the back of someone’s house, quite bewildered.

It was a youth weekend away, or at least, it was meant to be. I had arrived at the house of those organising it along with some friends. To be honest, at this point I had not yet encountered Jesus, and I wasn’t there for the God-ward side of things. My friends, including my girlfriend, were there, and I enjoyed these events and the time spent with them. But my mind was far from being on Christ.

As we arrived, I saw the minibus that was meant to be delivering us to our destination sitting with it’s bonnet open, and a mechanic in overalls darting to and fro from it. My friend’s dad left us there, so we wandered over to the house and we were soon told that the bus had broken down, and they’d been trying to fix it for hours, with no luck. That was when the young guy who was organising the weekend told everyone to go into the back garden. They split us up into male and female groups, and had us sit down, the girls at one end of the garden and the boys at the other. I wasn’t sure what was going on, and what I heard was not what I expected. They wanted us to pray? Wait, they were serious?!

As several of the leaders and campers took turns praying about the situation, I sat with my head bowed, eyes closed, a picture of reverence… and silently mocked in my head. I had a bit of engineering know-how; I was planning on going to study aircraft mechanics in a couple of years when I went to college. If the mechanic had been working all day and didn’t know how to fix it, then what was the point in praying. If it didn’t work, it wouldn’t work in the next few minutes.

A few minutes after we had finished praying, the bus was working. We made it to the location without any delay. And I was dumbstruck. Though it would be another 14 months until I would become a believer, this incident etched itself into my mind. I had mocked and yet now I couldn’t explain what had happened.

The organiser of the event would end up being the person who discipled me for the first three years of my Christian walk. He is himself an engineer and handyman, and I have worked with him fixing many things that we did not pray about. Sometimes work just needs to be done, as you walk with the Spirit, not necessarily with a set time of prayer for it. However, that afternoon on April 29th, 2011, he had felt an impulse to go to prayer in front of that group of young people. And in the years since, this incident and many others have shaped my view of prayer, of its necessity, and of the God who hears and answers even mechanical-related petitions for his glory. It was not that I was taught all the Scriptural verses on prayer or sat in many lectures about its importance. I had witnessed it, and it shaped me.

Over those years of discipleship there were certainly late-night conversations about interesting passages of Scripture. There were tears at times, gentle guidance as I made many a mistake. There were weekends of Bible-teaching. But there were also building sites and broken lawnmowers, organising youth weekends and drives to the emergency room of the hospital from stupid stunts gone wrong. There was living with him (and his wife, and another single guy) every weekend for 3 years, and some other times, without one complaint from their lips. And over that time their faith rubbed off on me. Not necessarily pristine theology or cut-and-dried answers, but the reality of how faith is worked out in the muck of life, with all its mundane problems, its highs and lows of everyday life. Yes, they taught their faith, but even before I could articulate certain things, I caught it.

That is why I titled this “Caught before Taught”, rather than the usually heard “caught not taught”. I think the latter is unhelpful, probably untrue, and maybe a bit pretentious. We need teaching, we are created that way. The Scriptures exist, the words of Jesus exist, the letters of Paul exist, because we need teaching. However, there is so much talk about discipleship courses these days, or people saying, “how will we disciple this group?” Not bad questions to be sure, but it is to me a little reductionistic, often expecting some amount of teaching hours to result in mature disciples who will persevere in the Christian journey. I have never, in the past 12 years of walking with Christ, heard of anyone who raved about how they were discipled by a course. I have heard many however, who have expressed that the deepest part of their being shaped as a Christian was by having a living example of that faith and seeing that rub off on their life. One other worker here in South Asia was telling me the same story a few weeks ago. He praised his parents who took in young guys off the street, guys who would have headed into a life of drugs and crime, and gave them their house, their time, and the gospel of Christ. And as a child growing up in that household, he was changed. He caught that faith long before he ever was taught it.

Hebrews 11 serves as an example of this in its entirety, and yet there’s even some specific examples that drive this home. I’ve already written about what Jacob and Esau learned in their pilgrim father’s tents. But there’s another example that I’ve been meditating on the past few days too. From verse 23 we read this:

“By faith Moses, when he was born, was hidden for three months by his parents, because they saw that the child was beautiful, and they were not afraid of the king’s edict. 

By faith Moses, when he was grown up, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, choosing rather to be mistreated with the people of God than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin. He considered the reproach of Christ greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt, for he was looking to the reward. By faith he left Egypt, not being afraid of the anger of the king, for he endured as seeing him who is invisible.”

– Hebrews 11:23-27

What’s striking to me in these verses is that Moses acts in the exact same way his parents did. Surely many parents caved to the pressure. Surely many parents didn’t put up a fight. Surely many parents didn’t have eyes to see anything other than the desperation of the situation. But Amram and Jochebed were different. They saw something, the beauty of which caused the oppressive edict of the king to diminish in their eyes. They had faith that did not fear the evil of the enemy but would act righteously.

How much of this did Moses see? How much did he know? How much did his mother tell him as an infant, or did Miriam whisper to him on rare occasions of interaction? We don’t know. But we do know that what happened when he was born, was replicated in his own life when he was grown up. Like his parents before him, he had eyes to see beyond the immediate threat, and to see even further than perhaps they saw. He saw the reward. He saw the invisible God. And just as his parents had modelled by their faith, he too feared not the king but acted upon what he saw by faith. Something of their faith had been caught by Moses. It led him to make mistakes, it led him to act rashly. But it also led him to lead the people of God out of Egypt with a measure of bravery, and with a solid faith.

Many people have had an input in my life in many ways, but none more so than the couple who opened their house to a poor, new, foolish disciple, and showed him what faith worked out in life looked like. I imitated them, as they imitated Christ. And the challenge that I bring to myself is whether or not my life is imitable. With all the energy I spend studying and teaching, is my faith going to be caught by others? Do I live it out in the mundane, or do I think that words alone will do the work?

Maybe the issue is not which discipleship course is best, but whether we are willing to present our lives, with all the vulnerability which that entails, and invite those around us to walk together through the varied and colourful events of life, with eyes fixed on Christ together. Don’t neglect the elements that need to be taught, certainly. But while it does take time to labour in providing good teaching, it is somewhat easier and less costly than fully open discipleship. Not a course, not even just a coffee once every six months to check-in can produce disciples. It is easy to measure how our faith is being taught, but may we be willing to strive to have a faith that is both taught and caught.