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LifeWay Leadership Podcast Network. G'day, I'm Scott Sanders. I'm Derek Hanna. Welcome to The One Thing, a podcast designed to give you one solid practical tip for gospel-centered ministry every week. And I'm here with Derek again today, and we're in the midst of the World Cup. Listeners are asking, who is your favorite cricket player? Are they really asking that?

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All time. I'm not talking just the current side. All time. All time. Look, I want to go with Daniel Sams. Anyway, but Steve Waugh clearly is the greatest cricket player we've ever produced. The red hanky. Yep. The inningsers that kept on going for a long time. I don't think inningsers is a word. He was the innings assist of our captains. It was. Now The One Thing is brought to you not by the ACB, but we're brought to you thanks to the Geneva Push, the Australian Church Plenty Network. We're also proudly part of the Lifeway Leadership Podcast Network, and we encourage you to check out our network page so you can find a whole stack of great podcasts there.

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But for now, you press play on episode number 64 of The One Thing, Maturing Believers. Every now and again, someone sends in a brilliant question. Sometimes not so brilliant. But anyway, we have a great question this week, one that deserves that whole episode of its own. This one comes from Amanda in Sydney. We've got a great church. It's full of amazing people. We're great at mission and bringing people in the door. What I want to know is how do you get people who have been in church in a long time and Christians for a long time to go deeper in their relationship with God? So, question from Amanda.

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Excellent question. Now, Scott could obviously answer this on his ear, but we've got someone even more qualified in the studio today. We've invited along to The One Thing, Cole Marshall. Welcome, Cole. Thank you. You don't want to know my favourite cricketer of all time? I'd love to know your favourite cricketer of all time. Norman O'Neill. Do you remember him? You remember him really well. That's what you were saying. You remember his cover drives at the Sydney Cricket Ground? My first bat was a Norman O'Neill bat, so he's my favourite. That was the brand, Norman O'Neill bat? Yeah. Yeah. There you go. So, it's good to have been with you.

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Thanks very much for that. Now, we obviously know Cole Marshall very well. We've known him for over 25 years, but you probably know him from his book or his books, multiple books, Trellis and Vine and The Vine Project. He's co-authored those with Tony Payne. He's written lots about church and discipleship, changing the culture in your church, some great tools, and has been involved in Christian ministry for… How old are you, Cole? Yeah. I'm right there. Many years.

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Turning 70 this year. There you go. Now, I guess behind Amanda's question is people stagnating in church life. Why do we stagnate? Why does the Christian life plateau? It's a great question. Amanda, was it? Yeah. I've thought a lot about that because I've been hanging around Christians in church for a long time. I think at a basic level, some members of our churches have just never been converted.

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I was like that for many years. In my teen years, listening to good sermons, Christian family, all the rest, leading the youth group. But I had to come to a crisis point, and my brother brought me to that, my actual blood brother, John, of coming to the foot of the cross, realizing there was no other way of my sin being dealt with before a holy God, other than the cross, other than Christ. The crisis of justification by faith. So I think we've just got to keep that in mind.

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In this whole thing of diagnosing the problem, I think it's very much an individual thing. We've got to think of individual people and where they're at and why they may have plateaued or stagnated or whatever. But there are some categories we can think about in terms of general reasons and trends. So we've got to know the person really well to work out why they might have gone flat in their Christian life. So what are some of those things that you've seen, I guess, in your home church?

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Yeah, I think it's living off the early years of being keen as a Christian, growing up as a Christian in the youth group, and learning a lot and growing a lot and enjoying that in those early years. And then all of that, feeling like they can live off that without going deeper, which is kind of the central thing we're talking about, isn't it? As to why you get to a certain point in Christian growth and enjoyment and knowing God and living for God

[4:45]
and then somehow flattening out. I think the spoon-fed culture that we tend to produce in churches, this may sound a bit harsh, but I often have the thought that our ministers are spending 10, 15, 20 hours preparing a sermon, whatever it is, digging deep. Our small group leaders will be doing less but some preparation. And then we turn up to the sermon or the group or whatever, not even having opened the word to find out what we might need to learn

[5:22]
or to have some question in our head or whatever. It just seems crazy, just at a learning level, to be spoon-fed like that and not to learn how to feed ourselves. I'm not sure how much that's a big problem at the moment, but I suspect it is. We've got Christians who aren't reminding themselves of the greatness of grace and forgiveness. They're kind of sitting into what's happened in the past.

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We're not actually preparing ourselves to respond to God's word or hear God's word. We're just expecting people to just tell us rather than actually taking ownership for that. What about other reasons like conflict in church life? Do you see that as actually impacting someone's spiritual maturity? Yeah, that can consume not only the individual but the fellowship. Again, turning up to church or groups and having unresolved conflict and attitude, just bad attitudes toward people

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or even not quite wanting to be there because of the conflict. That's going to slow down our learning. I think of all of this through one of the lens I think of is obviously being a disciple and a disciple is a learner. So what's stopped us learning at some point? What's stopped us learning in the Christian sense of not just learning information, but learning to live worthy of the Lord, learning to apply the information, the knowledge of God to our life.

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So, yeah, conflicts. I'm not going to be learning in that sense if there's unresolved issues with people in church. How connected do you think it is to life stage or even Christian age as well? I may have become a Christian at 22, but it's a plateau at 28. Have you seen any connections there? Yeah, and that's the group I've been working with the last 10 years or so really is the middle-aged Christian and middle-aged in terms of their life as well. And they are the ones who are finding it hard to keep growing, to keep that zeal going of Romans 12,

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to be striving and straining in the Philippian 3 kind of language. That group of people, there's different things happening. It's the busiest time of life in terms of their family, their job, job pressures, change of job, finances, all of that going on. Sometimes they're too busy in church life, so we've made them busy in church life.

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They're doing church with us, but we're not giving that vision of personally growing and feeding and learning themselves. Yeah, I think it's a big issue for people at that stage of life. Well, in the interest of not going deeper into sort of Derek and Scott now and our middle-agedness, we do want to just have a pause and have a quick break. Just open up the toolbox before we keep pressing into that because that's a really helpful start. So my top three must-have resources for thinking about maturing believers are, well, obviously, the Vine Project.

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Check out their website, vinegrows.com. Some excellent resources, practical resources to help you dig into how you think about this across the whole church. The other thing that I've found really helpful in my own personal life is it's the You version of the Bible, a really helpful app that allows you to get daily reminders. But the function that I think really presses into this space is the ability to actually share with a group and groups within groups to encourage you to actually think or to read the Bible together and also to reflect on that with others as well. And then the final book is a book called Transformational Discipleship.

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Some excellent research that Lifeway Research did a few years ago on the attributes of a growing disciple. I reckon it's a helpful book just to read as a pastor and as a leader, just to help you think into, well, it's not going to be one thing. It's going to be a number of things. I reckon it's helpful to read a book like that just to help you think into this whole outcome of how do we actually see people maturing in Christ in our church life. All righty. Just before we do head back, a couple more questions. Dig deeper more into what maturity is. Let me give a plug for the Rainer on Leadership.

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We're part of the Lifeway Leadership podcast. And listen, I've been listening to more and more podcasts recently. What do you listen to, Scott? I listen to the Unstuck podcast. I listen to a podcast on training just called The Training. Not trains. No, training. You do strike me as that kind of person as well. Which I find really helpful. And I really enjoy listening to the one thing. And so I reckon you guys should too. Anyway, an even better podcast on Lifeway Leadership is Rainer on Podcast. Tom Rainer, Jonathan Howe. It's excellent. Tom Rainer and Jonathan.

[10:12]
They're excellent at summarizing it and giving pointers to difficult topics. Seven Habits of Highly Effective Preaches. There's eight church fights that are fading. Americans are so good at this stuff. They love the pithy, catchy phrase. They're excellent. We love you if you're listening. Anyway, Rainer on Leadership. Listen to that. All right, let's get back to it. Kyle? Yeah, Kyle, one of the helpful things to think through on this is actually how do you measure maturity? You know, so briefly, just give us how do you measure growing in the Christian life? I'm glad you asked. I just had to write an article for a magazine on measuring maturity. How about that?

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The measure is Christ himself. Ephesians 4, the measure of the manhood of Christ. In Ephesians 4, that's the purpose of all ministry. To be like God. The person in Matthew 5 is to love the enemy and be perfect like God is perfect. So the measure, I mean, how can you stagnate? How can we stagnate when the whole purpose of God in the universe is to create a God-like,

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Christ-like people who are actually like him and to reinstall the fallen image of mankind, the broken, sinful image, to make us like Christ. This is not a side topic, maturity. This is the whole purpose of the gospel, the whole purpose of Christ coming, is to have a people who are like him and like the Father in our character, in our walk, in our whole being. So that is really hard. We can't stop. That's the measure. Yeah, that's the measure. How do we see that? Okay. The marks I came up with in this article, if I can remember them all, love, I think,

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is the first place to start in terms of the loving the unworthy, loving like God loves us. And we are unworthy of his love. Discernment is another big one. What I did was look at all the passages in the New Testament, would talk about maturity. So that's where I came up with this list of five or six. A discernment that is applying the knowledge of God to our life, to our churches, to our thinking, to our doctrine, and so on. The third one was repentance. It has to be changed.

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You mentioned that transformational idea in that book. So the knowledge of God, we're filled with the knowledge of God that we might walk worthy of the Lord. If you want a passage that summarizes, I think, a short passage that summarizes the idea of maturity, it's those prayers like Colossians 1, 9 to 11, Philippians 1, 9 to 11. It really captures it all. There's endurance in there. There's thankfulness. There's repentance. There's unity.

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Those kinds of marks. So I came up with six or seven marks. So that's really helpful to think into. This is what we're trying to see in the life of each believer in our church. You've been interacting with a whole bunch of churches over the last seven or eight years with your Vine Project hat on and Vine Growers hat on. What are you seeing that's actually allowing, what a church is doing that actually helps them mature believers? Yeah, addressing blockages in people's lives as well. Yeah, yeah. Let me just go back one step and then I'll answer that. I remember this morning, and you mentioned some American guys at the moment, but I was

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greatly helped by some Americans in my young Christian life by the Navigators. And they came up with a thing called the Word Hand. There was also a prayer hand. We'll leave the prayer hand. We'll do the Word Hand. The Word Hand is that we hear the Word, we read the Word, we study the Word, we memorize the Word, and then we meditate. The thumb is the meditation. And so the meditation has to touch all the other fingers. I know this is an audio thing, so you can't see me touching my fingers. But I think we have a lot of people who are just hearing, and they're not reading

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themselves, and they're not studying at a deeper level, and they're certainly not memorizing these days. And there's not that digesting. The other way that Cranmer, the Anglican, said was we read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest. So I think there's a lot of hearing going on and general discussion in our churches and our sermons and so on, in our groups, but not that study, memorizing, and the meditation, which is digesting and feeding. So in answering the question about what do I do, what do we do, what do we do together

[14:30]
in all of this, I think one of the aims is to get all of those elements going in the Christian life in terms of taking in the Word of God. Someone has said marriage is not a big thing. Marriage is a million little things. That's Keith and Sarah Condie from Building a Safe and Strong Marriage. It's a great course that they've designed to help couples in nurturing and building their marriage. Across five easy sessions, couples will have a chance to stop and focus on their marriage and work out how to make it better.

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Find out more, download the course, or buy the DVD, participant workbooks, and facilitator manuals at buildingmarriage.com.au. We've got three Building a Safe and Strong Marriage courses to give away. So for the best three questions that are put up on our Facebook page over the next month, you'll have all the bells and whistles from this course sent to you. Give us your questions. I think of it as building a deep learning culture in our church. It's through preaching. I think we have to keep thinking about how we preach.

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Sometimes our exegetical preaching can miss the theological depth and application. So we have to, those of us doing preaching, need to think about what is the big theological idea in this passage, not just teach people how to read the passage. I think we've got to do more theology in our preaching to get the big ideas out so that people know how to apply those big ideas, whether it be the doctrine of Christ or God's providence or whatever it is to our life.

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I think there's a job to be done there. We need to preach in a stretching way, not to the lowest common denominator. Keep stretching people so they're asking questions and they're confused and they don't understand and they want to know more. I think we try and have neat sermons that are all tied up rather than having open-ended sermons with questions at the end that we need to research. People, I forget who it was, one of the great English preachers used to say the sermon was the entree and the meal was when you go home and discuss the sermon. That kind of impact of the sermon to go away and want to read more.

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If we've got people not wanting to read the passage more or read a book on that or whatever, then we've failed in our preaching. It's too neat. And I think more honesty from our preachers sometimes too of how they are applying the word of God and what their journey of learning and growth is and how they work at not being stagnated and just appropriate honesty about their Christian life to show what it looks like to be mature as a Christian. So I think there's a job to be done constantly in thinking about our preaching. I think one of the ways I think about this is people in our churches will be helped differently

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because of their individual situation as to what will get them out of the rut and get them growing. So some will be impacted by preaching in that. Others need a mentor. I had a great mentor. I was a young Christian. I'd walk around the park with him and pray with him. And I just got to know him as a 10-year-old Christian, how he walked with God. I still remember those times walking around the park praying with him. He was a mentor to me for a number of years. So some of us need that.

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Not everybody needs that, but a lot of us do. I think it's a combination of these things. I think we need to create a reading culture where we're talking about books like you guys are here in this podcast, getting people to read, having the book stall. Well, I'd like to see churches, I'm talking to my own minister about this, Phil, of having a curriculum of reading, a lifetime curriculum of reading, so that we know people in our church know what to read in the first year of being a Christian. They know what to read in the first five years.

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And then there's a 10-year, then there's a 15. And some of the guys I'm working with who are in those middle years, they've just stopped reading. And they tell me that they can't read and they haven't got time and they're not readers and all the rest of it. I've had professors tell me this. And they read in their own sphere, but they're not reading Christianly. They can read, of course they can. And now there's audio books for the congregations where reading's not a huge thing for people. You can do it all on audio and all the technology anyway. So create a reading culture.

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I think we need to push people toward formal theological learning. I know it's a bit of a turn-off for some, but get rid of that connotation of theology being impractical and unhelpful. And we can do all that online now. The resources are endless. The big one I've tried in groups recently is turning small groups into disciple-making teams. So what we did with some men exactly at this stage of sort of flattening out in their Christian life

[19:23]
was to inject evangelism and ministry and being out in the streets and going up to the pub and evangelizing people into the life of the small group. And that leads, as I thought about this for this podcast, I thought that leads me to a bigger thought, that the reason people jump out of this flat period is because they've got some skin in the game. So something actually matters to them. And lots of things like that happen. And pastors need to anticipate these things happening.

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So what do I mean by skin in the game? Am I going on too long here? Do you want to ask other questions? It's meant to be a 15-minute podcast, but we do have one of the greats of the Australian church in the room. Let's hear the skin in the game and then we're going to go to the one thing. Actually, I reckon this is a really important one. This is a good go for this one. And people understand back home. They'll be on their running machines and they'll just have to run a little bit longer. Well, now it's going to get for 40 minutes. You've got to stop. All right, Tom, go. Well, it's a bit like Israel Folau and all the rest of it that's happening around us in Australia at the moment.

[20:26]
If you don't know that story, you can look it up. But if our church members with us are not on the front line in evangelism and ministry, if they're not teaching anybody else, if they're not trying to communicate the gospel, well, let's put it positively, when you're at work with the thought that you're going to try and be a Christian at work and be open to a Christian at work, and then you start getting questions and you get objections and you get some persecution and all the rest of it, you're going to go deeper in the Word. It goes both ways. The reason you want to be on the front line is because you're deep in the Word

[20:59]
and you're having a deep relationship with God day by day and praying and living for his name. But the persecution also throws you into it. It's not just persecution. It's personal things that are happening in terms of grief, in terms of health, in terms of stage of life, just crisis-type things where we need to rely on God and call upon him and know him and know the truth and certainty of the gospel in a whole new way.

[21:31]
It can be through evangelism together. It can be in evangelism being confronted by the big topics of hell, of sin, of judgment, of what about other religions. I was asked the other day by somebody. So if we've got people not connecting with others, if we've got church members not connecting with the world like that, there's no incentive to keep going deeper and to learn and to ask hard questions and to read books. You get what I mean? Yep. I'm taking a long time to say it. No, no. That is great.

[22:01]
Well, Cole, we could have a whole other podcast episode, and no doubt we'll get you back in again. But if you've enjoyed what you've heard today on The One Thing, we'd love it if you would just take a moment to share this podcast with someone else. Share it with a leader who you think needs to be reminded of this. But before we go, I want to just hear, Cole, what's the one thing that you want listeners to know about maturing believers in the local church? Well, get our members to have some skin in the game, that it actually matters. They're public Christians.

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I think that's a key thing. All righty. That's great. Thanks for joining us for another episode of The One Thing. Coming up on our next episode, brothers, we're not professionals, or should we? Well, we're going to have a special debate between Derek and myself on whether churches are getting too professional, or maybe they have to become more so. Tune in. But that's all from us for today. I'm Derek Hanna. And I'm Scott Sanders. Chat soon. Thank you.

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Thanks for joining us. Thanks for joining us.