"Can lives change ?"

Dr. Marc S. Blackwell, Sr

Learning to change and changing to learn 

are both essential features of genuine progress. 

Life-long Learning. Learning to Change, for the individual means a commitment to deal with life’s situations in a framework of increased personal responsibility or accountability.  As a concept, Learning to Change is an approach toward gaining knowledge that develops through identifiable processes. Learning how these processes operate are invaluable lessons, and life-long in nature.

Education: Such life-long learning calls for clear rejection of the idea that an individual would attend  undergraduate or graduate level education as his or her “preparation” toward life or toward a career.  Such “education” is rather accepted as necessary for gaining some of the basic tools needed for a life of learning and changing and hopefully growing.

Change is hard! Dr. Jay Adams responds to the subject of change by pointing out that: “Biblical change is the goal ... but change is hard ... One of the major reasons why Christians founder and fail is because they are either unwilling to make changes or do not know how to make the changes that God requires of them in order to meet the vicissitudes of life. ... Counselors must help the counselee to refocus from the past to its effects upon the present. ... The past can be dealt with only in the present by forgiveness, rectification, reconciliation, and other changes that must be made today. ... to call for repentance, which is a call for change—a change of mind leading to a change of life.

 Natural accountability. For adults this means the individual will learn more effectively when they are responsible for, or at least involved in, setting the goals and planning the process. For this reason learning is usually more effective when that learning takes place in the environment where the applications will be made and within a context of natural accountability. Natural accountability is learning with sincere service in mind and where hope is a real possibility. Adult learning is most effective when it is clear that the learners will face the responsibility of being the future teachers themselves.

One guaranteed feature. In our modern society, the inevitability of change is the one guaranteed feature that is facing us all! Some people attempt to handle these changes by being openly inflexible or just quietly supporting the “status quo.”  Others look to an organisational or behavioral approach that relies on routine to manage or control the forces of change as best as is possible. Others yet, just bend under the slightest amount of pressure and almost seem to “accept change for the sake of change.”  None of these responses are sufficient to provide the guidance needed to carry us through the traumatic convulsions, stresses or the serious changes challenging individuals and Christian ministries today.

Responsible behavior. Dr. Jay Adams points the way when while explaining the cognitive aspects of Biblical counseling he clearly states: “ ... it is obvious that all responsible behavior has a cognitive side...I have not usually distinguished explicitly between changing one’s thinking and altering his actions ( the Bible doesn’t draw sharp lines here either)... Because scriptural counseling is (or should be directive) and most usually counsel consists in large measure of giving information and advice, by the very nature of the case, teaching must be involved.  Instruction in Christian living ... must be conceived of as consisting of more than theoretical learning, acquired by attending courses. Much learning comes only through discipleship, which involves observation, participation, discussion and critique ....

Teaching and Discipleship. Biblical counselors do not always begin with didactic instruction but often let such instruction grow out of that sort of experience that results from obedience to Christ’s commands! Just as Christ  instructed His disciples we can instruct counselees. But be aware that those who narrowly think of instruction purely in Greek academic (and abstract classroom) terms "fail to recognize that in the Bible whole persons teach whole persons, acting as whole persons." They do not merely pack (or repack) heads. Biblical teaching and instruction is done fundamentally in life situation (cf. Deut. 6:4-9; 11:18-21) and discipleship milieus. In life situations, the teaching of truth grows out of the problems of living; in discipleship, truth is incarnated in life.

Extreme types of leadership. Scripture warns and ecclesiastical history reveals that either rigid authoritarian leadership, on the one hand; or, abstract philosophical leadership, on the other hand, has generally dominated the Christian church.  Regretfully, these two extreme types of leadership offer little more than rigidity and a blindly dutiful obedience - on the one hand; or,  ill-discipline and self-centeredness on the other. Leading others to adapt, together with the goal of delegating and possibly including some sharing of decisions have generally been the focus of the church’s goal in teaching.  

Not many years back I attended a large gathering of pastors where the two above mentioned extremes were still evident. On the one hand we had the host group, an “evangelical” denomination that is committed to hierarchical leadership structures, and to tradition to the extreme.  Then, on the other hand, we were privileged to listen to a truly gifted speaker and a strong independent church leader seriously committed to an “executive body” leadership style. It was especially interesting to see that both had one thing in common, it was their mutual disrespect or fear of  democratic methods of church organisation and administration.

Although the well-tried hierarchical and the often accepted “executive body” approaches of leadership may present a most persuasive argument for their usefulness, they are far less capable of translating those arguments into practice. The defense of both of these methods of leadership, like that of many corporate styles will be primarily sociological, psychological, or systems theory. In some cases the attempt at defending such leadership styles will be one of eclecticism, i.e. of mixing these various leadership and organisational styles together and then operating from a very broad base of styles.

Changing to Learn:
The Scriptures clearly relate incident after incident where the leader or Christian servant listened to others and worked within a framework of truly democratic transforming cooperative involvement.

The need is to create and sustain a climate or culture of change and useful ministries and lives willing to  learn is imperative! Many call for “accountability” but this notion prefers cooperation and team-work over any concept of accountability with its tendencies toward ‘authoritarianism’ and control. 

Ministry within a team environment is a “notion” designed to encourage this culture of (i.) personal life-long learning and (ii.) shared vision, (iii.) testing through modeling the changes under consideration, and (iv.) cooperative team-supported service that is changed only through sound ‘cause and effect’ and Biblically mandated considerations.