Suppose I bring you a new believer who cannot read and cannot see. There is no Bible she can open, no page she can underline, no video she can watch. How confident are you that she can grow into a mature Christian? If your confidence falls when I remove those things, I want to ask what you believe causes growth. Do you believe Christ has entered her? Or do you believe her future depends upon our ability to transfer enough religious information into her mind?
I ask because we have reached a strange place. Never have so many Christians had so much material within reach. We have the Scriptures in our pockets, sermons without end, recordings, conferences, commentaries, study notes, hymn collections, and teachers whose words can follow us from morning to night. Yet it is possible to spend years among these riches and remain inwardly thin. We can explain abiding while seldom abiding. We can define the new creation while reacting to everything from the old one. We can know precisely what growth in life means and scarcely recognize the living Christ who is our life.
I want to look back at the first believers, but without making them into a romance. They did not have a completed New Testament bound in personal copies. They did have Israel’s Scriptures, which were read and explained aloud. They received apostolic teaching and, in time, letters circulated among the churches. They prayed, broke bread, and spoke to one another. Nor were they all mature. Paul called the Corinthians infants, and Hebrews reproached its hearers for still needing milk. The early church had its quarrels, failures, and terrifying confusions. We do not gain anything by pretending otherwise.
The astonishment remains. People could come to know Christ deeply without first acquiring the private tools we now assume indispensable. The gospel traveled through voices and lives. A slave, a widow, a child, a person who could not read a sentence could still hear that Christ had died and risen, receive the Spirit, be joined to His Body, and begin to live by Him. The question is not whether every first-century Christian matured quickly. The question is why we so easily confuse the conditions that serve growth with the life that actually grows.
A child is nourished by food, not by a description of food. She needs people to feed her, but their skill cannot replace the meal. Something like that seems almost too obvious to say about the Christian life. Christ is the bread of life. He does not merely distribute instructions for a life that we then produce. He gives Himself. The branch bears fruit because it remains in the vine. It cannot manufacture sap by studying botany, and it cannot improve the vine by trying harder to look fruitful.
That was the force of Watchman Nee’s insistence that Christ Himself, rather than a collection of spiritual things, is God’s provision. Witness Lee pressed the same distinction. Recalling the years he spent accumulating Bible teaching, Lee described recognizing how dead and unfruitful he had become. He later warned those caring for others not to put his teaching before them as an end in itself, but to feed them with the riches of Christ. These men left behind an enormous body of writing. It would be absurd to use their names as an argument against reading. But it would be equally absurd to study them so thoroughly that their central warning never reaches us.
What if our most serious obstacle is that we can receive a description of Christ and feel no need to turn to Christ? We can leave a meeting satisfied because the speaking was accurate. We can leave a book persuaded because its distinctions were fine. We can repeat a phrase until it sounds like our own discovery. None of this tells us whether we have eaten. The mouth can pronounce the word bread while the body starves.
Here is where the question becomes painful. A person without sight or literacy may be denied access to much Christian material. That is a real loss, and we should make the Word available through reading aloud, audio, conversation, and every means we have. But she is not denied access to Christ. We should not quietly believe that the Spirit becomes less capable when the eyes cannot see print. We should not place her on a lower rung of spiritual possibility because she cannot perform the habits of an educated believer.
How would I shepherd her? I would come near. I would tell her the story of Jesus and return to it often. I would read the Scriptures with her, listen as carefully as I speak, pray with her in words she can make her own, bring her among believers who know her name, and ask what she senses of the Lord in the ordinary hours of her life. I would trust that she may know Him in ways I have been too busy to learn. I would not make her dependent upon my constant interpretation of her experience. I would want her to discover that Christ is present when I leave the room.
And then I would have to face the possibility that I, the one carrying the books, am the needy one. She may have learned to turn inwardly to the Lord while I turn reflexively to an explanation. She may be poor in vocabulary and rich in dependence. I may be able to correct her words and still be unable to share her rest. Which of us is mature? We should be very slow to answer.
Growth in life is not an increase in religious performance. It is the increase of Christ within a person, the gradual making of His home in places we had kept for ourselves. It may show itself outwardly in patience, mercy, truthfulness, and endurance, but those are fruits. The source matters. Someone can imitate the fruits for a while. An orderly temperament can look like peace. An agreeable personality can look like love. A church can teach its members to behave alike and call the result maturity. Yet the New Testament’s great promise is not that our natural selves will become polished. It is that Christ will live in us, and that we will grow up into Him together.
The first believers did not possess a secret method that we have lost. They were confronted with a living Person. His resurrection was proclaimed as an event that had altered reality, not as an interesting theme for a series. Their baptism marked a passage into His death and life. When they gathered, there was prayer, teaching, eating, mutual care, and the costly discovery that another member of Christ’s Body could not simply be discarded. Their faith had to inhabit meals, money, households, grief, and danger. One could hear the Word and then meet its demand in the person sitting nearby.
We have found ways to encounter Christian content while remaining spectators. A speaker can carry the meeting. A recording can fill the silence. A song can move us without drawing us into prayer. We can agree with a message and never allow it to interrupt the life we are already living. Even fellowship can become the exchange of approved observations. We say true things, receive approving nods, and go home without anyone having brought his actual hunger into the room.
I do not say this as a verdict against sermons, music, or books. I am writing an essay; it would be ridiculous to pretend words do not matter. The Scriptures are a gift beyond measure. They witness to Christ, correct our inventions, expose the self that loves its own ideas, and give language to prayer. But even the Scriptures can be approached as a possession. We may master a passage so that it cannot master us. We may use a commentary to settle every difficulty before the difficulty has driven us to the Lord. We may make the ministry of a gifted brother into an authority that saves us the vulnerability of hearing Christ today.
This is the revolutionary part, if we dare to mean it: a church could possess more light in its library than any previous generation and still be dark in its daily living. Its members could know the theology of the indwelling Christ and organize nearly every hour as though He were absent. Its leaders could measure attendance, training, doctrinal fluency, and visible service while having no reliable way to tell whether people are living from Him. The institution could succeed at everything it knows how to count and fail at the one thing for which it exists.
Perhaps the abundance itself makes this harder to see. Whenever there is emptiness, we add another resource. Whenever there is weakness, we prescribe another program. Whenever someone says he cannot find the Lord, we give him another sequence of practices, each one defensible, until he feels that contact with Christ depends on keeping up with a system. Even the command to abide becomes a task managed by the independent self. The very person who needs to cease drawing from himself is given one more project to accomplish by himself.
I am not suggesting that we abandon disciplines or cease teaching. I am asking what our teaching does to a hungry person. Does it bring him to eat? Does it help him notice the Lord’s present movement? Does it open the Word and then leave him free before God? Does it join him to the saints as a living member who can receive and give? Or does it produce admiration for the teacher, dependence on the next explanation, and fear of stepping outside the accepted vocabulary?
We may need to change what we mean by shepherding. It is easy to keep people busy, to make them knowledgeable, to secure their agreement, even to shape their outward conduct. It is harder to stand with them while Christ gains ground that none of us can manage. That takes patience with silence, attention to a particular life, courage to confess when our own words have become empty, and faith that the Lord is doing more than we can see. The shepherd is neither the source of life nor its proprietor. He can feed, protect, and accompany. He cannot grow in another person’s place.
And there is a communal question that presses harder still. Can the saints speak honestly among us? Can a person say, “I understand the message, but I am not living there,” without being hurried toward a more acceptable testimony? Can an older believer admit spiritual dryness without losing standing? Can a new believer offer something living before she learns our terms? If every gathering rewards fluency, we should not be surprised when fluency becomes our chief product. We have trained people to sound nourished.
Paul’s word about the Body should unsettle the arrangement. The members who seem weak are indispensable. That is not a sentimental concession. If Christ has placed His life in them, we need what He gives through them. The person who cannot read may receive the Word as she hears it and return it to us with an immediacy that exposes our distance. The one we thought we were carrying may become the one through whom the Lord carries us. A church that cannot receive from such a member has misunderstood its own life.
None of this means growth is instant. The first believers’ failures warn us against that fantasy. Life takes time to spread through a person. There are seasons when its work is hidden, when prayer feels poor and no visible change can be reported. We should not replace one cruel standard, the count of knowledge, with another, the demand for constant spiritual intensity. A branch does not strain to prove that sap is moving. It remains. It receives. It is pruned. It grows.
The question, then, is not how to recreate the first century or how to discard the tools of the twenty-first. It is whether we will allow everything we have to be returned to its proper place. Let the Bible bring us to the living Lord of whom it speaks. Let teaching nourish rather than merely equip us to teach again. Let a hymn become prayer. Let a meeting make room for the Body. Let us put down a book when reading it has become a way of postponing the simple, frightening act of turning to Christ.
I would like us to be astonished again. A blind believer without a private Bible can grow deeply in the life of God. A scholar with a thousand volumes can remain on the surface. The difference is not intelligence, ability, or access to better materials. It is the living Christ received and given room, day after day, in the midst of His people. If that seems too little to support a church, perhaps we have finally reached the question we most need to ask: What have we been depending on instead of Him?
