Are We Gatekeeping Ourselves from Spiritual Maturity?

I’ve noticed something recently in conversations with Christians who, by almost any reasonable measure, I would consider mature.

These are people who have followed Jesus for years, served faithfully in their churches, sat through countless sermons, and have a genuine desire to know God more deeply. Yet I’ve encountered a surprising reluctance among some to engage in theological conversations without a pastor present, to study certain passages of Scripture without some form of authorisation, or even to voice the questions they are wrestling with in their own faith journey.

If I’m honest, this troubles me.

I don’t I think we should all consider ourselves authoritative theologians, confidently declaring our latest interpretation of a passage to be the definitive position of the Christian faith. We have plenty of that already. Nor do I believe pastoral oversight, theological education, or accountability are unnecessary. I certainly do not want to claim that, rather quite the opposite.

But because I wonder whether, somewhere along the way, we have confused being discipled with being dependent. We have subcontracted our faith, our minds, and our journey to professional Christians.

And perhaps, more worryingly, we’ve begun to gatekeep ourselves from the very spiritual maturity we’re supposed to be pursuing.

Who gave us permission to ask questions?

I wonder how many of my brothers and sisters in Christ have quietly concluded that theology belongs to the professionals.

We listen to sermons, attend Bible studies, read books by people with letters after their names, ordinations behind them, and generally trust those who have been given the responsibility of teaching us, rarely wondering, pondering, or contemplating matters of God for ourselves. These are good things, lovely things, and I have few greater joys than a conversation with another human contemplating the Almighty.

But what happens when we encounter something we don’t yet understand? Or when a passage seems to challenge or undermine something we’ve always believed? What happens when someone across the dinner table raises an uncomfortable theological question? Or causes us to step outside of our dissociated haze?

Do we engage with it? Do we open our Bibles together, wrestle with the text, listen to one another, and perhaps leave the conversation with more questions than we arrived with?

Or do we quietly decide that this is a conversation best left until the pastor is in the room; delegating our processing to the 1%, the professionals.

I suspect, for some of us, it’s the latter.

I want to be careful here, because there’s wisdom in recognising the limits of our understanding, I’d argue that is the first rule of contemplating God. There are questions that benefit deeply from particular expertise, and occasions when it would be foolish not to seek the counsel of someone with greater theological knowledge or pastoral experience, if you have access seek it, but never leave a question unconsidered.

There’s a difference between recognising that we need guidance and believing we need permission.

One is humility. The other might be holding us back. It might even be abdicating personal responsibility.

The Bereans didn’t simply take Paul’s word for it

There’s a rather wonderful account in Acts 17 of Paul and Silas arriving in Berea and teaching in the synagogue.

Luke tells us that the Bereans received the message with eagerness and examined the Scriptures daily to see whether what Paul was saying was true.

Stop and ponder that for a moment.

This is Paul. The apostle Paul. A man whose letters would become foundational to the theology of the Church, standing before people and teaching them about Jesus.

And they went away and checked his work.

Remarkably, Luke commends them for doing so, calling them noble, telling us they had an admirable approach to scripture and the new teaching they were encountering.

Their willingness to examine what they were being taught wasn’t treated as rebellion or an inappropriate challenge to spiritual authority. It was considered noble.

Now, we ought to acknowledge that the Bereans were examining the Hebrew Scriptures to evaluate Paul’s proclamation concerning Jesus. They weren’t engaged in quite the same activity as a modern small group discussing a difficult New Testament passage. But the principle remains significant.

They were expected to engage their minds, examine the Scriptures, and take responsibility for discerning what they were hearing.

It wasn’t enough that someone authoritative had said it. There are plenty of people in every generation who sound authoritative and speak with charisma who aren’t speaking truth. They had to weigh it.

I wonder what that might look like in some of our churches today.

Would we celebrate someone who went home after Sunday’s sermon, studied the passage, and returned with a thoughtful disagreement? Would we welcome that conversation? Or would we find ourselves becoming a little defensive?

I wonder if perhaps the person sitting in the congregation might even feel sufficiently confident and secure to raise the question in the first place? Is it their place?

The purpose of teaching is maturity

In Ephesians 4, Paul describes Christ giving apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers to the Church.

Why?

To equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we develop into maturity.

That’s a rather important distinction.

The work of pastors and teachers isn’t simply to provide a weekly supply of theological information to people who would otherwise be unable to function spiritually. It is to equip the Church.

To help ordinary Christians grow in their understanding of God, develop discernment, participate in ministry, and become increasingly formed into the likeness of Christ.

In other words, the effectiveness of a pastor’s ministry cannot simply be measured by how much people depend upon their teaching, arguably the contrary, an effective disciple-maker makes mature disciples.

Surely, in part, it must also be measured by how well those people are being equipped to live faithfully when the pastor isn’t there.

Not to knock the 1%, the faithful few who minister, nut maybe the responsibility lies with the whole body, perhaps we are all responsible, perhaps we have stunted our growth by gatekeeping ourselves from maturity. Is that possible?

I think there’s a temptation in ministry, sometimes quite an innocent one, to become indispensable. No one wants to be out of the job, and I doubt many ministers do this intentional, but we do lean gladly into systems of security.

People appreciate our knowledge. They come to us with questions. They value our opinions and seek our guidance. These can all be encouraging things, particularly when we’ve invested years into studying Scripture and caring for people.

We ought to be rather cautious about becoming the answer to every question, this special systematic pride often comes with an especially damaging fall, a fall that many are familiar with. Burnout. Put a fellow on a pedestal and they’re gonna fall down, eventually.

If the people entrusted to our care never develop the confidence to study, question, discern, and encourage one another without us, have we really equipped them? Have we even done our job?

Or have we simply become very good at making ourselves both dependent and depended upon?

This isn’t an argument against pastoral authority. It’s a call to better systems of practical discipleship.

We were never supposed to do this alone

Of course, I don’t want to exchange one problem for another. Nor do I want to throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater.

There is a somewhat popular approach to Christianity which consists of little more than oneself, one’s Bible, and whatever one may happen to think it says. I would posit that perhaps God himself would take a look at that and declare that it was not good.

Certainly that’s not the flavor of spiritual maturity I’m advocating.

We are formed within the body of Christ, not independently of it. We need the wisdom of those who have gone before us, the correction of those who know us, and the teaching of those who have devoted themselves to understanding the Scriptures. We need to be willing to discover that our cherished conclusions actually might be wrong.

And we need the humility to admit when we simply don’t know, to remember that we are not God.

I think that sometimes we’ve misunderstood what it means to study and discern in community.

Community isn’t merely gathering around someone who has all the answers. It is a people learning to follow Jesus together, bringing what they have learned, what they are discovering, what they are struggling with, and even what they doubt.

Colossians 3:16 gives us this lovely picture of the word of Christ dwelling richly among believers as they teach and admonish one another in wisdom.

Notice that this isn’t exclusively the responsibility of the person standing at the front on Sunday.

There is an expectation of mutual participation. Teaching and admonishing each other.

I should be able to sit with a brother or sister over dinner and explore the Scriptures together. We should be able to disagree, occasionally quite substantially, and still recognise that we are pursuing the same Lord. We should be able to ask questions that make us uncomfortable without immediately assuming that the conversation has become spiritually dangerous.

And when we reach the limits of our understanding, we should be perfectly comfortable taking those questions to someone equipped to help us further.

That’s not a failure of discernment. That’s discernment being exercised well.

Have we become afraid of getting it wrong?

I suspect fear has something to do with all of this.

Fear of misunderstanding Scripture. Fear of being labelled difficult. Fear of asking a question that exposes our ignorance, or worse, makes someone wonder whether our faith is quite as strong as they assumed.

Perhaps some of us have spent so long in church environments where certainty is celebrated that we’ve forgotten how to be curious. Some of our traditions almost seem to require this. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it doesn’t kill the Christian, it is the process by which we are formed; lack of curiosity is what kills the Christian, at least in terms of our growth.

Curiosity matters. Just stop a minute and ponder that, could you do that for me, please?

— take a moment —
— pause —
— interrupt your consumption of my words to ponder the creator —
— breath deeply, wonder, and be curious —

Hebrews 5 offers a fairly uncomfortable challenge to believers who have lost their curiosity, those who ought to have progressed further in their understanding. The writer observes that although they should be teachers, they still need elementary instruction.

Then comes this description of maturity: those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.

By constant practice.

Discernment is something we develop. It requires engagement, exercise, experience, and, if I may suggest, a willingness to occasionally discover that we’ve misunderstood something. I am not God. We are not God. We get things wrong.

We cannot expect Christians to develop mature theological discernment if we discourage them from practicing it.

I don’t know that we always appreciate how damaging it is when we cannot ask questions, when we foster an environment reliant upon the preacher, and criticism the questioner. When we do so we create a sort of fear based atmosphere that can be truly damaging to spiritual formation.

If people are afraid to ask questions, they’ll often keep them to themselves, or even dissociate from them. If they’re afraid to express uncertainty, they’ll learn to perform confidence, they’ll take on a fake it ‘till you make it veneer. And if they’re afraid to explore Scripture without supervision, they’ll remain dependent upon someone else to do the exploring for them.

None of this necessarily produces sound doctrine.

It may simply produce people who know how to repeat it.

And I think there’s a substantial difference between being able to articulate what your church believes and having wrestled sufficiently with Scripture to understand why you believe it yourself.

Perhaps the gate is already open

Here’s what I find particularly interesting about this.

I don’t think pastors are always responsible for the reluctance I’m describing.

Certainly, there are churches where spiritual authority is exercised poorly, where questions are discouraged, and where disagreement is treated as disloyalty. That deserves serious attention.

But I’ve also encountered this reluctance among people whose pastors would, I suspect, be delighted to discover their congregations studying Scripture together, asking difficult questions, and developing theological understanding outside organised church programmes.

Nobody has explicitly forbidden them.

Nobody has told them they must obtain permission.

Yet somewhere along the way, they’ve come to believe that there are conversations they shouldn’t be having without someone more qualified in attendance.

We’ve put a gate across a path that nobody actually told us we couldn’t walk.

And I wonder how much spiritual growth we’ve missed because of it.

How many conversations never happened? How many questions went unasked? How many opportunities for mutual encouragement, correction, and discovery were quietly abandoned because we assumed that theological exploration was somebody else’s responsibility?

I wonder, too, what this means for the next generation of Christians we’re discipling.

If our example of spiritual maturity is to remain perpetually dependent on someone else to interpret, explain, and apply Scripture for us, what exactly are we teaching those who come after us?

Becoming a people who can discern together

I want to see churches where the Scriptures are opened around dinner tables, in living rooms, over coffee, and wherever Christians find themselves sharing life.

Where ordinary believers are sufficiently confident, and safe, to ask extraordinary questions.

Where disagreement doesn’t immediately become division, and uncertainty isn’t mistaken for unbelief.

Where pastors are respected, theological knowledge is valued, and the historic witness of the Church is taken seriously, but where none of these things becomes an excuse for refusing to engage our own minds and hearts in the pursuit of Christ.

I want to see Christians who don’t merely consume teaching but grow capable of teaching, encouraging, and correcting one another.

And I want us to remember that spiritual maturity isn’t demonstrated by having an answer to every question. Sometimes it looks like having the courage to ask one, the humility to listen, and the perseverance to keep searching the Scriptures together.

We will get things wrong along the way. Of course we will, and oh the joy to be called wrong, to be loved so much as to be corrected. That’s why we need one another.

But surely the possibility of getting something wrong cannot become our reason for never trying to understand it.

If Ephesians 4 is to be taken seriously, the goal isn’t a Church permanently dependent upon a handful of gifted teachers. It’s a body growing together into maturity in Christ, with every part contributing to its growth.

So perhaps we need to ask ourselves a rather uncomfortable question.

Are we waiting for permission to pursue a spiritual maturity that we’ve already been called to grow into?

Because I suspect, for many of us, the gate is already wide open.

We just need to start walking.