I’ve been in a variety of “church” settings over the past year or so. I’ve visited megachurches in California and hipster churches in New York. I’ve belted out worship songs in hundreds of students at camp, and recited liturgy in a small chapel in Princeton. While all seek many of the same things, they also share some of the same limitations. One limitation that I’ve become more and more aware of can be summed up as follows:

teaching the Gospel doesn’t change lives, implementing the Gospel does 

It seems like a small point, but many churches are struggling because they haven’t embraced this truth. As products of the Enlightenment, we have all been taught that education changes lives.  While it’s true that education is very important, in the realm of Christianity, or even basic morality, it’s not enough. Let’s face it, there are lots of smart people in the world who are still really corrupt. Some of them may even call themselves Christian.

When things go wrong, we lament as a society that the offending parties had not been educated properly. Perhaps if they had a quality education they would never have committed these crimes or have gotten themselves into financial or relational trouble. Even in the church we have adopted this mentality. When marriages are breaking down, or our kids aren’t behaving properly or our numbers are off, we seek out new teaching curricula. We set up new Bible study groups. We ask people to pray more. We work harder and beg others to work harder as well. But, it doesn’t work.

The educational material available to churches in the last 20 years has been incredible.  We have unparalleled access to books from every century. We have amazing video resources and podcasts from the greatest teachers on the planet. We can research anything we want on the internet. We have information at our fingertips that the wealthiest and most educated people of the last century could never have dreamed of having.  If teaching more often and effectively was the answer, we would have solved all of our problems long ago. Our problem is not a lack of teaching or poor teaching, it’s a lack of implementation.

I’m not saying that teaching isn’t important, of course it is. It’s just incomplete. So, why do we spend so much time teaching and so little time helping people implement what they already know? For one reason:

implementation requires relationship, teaching doesn’t

You can learn from someone a thousand miles away that you will never meet or know. You can harvest information from a writer that’s been dead for 300 years. Implementing what you learn however, requires relationship. Real implementation of truth has to occur in and through our daily relationships. This creates a problem for many of us today. Most people aren’t investing time and energy into building and maintaining quality relationships. We are just too busy. We are more relationally hungry than ever, but continue to remain alarmingly disconnected from others. Social media allows us to broadcast and receive pithy sayings, as if collecting a cool quote or principle were the end goal. New facts and theories collect in our brains like moldering books in a forgotten library.   Knowing that Jesus taught us to forgive others is miles away from actually forgiving someone who has deeply hurt us. Mastering forgiveness requires the encouragement and help of others who are also mastering the art of forgiveness. Instead of gathering the courage needed to implement what we know of forgiveness, we grab our phones and tweet a quote by Ghandi or Martin Luther King Jr. We learn more and practice less. It would be like showing kids a video about baseball, but then never heading to the field with a glove and ball to practice. It just doesn’t work.

In the years ahead, I believe that churches who start more Bible studies while failing to create space and time to foster relationships will become weak and irrelevant. In other words, the Bible isn’t the point, how it leads us to live is.

So, if you feel stuck in place with your faith, I challenge you try a different approach. Don’t buy a new book or attend a new class. Find a friend. Forgive someone. Give to the poor. Sit by the bed of someone in the nursing home. It may be the breakthrough you need.