Reflections on Keas Keasler's Kingdom Apprenticeship
I have spent much of my life thinking about the church. How churches grow. Why people come. Why they leave. What makes a community healthy. How we communicate faith in ways that resonate with a rapidly changing world.
These are important questions. I think about them almost every day.
But recently, while reading Keas Keasler's Kingdom Apprenticeship, a book exploring the remarkable theological vision of Dallas Willard, I found myself returning to a question that might be even more important.
What kind of people are we becoming?
Willard was one of the most remarkable Christian thinkers of the past century. A philosophy professor at the University of Southern California, a theologian, a writer, and a deeply committed follower of Jesus, he spent his life wrestling with the relationship between what we believe and who we become.
Keasler's book is an extraordinary exploration of the theology beneath Willard's teaching. It reveals that Willard's interest in spiritual disciplines was part of a much larger vision. Willard believed Christianity was about the possibility of becoming a different kind of human being.
Think about that for a moment. We live in a culture obsessed with measurement. We measure productivity, income, performance, physical health, influence, and success. Churches measure attendance, budgets, online engagement, participation, and giving. At Saint Matthew, we pay attention to many of these things. They tell us something about our reach, the health of our ministries, and our ability to pursue our mission.
But numbers have limitations.
A church can be growing numerically while the people within it remain spiritually stagnant. Someone can attend worship every Sunday for decades and still struggle to become more generous, forgiving, patient, or loving. We can learn an enormous amount about Jesus without ever learning to live like him.
This was one of Willard's great concerns. He wanted people to understand that following Jesus meant entering an apprenticeship in a completely different way of being human. The word apprenticeship is important.
When someone becomes an apprentice to a carpenter, they do more than memorize information about woodworking. They spend time with someone who knows the craft. They observe. They practice. They make mistakes. They gradually develop new instincts, abilities, and ways of seeing.
Eventually, something changes. They begin to think and work differently because the craft has become part of who they are. Willard believed something similar could happen in our relationship with Jesus.
We can become people whose responses to the world are increasingly shaped by compassion.
People who have learned how to forgive. People whose generosity flows more naturally. People who are less controlled by fear. People who can encounter someone different from themselves with genuine curiosity rather than immediate judgment.
This kind of transformation takes a lifetime.
I wonder what would happen if churches placed this question at the center of everything they did.
What would worship look like if our goal was helping people become more loving?
What would our children's and youth ministries look like if we measured success by the development of compassionate, emotionally healthy, spiritually grounded young people?
What would small groups become if they were places where people learned to practice vulnerability, forgiveness, and genuine care?
What might happen if church leadership focused as much on the character of our community as on the growth of our organization?
At Saint Matthew, one of our central commitments is to help people develop deeply formed lives. The deeper I journey into Willard's theology, the more convinced I become that this commitment belongs at the very center of our work.
There is a beautiful possibility here. Imagine a church where people gradually become more patient with their families, more compassionate toward strangers, more courageous in the face of injustice, and more generous with their lives. Imagine a community where people feel increasingly free to be honest about their struggles because they are surrounded by grace. A congregation where the growing presence of love becomes one of the clearest signs that God is at work.
I love seeing our church grow. I love watching new people find belonging and discovering the ways our community can positively impact our neighbors. And I want that growth to lead somewhere profound.
I want us to become people who live more deeply into the way of Jesus. Because in the end, one of the most important questions we can ask about a church is this: Are people becoming more loving because they are part of this community?
That is a question worth building a church around.
