I preached a five-week series last summer called Influencer. The first two weeks were classic teaching. We opened the Scriptures, laid a theological foundation for what it means to be an everyday influencer for Jesus, and explored two big questions: What has God given me? And where has God placed me?
People were tracking. Lots of head nods.
Then we did something that was new for me. For the last three weeks, instead of teaching new content, we trained micro-skills. Week three was encouraging words, with a specific formula people could immediately use in a conversation. Week four was catalytic questions, a tool called the Question Ladder that helps move a conversation from surface-level to soul-level. Week five was the discipline of being fully present, with three practices drawn straight from Jesus at the well in John 4.
I immediately noticed a difference in peoples’ responses. They shifted from, “Great message, pastor,” to, “I tried the question ladder at work and my coworker opened up about her marriage.”
The appreciation was nice, the action was more rewarding.
The Practicum Problem
This phrase, “the church in America is over-inspired and under-trained,” has haunted me for the past few years. I want to get more specific about what I think we can do about it.
Think about how training happens in almost every other serious field. Medical schools don’t lecture for four years and hand someone a scalpel on graduation day. The military doesn’t teach strategy in a classroom and then deploy soldiers who’ve never run a drill. Therapists don’t just study counseling theory. They do supervised clinical hours. Pilots don’t just read about flying. They log simulator time before they ever touch a real cockpit.
Every serious formation environment in our culture combines instruction with practice. The classroom and the field. The lecture and the lab.
Now think about the church. We preach forgiveness as a concept, but we don’t walk someone through the actual skills involved in talking to the person who hurt them. We preach evangelism as a principle, but we don’t walk people through crafting three sentences to try at work this week. We preach generosity but we don’t create a safe environment with trusted guides where someone can rework their budget. We have the classroom. We’re missing the practicum.
The Brain Problem Behind the Practicum Problem
There’s a neurological layer to this. Author Jessie Cruickshank points out in her book Ordinary Discipleship explains that our brains have two distinct types of memory. Semantic memory stores facts and data. It’s your Jeopardy! memory. You memorized the state capitals as a kid. How many can you recall now? Unused facts get discarded. That’s how the system works.
Then there’s episodic memory. This is the memory of your story, your lived experiences, things you’ve walked through and practiced. This memory is wired into your emotions, your identity, even your bodily systems. Your brain fights to keep this kind of memory. One way to think about this is “head memory” vs. “heart memory.”
And episodic memory does something semantic memory can’t: it projects into the future. It’s the only memory system that can answer the question, “How do I apply this to my life?” Semantic memory can’t do that. Try to apply the fact that George Washington was the first president to your life next month. You can’t, because it’s stored in the wrong memory system.
Here’s the connection; when we teach “God is good” as one of the points in a sermon, peoples’ brains receive it as data and file it in semantic memory. Then we make a shift from head mode to heart mode and ask them to apply it to their lives. And the neurological truth is, they can’t. Their brains are in the wrong memory mode.
Your people are sitting in Jeopardy mode, filing facts. But you want them in story mode, where truth gets practiced and lived and remembered the way they remember learning to ride a bike or the first time they prayed out loud in a group. Nobody learns to forgive from a three-point outline. They learn it when they sit across the table from someone who wronged them and try it with their own shaky voice.
The problem isn’t that your people are lazy or apathetic or consumeristic. The problem is that our primary method of teaching stores truth in a place the brain was never designed to retrieve for real life. We are asking the sermon to do work that it’s impossible to do.
What Changes This
Episodic memory gets built through experience, through conversation, through practice in community. When someone hears about forgiveness in a sermon, that’s semantic. When someone practices forgiveness with a real name and a real situation in a room with people who are praying for them, that’s episodic. It becomes part of their story. And because it’s part of their story, their brain can project it into the future. They know what to do next time.
Paul seemed to understand this intuitively. In 1 Timothy 4, he tells Timothy to “train yourself for godliness,” and then a few verses later says, “Practice these things, immerse yourself in them, so that all may see your progress.” Not study these things. Not understand these things. Practice them. Immerse yourself. The language is physical, participatory, embodied.
In Paul’s world, that’s how formation worked. It was life on life. The pedagogy was apprenticeship, not lecture. We’ve drifted from that when we built churches around a communication model that defaults to information transfer. When the sermon became the centerpiece, the immersion became supplemental. Over time, we got really good at teaching. We just forgot to build the practicum.
What I’ve Learned Trying This
At Grace Church, we’ve been experimenting with creating practicum environments we’re calling “training labs.” We’ve also tried weaving some training elements into our weekend services. Our Good Grief series gave people a lament tool drawn from Psalm 77, and we spent five to ten minutes each week actually practicing it together. Four movements: turn to God, bring your complaint, ask boldly, choose to trust. We didn’t just preach about lament; we practiced it in the room.
The Influencer series I mentioned earlier was even more intentional. Two weeks of teaching to lay the foundation, then three weeks where the sermon shifted into skill-building. Encouraging words with a real formula. Catalytic questions with a real tool. Presence with real disciplines. People practiced in the service, took the tools home, tried them during the week, and came back with stories. The feedback was the fruit that something had shifted. People moved from “that was a really good sermon,” to “I tried it.”
That’s the difference between “I know it in my head” and “I know how to do it in my life.” The practicum is what bridges the gap.
The Question to Linger On
I don’t think most of us are doing anything wrong. I think most of us are doing something incomplete. We’re running a school without a lab. A classroom without a residency.
So, here’s the question I’d urge you to ask for your next sermon, “How can I help people do what I’m talking about?” Then provide a micro-skill idea that could help them get there. Your people might not have a heart problem. They might be experiencing a practicum gap.
Resource
See what this looked like in practice. Our Influencer series spent two weeks teaching and three weeks training micro-skills during the weekend service. Watch the series and steal whatever is useful.
