Even if somebody writes a recipe for you, what’s not in the recipe are the nuances: how the gravy looks when it’s ready, and how it smells when it’s ready. You can’t see that on a piece of paper where a recipe is written. You have to walk with a real good cook to learn how to cook. Secrets are not in books and manuals. Wisdom passed down from the elders is in direct proportion to how willing you are to walk humbly with your teacher… We are a reflection of someone else’s love for us.” —Bishop Yvette Flunder, August 4, 2014
Apprenticeship and discipleship aren’t so far apart in my mind. That’s partly because of the cultures I inherited my understanding of discipleship from and partly because they’re among the best ways to grow and build skill.
As infants we learn through observation, modeling, experimentation, and feedback. Many babies constantly scan their environment not just for objects to learn about but also for people to learn from. We learn quickly to watch our elders’ responses: there’s praise when a child staggers from a crawl into a walk, and a wagging finger when they reach for sharp scissors. In this culture, we expect an infant’s elders to watch and walk alongside it; we expect a child to become a student as it learns with adults how to do things and, ultimately, how to be human. Until each child becomes old enough to find new examples beyond their immediate circle of adults, they rise to the level of their models. That’s discipleship.
The teams I mentioned in yesterday’s post relied on apprenticeship in the tactics of civil disobedience and resistance. In 1959, for example, Diane Nash and John Lewis trained with Jim Lawson at Fisk University, studying through role play how to respond to taunts, threats, and physical assaults during desegregation sit-ins. CORE trained activists and reviewed their daily actions in Miami, FL, in 1959. They were intentional about learning and analyzing their efforts, and they were motivated to refine their contributions, to become more and more effective at raising pressure on a corrupt system until segregationists dismantled their handiwork.
All of these scenarios, and others—the trainee chef watching the master plate a meal; the youth invited, as Flunder tells it, to hold the elder’s flashlight while they do repairs—imply qualities of closeness and attention that contemporary classrooms and lecture halls can’t always include. And “the nuances” of the object of learning, the tacit or implicit knowledge, can only be learned with others who know it and are willing to share.
Any of us might be able to go long distances on our own, but to go deep, we need help.