Yesterday's piece left one idea behind. This morning it wouldn't let go.
I drafted yesterday's article on my way to work, a few lines at a time at stoplights. This morning, reflecting on it, I found myself spending my time unpacking one idea that wouldn't let go. It felt important to share.
In 1885, a German psychologist named Hermann Ebbinghaus did something strange. He measured his own forgetting. He memorized lists of nonsense syllables, then tracked how fast they slipped away. Within an hour, more than half was gone. Within a day, about two thirds. Within a week, roughly three quarters.
Now, fair is fair. Those were nonsense syllables, and a sermon isn't nonsense. Meaningful material fades slower. But the shape of the curve has held up for over a century, and so has the cure.
The cure isn't hearing it again. It's pulling it back out yourself. Retrieval. Spaced over time. Researchers have tested this for decades, and the finding keeps holding: you keep what you're made to produce, not what you're handed.
So here's what wouldn't leave me alone.
We know how people learn. Go to any serious college and look. Spaced review. Self-testing. Papers. Exams. Somebody asking you a question and watching you work to answer it. The whole system is built to fight the curve.
And here's the counterintuitive part. So is seminary.
Seminary is graduate school. Greek and Hebrew drills. Exams. Papers defended in front of professors who push back. The future pastor gets the full treatment. Retrieval, spacing, accountability. Everything Ebbinghaus would prescribe.
Then he graduates, walks into a pulpit, and hands the congregation the one method he was never trained with.
One exposure. One voice. No retrieval. No test. Nobody ever asks the pew to produce a word of it.
Think about that. The man up front was taught the way people learn. The people in front of him get the way people forget. Same content. Opposite method. And the only one who ever had to prove he kept it is the one holding the microphone.
I don't think that started with bad habits. I think it's in the blueprint.
Calvin asked why the church needs pastors if everyone can read the Scriptures for himself. His answer, as one historian summarizes it, was that the pastor divides the Word like a father dividing bread into small pieces to feed his children.
He meant that kindly. I believe that. But look at what the picture assumes. The congregation is the child. The text is the loaf. And the child doesn't get the loaf. He gets what someone else already cut up for him.
The pastor gets the whole loaf for years in seminary. The pew gets the pieces. Once a week.
And here's the part I keep circling. Over time, the pieces stopped even being the bread. What comes down on Sunday is mostly a performance. A well-timed, engaging piece built on one man's reading of the text. Sometimes it's a good reading. But it's still his.
We've learned to receive the chef's description of the meal and call it dinner.
Dissecting the text is the opposite act. You put it on the table, open, where it can push back on you. Where somebody can say, wait, that's not what verse four says. That doesn't entertain anybody. It's work. And it can't be done to you from a stage.
So stack it up. Ebbinghaus says we lose what we don't retrieve. Seminary knows it, and trains its own that way. The pew never gets that training. Then, when people can't explain what they believe, we call it a lack of devotion.
It isn't devotion. It's design.
Now, people get tired of me saying it. Be a Berean. I know. I've worn the word thin.
But I've come to see it's not just a church problem. The pre-cut bread is everywhere. The news cuts it for you. The feed cuts it for you. The ad, the politician, the pundit, the pulpit. Most people take the pieces and swallow. Not because they're foolish. Because examining is expensive.
My guess is maybe twenty percent don't. The ones who stop, read the whole chapter, ask where it came from, and won't run on somebody else's confidence.
And that makes me read Yeshua, Jesus, differently. Mattityahu, Matthew 7:13-14. The gate is narrow, the road is hard, and few find it. That word for hard carries the sense of pressed, squeezed, under pressure. I used to hear that as the few who are good enough.
I don't anymore. I think it's narrow because it costs something most people won't spend. Focus. Attention. Sustained, against a current that's always pulling the other way.
Not brilliance. Attention.
And attention is exactly what a pre-cut world is built to take from you.
Few find it because few are willing to pay for it.
I'm still chewing on that one. Nobody cut it up for me.
Thank you for reading my journal.
Shalom v'shalvah.
Your brother in the Way,
