Have you experienced the pain of unlearning? – 1st Thessalonians 2:13–3:13, Part 1

This week I once again welcome guest blogger, Kirk Marks. Kirk is a retired pastor of 35 years who now works in international fair trade.

Have you had the experience of unlearning?

We all know what learning is. It’s when you didn’t know something, you didn’t know how to do something, or maybe something you didn’t know anything about, and you find it out. You gain knowledge, you gain skills, you learn. We don’t learn in a vacuum. There’s things that we already know and sometimes we build on our knowledge. That is learning.

I experienced a new kind of learning recently. Three years ago, I changed careers. I retired from pastoral ministry and from being a teacher of college and seminary, and I began a new career in importing and fair trade. I knew a tiny little bit about that world. I’ve learned a whole lot more these past few years.

But what about unlearning? Have you thought you understood something, but you realize, “Oh, I had that wrong in my head,” and you have to adjust? While we learn pretty well as adults, unlearning is really hard.  Unlearning is when you have been taught something, maybe by a teacher, maybe you read it in a book, maybe you imitated someone in learning how to do a certain something, and you find out later that you got it wrong.  You find out that what you learned isn’t working anymore, or the world changes and you have to do it differently. So you have to stop doing what you were doing and learn how to do something else. That’s unlearning.

Brain scientists tell us that unlearning works against our biology. Our brains form pathways when we learn, and as we repeat those lessons our brains get programmed to help us to perform better and quicker.  But when we try to change and do things a different way, we are going against the pathways in our brains.

It’s really, really hard to unlearn things.

I am talking about unlearning because, as it turns out, the first verse in the section of 1^st Thessalonians we’re studying this week, we bump into two matters in my Christian life that I had to unlearn and relearn. We’re going to see that what Paul writes to the Thessalonian church relates to the church of Jesus Christ in 21st century America. We will discover that there are some aspects of church and Christianity that we need to unlearn, and maybe some new things we need to learn too.

Paul, in writing to the Thessalonians, refers to the history he had with the Thessalonian church as their church planter.

Then he got some new information, so he’s going to talk about the present.

Then he’s going to talk about the future. He’s going to talk about his hopes and wishes for what’s going to happen in the future,

Check back to the next post tomorrow, as we begin to study 1 Thessalonians 2:13–16 and 3:6–13.

Photo by Uday Mittal on Unsplash