10,000 hours to master something

It has been argued that to master something - anything - you need to do it for ten thousand hours. This made me think that people who are regular church people do spend a lot of time in church activities. With attending church, setting up or clearing down, helping with coffee, home group meetings, church meetings, preparation work, it seems that if you are involved for twenty years or so, you probably put in the ten thousand hours that are needed.

The thing is, what have you mastered after this time? The answer would probably be "churchmanship", and the problem is that we can far too often confuse this with faith. Diana Butler Bass points out in her book "Christianity after Religion" that this ten thousand hours does not work for faith. Faith is a growing thing, a process, that it is impossible to master, because it is always changing.

The danger is that after ten thousand hours, people seem to be adept at managing the church system, and part of this managing, or expertise in churching, is the ability to seem "pious" or "spiritual". To those who are less experienced - or even those more experienced - it is very easy to confuse this expertise with real spirituality or piety. Which then, of course, becomes the thing that people seek after, and so stay within the church for a long time, to gain the hours to seem spiritual. In the end, this churching experience becomes the definition of spiritual growth, the definition of a mature Christian. Which it isn't.

Don't misunderstand me, there are people who are in churches who are spiritually mature, pious, strong Christians. The problem is that these two are not necessarily related. There are people not in churches who are spiritually mature too. There are people who have not been Christians for long who show great spiritual maturity. Of course, because they have not much experience in churching, their insights and ideas are liable to be dismissed.

So, ten thousand hours to master something?This is perfectly valid, but it fails when we are talking about faith, spirituality, maturity. We need to learn to see these in other ways.