Thoughts on Spiritual Formation

Let us say you think Christians ought to progress in some ways toward a deeper spiritual maturity over time. Let us agree that in general we can gain a good glimpse of what maturity looks like. Let us then also agree that we can work toward developing a plan for each of us to become more spiritually mature– with emphasis on each and not just the group. This is the burden of Thomas E. Bergler, From Here to Maturity: Overcoming the Juvenilization of American Christianity.

What, then, is spiritual maturity? In Richard Foster’s Streams of Living Water there are six orientations to spirituality:

The spiritual disciplines, a life of holiness, life in the Spirit, a life of social activism, a life of personal devotion, and the sacramental life.

Here is Bergler’s big idea, spanning these various orientations in Foster but probably to be located in the holiness and life in the Spirit orientations, with some emphasis too on disciplines. His definition:

Spiritual maturity is the foundational level of spiritual formation of the human heart resulting in thoughts, feelings, and choices that display basic competence in the Christian life (54).

On the next page he offers some commentary on his definition:

First, in keeping with the teachings of Scripture and the Christian tradition, it faithfully preserves the centrality of the human heart in the process of spiritual transformation.

Second, it emphasizes the interaction between the mind, the feelings, and the will in responding to God’s grace and truth. Only people who experience Gods transformation in all three of these dimensions can achieve the competencies of a mature Christian as taught in the New Testament.

Finally, this definition makes clear that spiritual maturity is to be understood as a foundational stage of spiritual formation.

He thinks other framings of spiritual formation, often simpler in fact, are not as complete as his framing:

More abbreviated ways of describing maturity such as “being like Jesus” [Willard] or “being a person who loves God and neighbor” [SMcK], while technically correct, assume too much and can therefore be misleading. A spiritually mature person is like Jesus and loves God and neighbor, but in a basic, introductory way. [Love of God, love of others are never introductory.] And such shorthand descriptions of maturity, although thoroughly biblical, often do not provide any help in knowing how maturity is to be achieved. [Agreed] Confused Christians quickly start thinking of these simpler formulations as unattainable ideals. [I find this true about nearly all visions of maturity.] Others get excited about the goal but become quickly frustrated when just knowing what they should be like and trying hard to achieve it do not seem to be working. [Always true, too.]

Bergler’s study is all about providing a method and developing a plan and being intentional about it so that we don’t just talk about it or dream about it but get the wheels rolling to take us there. On this Bergler is to be commended, even if one might want those wheels moving in a slightly different direction.

Quite a few people, after hearing about the juvenilization of American Christianity, have perceptively asked, “How do we form young people into mature believers if the adults in our church are not mature?” (56)

At the risk of stating the obvious, the answer is to create and implement a congregational strategy for moving adults toward spiritual maturity. Such a strategy would need to include the following elements:

1. A profile of what a spiritually mature adult looks like.
2. A process or model that clearly explains how adults can grow into that profile.
3. A plan for implementing the process.
4. Communal practices. (56-57)

At this point I have to areas I’d want further clarification (which is a nice way of saying I disagree or at least would frame these things differently).

His spiritual vision seems to me to be locked into life in the here and now and does not have enough eschatology, or kingdom vision, shaping what spiritual maturity looks like. I’m talking here about heaven or what we prefer to call the new heavens and the new earth, or the final kingdom of God. What is the description in the Bible of that vision? The vision is profoundly social or ecclesial in that it focuses on these kinds of themes: justice, peace, reconciliation with God and others, and worship. Bergler’s focus on the here and now for the congregations is good but what happens there is more how individuals in congregations might grow personally and not so much what a mature congregation looks like as the template for the virtues we need to develop.

But I want to end on this note: he’s definitely moved the discussion forward into the pragmatics of transformation for Christians who are being shaped in the context of congregational life.