STAGES IN THE SPIRITUAL JOURNEY
ASSESSING THE SPIRITUAL LIFE OF DISCIPLES
As a leader, one of the most difficult things to assess is where someone is in their spiritual journey and how are they progressing? Some churches measure a persons growth by whether they're attending regularly on Sunday mornings, if they're serving and giving, and if they're involved in a small group of some kind. If they're doing those things then it's assumed that they're growing in their faith.
However, if you end up leading in a church for very long, you will realize that involvement and serving are important but they are not the final measure of how far a person has progressed or how far they still have to go in their spiritual journey. It's possible to be doing all of those things and have stalled out in your spiritual life. It's even possible to be doing all kinds of things and actually still be an angry, immature believer. So how do we measure where someone is in their faith so that we can come alongside them and help them continue to grow?
I recognize that at this point there may be some who object to the idea of such an assessment. They might say something like, who are we to judge the spiritual life of someone else? Man looks at the outside but God looks at the heart. The truth is, if we are going beyond simply assessing and cross over into being judgmental towards someone that is absolutely not okay. It is important that we not assess people in a way that diminishes their value or pigeon holes them and labels them so that we can write them off. However, we see Jesus himself assessing the faith of his disciples.
We see Paul telling the Corinthians "But I, brothers, could not address you as spiritual people, but as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ. I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for it. And even now you are not yet ready, for you are still of the flesh." (1 Corinthians 3:1-2) He says you should be further along in your faith by now and not needing to be reminded of the basics of our faith. The writer of Hebrews says the same thing in Hebrews 5:12-13. It says " For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food, for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child."
Scripture very clearly shows us that as leaders we need to be able to understand where we are in our spiritual journey as well as where those we are leading people are so we can help them grow. The bible calls this process growing in maturity. Two of my favorite sections of scripture that speak about this process are Ephesians 4:11-13. In Ephesians Paul tells us Jesus "gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, 13 until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ." Paul says that Jesus gave specific roles to people in the church to use together so that they would grow, become mature, and look more and more like Jesus.
STAGES OF SPIRITUAL GROWTH
I'll freely admit that I'm not an expert here. I recognize that it is important to proceed with caution when talking about something so intensely personal and difficult to measure. I also know the great frustration of bumping up against an obstacle in growing as a follower of Jesus and not knowing what it is or how to get past it. This is where two resources have been incredibly helpful for me personally and for learning to lead others.
The first is a book by Jim Putman called Real Life Discipleship. In it he uses the stages of biological development as a metaphor for the stages of spiritual development. He begins by talking about those who are spiritually dead, then proceeds to being born again and being a spiritual infant. Then it progresses from spiritual infant, to spiritual child, then to spiritual young adult, and finally into spiritual parenthood. Putmans model looks like this...
When I read this book 10 years ago it brought significant clarity to where I was in my journey. It showed me that in some ways at that time I was a spiritual young adult and in some ways I was still very much a spiritual child. We'll unpack a little more about what those stages look like later. However, one of the areas that I found unhelpful about this book was its lack of clarity in how to transition out of the spiritual young adult phase into being a spiritual parent. Additionally, I'm coming to realize that just like there is growth that happens over time as a biological parent, Putman's descriptions of a spiritual parent don't do justice to the continued growth that spiritual parents can continue to pursue. Another thing I would like to note is that nobody really likes to think of themselves as spiritually younger than they are biologically. Our defense mechanisms kick in when a 30, 40, or 50 year old hears themselves called spiritual children or young adults.
This is where a second book called the Critical Journey by Hagberg and Guelich has been really helpful. They talk about STAGES of Spiritual Growth instead of Spiritual maturity like childhood or young adulthood. Their description of the spiritual journey of growing to be like Jesus looks like this...
I don't know any of these authors personally and don't know whether they would agree with the way I describe their models and how they do or don't overlap well. However, in my perspective, when you put them together they form a much fuller picture of what growing in our spiritual journey looks like. For example Hagberg and Guelich start with awareness of God but don't speak about the spiritual stage of those Putman calls "spiritually dead". As I mentioned before, I also believe that Putman lacks clarity on how to transition from being a spiritual young adult into a spiritual parent and his picture of what a parent is does not seem robust enough. It doesn't indicate that there is still significant opportunity for spiritual parents to grow in their relationship with Jesus and in how the engage with others. Another area that Hagberg and Guelich explore is a part of the journey called "the wall" which lies between stage 4 and stage 5. This is incredibly important because unless you are aware it exists, it can become a crisis of faith and could lead to either getting stuck or even regressing our in our spiritual growth.
Another adjustment that I have made is that I've modified the names of a few of the stages to be a little clearer based on conversations I've had with others. For example, I have changed stage one from "recognition of God" to the "new life", indicating that someone has made a choice to give their life to Jesus. I changed stage two from the "life of discipleship" to "the rooted life" because someone who goes past this stage never quits being a disciple but instead is continuing to grow because of the roots that develop in this stage. Stage 3 has been changed from the "productive life" to "the service focused life". The reason is that being the stage is primarily defined by service and activity and is usually directed towards serving and leading others. Lastly I changed stage 6 from the "life of love" to "the abundant life." Mostly because we are showing love in many of the other stages, but stage six becomes a place where the majority of our thoughts and actions are a result of being deeply connected to Jesus and overflowing with the love he pours into us into the relationships we have with the world around us. In Christ we have learned that we have more than enough so we abundantly give to others. I As I seek to reconcile these two ways of thinking about the growing over time in our spiritual journey, it looks like this so far...
I'm going to do a brief overview of the stages of spiritual growth as I understand them in our next post and then we'll unpack each one of them individually in other posts. One last side note. Just like someone who has children does not know what it's like to be a grandparent, if you are in a certain stage of spiritual growth, it is difficult if not unlikely to be able to tell someone what that stage looks like when you've not lived it. So, I am freely admitting that I believe there are some aspects of this process with which I have book knowledge of but not personal knowledge yet. These parts of the training can be at best classified as "in progress".