1. What is spiritual growth?
2. How can it be a key part of church life?
In order to answer these two questions we need to look both at what the Bible has to say about spiritual development and at how that can be done most effectively in the 21st century. Of course we learn from history, but simply looking back at some imagined golden age of strong devotional living won't necessarily help us here and now. And of course if we wanted to go right back to the New Testament Church, we'd have to ditch our Bibles in search of a pattern of discipleship because the New Testament largely didn't exist at the time!
I'm not going to try and blog about answers to these questions just yet, but I do think it's worth the effort to give it some thought. As a place to start I was reminded of something I heard on a podcast. Can't remember when or what the source was, but I did write down the following note.
For spiritual formation to happen we need:
- A theological understanding of what it means to be a disciple
- Self-awareness (if you learn a lesson about joy you need to know where you are with joy)
- Redemptive relationships (I'm guessing this means things like accountability and positive relationship with other believers).
So there you go, a simple starting point to think about what spiritual growth might mean for the 21st century church.
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