Spiritual Growth: A Primer
"All I really need to know I learned in kindergarten," says the author of a best-selling book. Many church members apparently make the same claim about their knowledge of God, the Bible, and the Christian life, but this claim is false. For coping with adult life and doing the ministries that God calls all of us to do, what we learned in kindergarten isn't enough.
Limiting ourselves to what our parents, Sunday School teachers, and other early religious mentors taught us is more comfortable than moving beyond it, however.
For this reason we often forget that no matter how admirable our mentors may have been, they were human. They had shortcomings and blind spots. Besides, our abilities, our experience, our present circumstances, and our calling from God aren't'· exactly like theirs.
We must no longer be children ... But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ ...
-Ephesians 4:14-15
Brothers and sisters, do not be children in your thinking; rather, be infants in evil, but in thinking be adults.
-1 Corinthians 14:20
Growth involves risk
To grow in faith, just as in other aspects of life, we must evaluate what we've been told, and revise some of it. This means risking the pain that change usually brings. We have to venture into unknown territory and dare to do some things that we fear. In order to grow, we must go beyond our comfort level.
When we refuse to do this, we keep ourselves from developing a strong faith. We also drive thinking people away from God and the church.
If we don't grow we miss a lot
We miss having a real relationship with God when we hang on to these kindergarten views about God-
§ God is an old man who resembles Santa Claus. Most of us would insist that we don't believe this, but many of our actions say that we do. We use only male words for God.
We assume that if we do what is right God will bring us what we want, and that if we don't he'll bring things we don't want.
When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.
1 Corinthians 13:11
God commanded my favorite style of worship.
When people in our churches advocate changes in our worship, we accuse them of letting today's culture have too much influence, but all of our worship practices reflect the cultures in which they arose. Even the worship we read about in the Bible is in styles typical of particular cultures. No single style of worship is God's style.
We miss having real relationships with other people when we hang on to these kindergarten beliefs about being a Christian-
§ A good Christian is always sweet and nice. This insidious teaching comes in many forms. "If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything." "Nice people (meaning real Christians) don't get angry." "Always avoid conflict." "Don't use dirty words." This fake sweetness requires a constant smile and a sugary style of talking. It has traditionally been expected of girls and women, but many people also consider it essential for clergy. It's deadly, and it has nothing to do with real Christianity.
§ Never think of yourself. This harmful teaching says, in effect, "Don't admit (even to yourself) that you have any ability." It also says "Never attend to your own needs or wants until after you have satisfied all of everyone else's," which really means "Never attend to your own, period." This is another teaching that is emphasized especially for women and clergy. And like some of the other harmful and incorrect messages we've been given, this one is deceptive because it resembles a valid Christian teaching-Jesus' command to deny ourselves and to minister to others. But it ignores what Jesus also said about loving ourselves, and what the Bible says about acknowledging and using our God-given gifts.
§ Being a Christian requires using special words. We've been taught that using today's everyday language for speaking to God or stating Christian beliefs is not permissible. But we urgently need to use ordinary conversational words people. to reach today’s people.
§ Older people always know better than younger ones. My mother stated this as "When you are older you will realize that I am right." In the church we act as if Christians who lived in earlier years knew all there was to know about God. We act as if all long-time members of a local church congregation deserve a larger voice than any newer or younger members. Because we stifle new voices, we miss doing new things that God is calling us to do. We also miss valuable relationships with Christians of different ages.
We miss being nourished by the Bible's message when we refuse to turn loose of these kindergarten beliefs about the Bible-
§ Christians should worship the Bible. In my kindergarten days Bibles didn't even look like other books. They had black leathery covers, tiny print, and tissue-paper pages with gold edges. This said that no one really expected to read them. Writing in a Bible was definitely forbidden. Fortunately most of us have gotten past this view of the physical book, but many of us still treat the words of our favorite Bible translation with inappropriate reverence. We make the Bible into an idol by revering its words and format instead of its message.
§ God personally put the Bible into its present form. We refuse to acknowledge the process by which an assortment of fragmentary manuscripts became the Bible as we now know it. We make mistakes like thinking that the Bible's first five books were written by Moses even though they describe his death. We assume that every author whose name is on a book of the Bible took word-for-word dictation direct from God somehow. As a result, we miss a lot of what God is really saying to us through the Bible.
§ If something isn't stated in the Bible, it isn't from God. This implies that God stopped speaking when the last word of the Bible was put into its present form. It implies that God doesn't communicate with people today, and that all recent insights are worthless. It keeps us from receiving God's current guidance and hearing God's call.
§ We can't expect the Bible's contents to make sense, and we shouldn't question what we're told about them. Getting past this false teaching at midlife was life-changing for me. For years I had been baffled by Bible stories that preachers and Sunday School teachers so often presented as if their meanings were logical and obvious. They weren't at all obvious to me, but I never heard anyone question them, so I was afraid to.
For about forty years felt this way about the story of Joseph interpreting Pharaoh' s dreams and deriving the nation's policies from them (Genesis 41). I knew no one who paid attention to dreams, and I certainly didn't know of any government officials who used dreams for setting national policy, yet I never heard anyone question the apparent craziness of this story. When I finally discovered how God actually uses dreams to guide us, it was a crucial factor in my becoming more than the lukewarm, robot-like churchgoer I had been for forty years. Kindergarten faith hadn't been enough.
During a discussion about whether to use a contemporary translation of the Psalms in a new hymnal, I was appalled to hear one of the United Methodist Church's most popular and influential clergymen say that we should stick with an outdated translation. He acknowledged that the words of the newer translation were more accurate. "We know they are," he said to the group of church insiders, "but we can't say this to our laity." It might cause some members to leave, he implied, and we must avoid that at all costs.
If we can keep our present members only by using this kind of deception-by keeping them at the kindergarten level of faith-we're not doing them any favor. More important, we're not communicating the real Christian faith, which can't be destroyed by the truth.
Many lay Christians, however, encourage clergy to conceal what they know. Laity attack their pastors or even drop out of the church in order to avoid having their kindergarten faith disturbed by pastors who try to lead them beyond it. When this happens, both laity and clergy are keeping the church at kindergarten level.
What difference does it make?
Why worry if what we learned about God and the Bible in our kindergarten days isn't accurate? Sticking with it seems easier and more comfortable than examining and revising it.
One problem with staying at kindergarten level is that it isn't really easy. Trying to keep ourselves convinced of something that doesn't really make sense to us is hard. Trying to banish questions that won't go away but that we're afraid to admit takes a lot of energy. Asking the questions and finding real answers is easier and much more satisfying in the long run.
In addition, when we fail to go beyond kindergarten answers in the church, we drive serious questioners away. Perceptive people who come to our churches and find us deluding ourselves with kindergarten viewpoints aren't likely to stay. Even worse, they're likely to give up on God without ever having seen the real God. What they give up on is the Santa-Claus-like god. They may never discover the difference if we don't make it clear.
When we're long past kindergarten age and we've been in the church for many years, it's time to move beyond kindergarten faith.
Beyond Mother's explanation
I've often been slow to realize that some of my mother's views were wrong and that she didn't know everything. Because she was loving and smart, she seemed confident, and she was my mother, I tended to see her as my ultimate source of lifelong authority.
In my kindergarten days I didn't even see that my mother wasn't always telling me all she knew. I remember asking her why babies came only to married people. "Because every child needs a mother to stay at home and look after it," she answered, "and a father to go to work every day to earn the money that the family needs. "Of course!", I thought. "Why didn't I think of that?" It didn't occur to me that there was any more to now about the subject. What a shock, when on the school playground I heard that there was!
What seemed impossible was true
What I heard went against everything I thought was right. Besides, it sounded repulsive. I thought, "That can't possibly be true!" But it was true, of course, and in time I saw it differently.
New information about God and the Bible may also seem unacceptable at first, merely because it is foreign to our way of thinking. But it may still be valid. God isn't limited to what we consider reasonable or proper.
Refusing to look further is dangerous
To mature as Christians we must continually look beyond our own experience and beyond what we've been taught in earlier years. What we were told early in life may contain important truths, just as my mother's explanation about babies did. But like that explanation, some of what we were taught was incomplete. Some was incorrect. If we never go beyond it, we're in danger. We and are easy targets for religious charlatans and false teaching.
Besides, if we don't go beyond what we learned about God and the Bible at kindergarten age, we lack the faith resources that we need for facing the inevitable problems that life brings.
We learn what we see
What we're taught isn't limited to what people deliberately try to teach us. The most powerful teaching comes from observing how other people act. This kind of teaching is dangerous because we don't realize it's happening.
We may hear our parents, Sunday School teachers, or pastors claim that all people are equally valuable, but if we see them treating women or people of other races as if they were inferior, that's what we learn. If we hear only masculine words for God, we learn to think of God as male. If we near clergy advocating honesty and self-sacrifice bat we see them using manipulative, cutthroat tactics to get the top positions in the church bureaucracy, we learn that power and money have supreme importance. If we hear people making pious statements at church but see them using dishonest practices or putting people down in their daily life, we learn hypocrisy. Actions really do speak louder than words.
Starving churches?
What I'm calling kindergarten faith, author J. Edward Carothers calls starvation. In his book The Paralysis of Mainstream Protestant Leadership (Abingdon Press, 1990), he says the church body is suffering from malnutrition. Although he doesn't think we're facing anything like death yet, he fears that's where we're heading if we don't make some changes.
"What I dread as a possibility,· Carothers says, "is a stagnated mainstream Protestant movement
that becomes a dragged-out case of continuing care-spoon-fed and kept quiet by tranquilizing tidbits of superstition disguised as religious faith." Carothers observes that today's mainstream churches include many people whose education and experience outside the church has given them the best current information from secular fields and has encouraged them to think for themselves, but that our churches haven't provided that kind of teaching about the Christian religion. And we haven't let our members know we weren't providing it. "One pastor after another," Carothers reports, "has told me, 'I do not wish to disturb my people with ideas that upset them.'" In Carothers' view, "When belief is solid enough ... we will be ready to act on the basis of that belief."
That's the kind of mature faith we need. In our Sunday School classes, worship services, and conversations, both clergy and laity must risk going beyond kindergarten faith. God needs us to get into action.[1]
OCTOBER 2009
Has your time to blossom come?
“The time came when the risk it took to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” This quote that a Connections reader sent me, by Cuban-French author Anais Nin, struck me as an apt description of how many Christians come to expand their understanding of God and the Christian faith.
Too many of us spend years clenched in tight buds with regard to our religious beliefs instead of letting our-selves open into the blossom that every bud is meant to become. Instead of doing the questioning and exploring that spiritual growth requires, we mindlessly stick with the first descriptions of God and Jesus that we ever received, from our parents, the church, or our culture. We tend not to risk blossoming until something nudges us into recognizing the pain that staying in a tight bud is causing.
Nudges can be necessary
Providing the necessary nudges is part of what churches need to do for their members and for the wider world, but too many churches prefer to provide only comfort. That’s unfortunate, because they harm us when they keep us so comfortable that we never feel motivated to blossom into more mature faith.
I hear a lot from Christians who have finally felt the pain enough to risk blossoming. After years of trying unsuccessfully to believe what their upbringing or a church told them they were supposed to believe, these Christians finally started considering what they really did believe. They’ve made some changes as a result. Some have decreased their church participation or changed churches. Some have become active in trying to promote change in the church. Most have started working more actively to promote justice and combat injustice.
Reading and hearing some blossoming Christians’ stories recently, plus working with PCCS friends to describe what we see as progressive Christianity, has made me think again about my own current beliefs. As a result, during the past few months I’ve been trying to put them into writing. I’ve often done bits of this in Connections, but now I’ve been trying to say it all at once—to write a “credo.”
It can be hard and even scary
Writing what I now believe has helped me get clearer on it. But doing that isn’t easy. Every few days I look back at what I’ve written and see a spot that still isn’t clear enough, so needs revising. I may never finish. And I suspect that even if I reach the point of seeing the writing as good enough, by that time I may realize that some of my beliefs have changed slightly. I see continual, lifelong reevaluation and occasional revision of them as important parts of being a Christian.
My credo effort has been scary at some points. Trying to write exactly what I believe about Jesus, for ex-ample, required admitting in a way I hadn’t quite dared to do previously, even to myself, how different my beliefs are from what many of my friends and fellow church members apparently believe about him. That realization made me wonder if I should just go back to trying to make myself believe what “everyone” else seems to believe. But I can’t do that.
Painful, risky, but exhilarating
Turning loose of beliefs that have never seemed convincing but that we’ve thought were compulsory can feel risky, but the risk is greater for some of us than for others. For me, the process has included pain but the risk has been relatively small and the benefit has been great. I’ve lost some friends and been shunned by some church leaders, but I’ve also found new friends who have essentially become my church, and the new in-sights and friendships have often been exhilarating.
For other lay Christians, the risk is greater. Some risk losing not only friends but also customers and there-fore income if they openly admit having minority beliefs. If they’re in the political world, they may lose votes.
For Christians in church-related professions, openly straying from church doctrine or majority views is more risky. Pastors may lose income or status if they openly disagree with official doctrine or policies. Pastors’ open-ness can make members uncomfortable by making them aware that beliefs they have counted on might not be true, and most pastors, it seems, want to comfort people rather than to risk making them uncomfortable.
Letting the bud blossom can be risky for professional scholars, too. Expressing beliefs that differ from what they have previously written or taught can lessen their credibility. It can even jeopardize their jobs. Besides, as Editor Charles W. Hedrick points out in When Faith Meets Reason: Religious Scholars Reflect on Their Spiritual Journeys (Polebridge Press, 2008), “ ‘Confessions’ have never been part of the modern academic study of religion, since they fall outside the purview of the objectivity demanded by critical studies.” But he notices that “scholars generally avoid such subjective personal reflections for a wide variety of reasons, not the least of which is an inability to resolve some of the basic questions for themselves.”
No escape if we’re true to ourselves
Here’s what scholar Robert W. Funk, whose personal story also appears in When Faith Meets Reason, says he had to consider in deciding whether to risk blossoming. “At what point does the discrepancy between what I know, or think I know ... and what I am willing to say publicly become so acute that my personal integrity is at stake?” But he reached the conclusion that I and so many others have also reached: “There is no escape if you wish to be true to yourself.”
Spiritual sleeping pills don’t help
As scholar Robert M. Price writes in When Faith Meets Reason, “The quest for answers is itself a spiritual exercise, one more bracing and productive than thinking one has all the answers. ... Dogmatic beliefs seem to be sleeping pills for the spirit.”
In future issues of Connections I’ll include more reports from laypeople, pastors, and scholars, about their experiences in letting their tight buds open and blossom. One Connections issue may even be my credo. Meanwhile, I suggest that you try stating yours, in your mind at least, if not in writing. Even if you’ve done it earlier, it may have changed by now.
I hope you’ll stay connected. Hearing each other's stories of blossoming is much more helpful than taking spiritual sleeping pills.
“The Church is not and perhaps never was chiefly for people who have a deep and serious intellectual interest in religion. On the contrary, the Church is for people who want to keep up comfortable old habits and associations, who want a feeling of reassurance and self-righteousness, and are happy to live by a ready-made Truth. They are content to go on slumbering peacefully. They want to be delivered from the extreme terrors and joys of real religious thought, and nothing is so effective a protection against religious terrors as conforming church member-ship. At least ninety-five percent of the hierarchy and of church members alike will never see the radical theologian as a liberator and rebuilder: instead, they will always see him [or her] as a troublemaker, a nuisance, an irritant who should be got rid of.”
—Don Cupitt, in Radical Theology
Do you agree with Cupitt? Are “intellectual interest in religion” and “slumbering peacefully” the only choices?
How else might we respond to what we hear churches presenting as “ready-made Truth”?
“Truth is not religion’s ultimate agenda; security is.” —John Shelby Spong, in Eternal Life: A New Vision
Do you agree with Spong’s observation? What do you think the church’s “ultimate agenda” should be?
What’s most transforming— information or practice?
A Connections reader recently sent me an article that made me think again about this question that I often see church leaders raising. Most of them seem to see practice as more influential, but I’m unconvinced by that. I know many churchgoers who, like me, have had their beliefs and as a result their behavior changed by getting new information, and I rarely see such change resulting from practice alone.
I believe that a person’s behavior—what the Bible calls “fruits”—is what counts, and that the main world-changing behaviors are compassion (love) and jus-tice. Seeing Jesus as the reason for them isn’t necessary. Simply seeing the need for them and practicing them, for whatever reason, is enough. But many churchgoers have to get more convincing information about Jesus, the Bible, and the church in order to see what they consider a good enough reason for practicing compassion and justice.
What kind of practice?
What kind of information?
The information mentioned in the article I read was Bible stories and “generalized theology,” which I took to mean what’s expressed in familiar creeds, hymns, and such. But many churchgoers get that kind of in-formation constantly without its motivating them to act compassionately or promote justice. They don’t learn about the Bible’s origin and development, the Roman Empire setting Jesus lived in and his response to it, or the history of Christianity and the variety of belief and practice it has included. Consequently, these churchgoers don’t seem to recognize what fruits Christians need to be producing.
The practices mentioned in the article I read included mainly attending church, being in small groups, and reading the Bible, yet it’s easy to do all those things for years without noticing the kinds of injustices that need to be exposed and opposed by Christians in today’s world.
So is information or practice more transformative? It depends on what kind of information we’re referring to, and what kind of practice.
[1] July 1994