Stages of Faith

Giselle the lay reader and I met to discuss one of the goals of the Church Development Plan, to establish a small group to pray deliberately and consciously for the work of the church and to wait on what God might want to tell us about it. Despite coming from very different experiences of the Church, we see this matter very similarly and I will be very happy to let her run with it and just occasionally turn up now and again.

Giselle gave me a print-out of an article by one Richard J Vincent (who I can’t find out very much about – his name is attached to this piece of writing and others) outlining a model for spiritual development which was probably news to his evangelical church audience in 2004 when he wrote it. His point, and I’m not sure how far it is his originally or comes from elsewhere, is that evangelical church communities tend to aim at getting their members to be committed, active and engaged, living the life of Christian service, and stop there, leaving them to run into the buffers when they undergo any kind of challenge to their faith, a challenge which Mr Vincent suggests is not only likely but actually a necessary step towards a further stage of development. That is a stage which leads inward, he says, detaching ourselves from the things we once thought were spiritually valuable, and ending in a greater degree of union with Christ.

I see the point of this, but I question any sense that it’s a tidy process. Mr Vincent and his sources also stress it isn’t, and yet the very fact of describing it in terms of ‘stages’ (even termed ‘early’ and ‘later’) tends to make it look neater than in fact it is. I can’t recall any single ‘Wall’ experience (that’s what the paper calls it) where my spiritual assumptions all had to be questioned and reformulated; rather it seems to be something that happens all the time, though perhaps I have yet to run into a very solid Wall. Meanwhile you continue to discover more and more about yourself, things that need unpicking and occasionally repenting; and in fact the spiritual life isn’t only about divesting yourself progressively of the bad habits of the past, but, sadly, also about chipping away the new ones, and the new delusions and illusions, that you develop as time goes on. The soul may grow closer to Christ over the years, but most of us need to go through the business of renewal and reformulation over and over again.

Then again, how much of this just comes from age? One would hope that a soul might progressively shed its illusions and attachments to nonsense as the business of merely putting one foot in front of another becomes more of a concern, and when I think of such advances as I may have made spiritually I find it hard to tell the difference between changes that show me growing closer to the Lord, and those that just result from getting older!