“Oh, grow up!” You may have heard it or said it at some point in your life. I teach human growth and development and there are certain things we all go through to grow up. We used to call these stages but that has changed mostly because it is not a simple step by step progression. Instead, we often go through one stage ahead of the one we should be going through. Still, stages help us to understand how things progress in general.
We have known that psychologically and physically we go through certain stages. Why have we not discovered that we do the same spiritually. Fowler, a number of years ago, wrote a book about the stages of spiritual development that is often read in seminary but rarely shared with people in church. I get it, many have not read the book but we should know better.
Why have we not taken the new testament words to heart, “when I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned
When we have “new” Christians, why don’t we assume that they are babies in the faith and explain things to them that will set them on a course of healthy growth? Instead, new Christians are expected to listen to sermons and Sunday school teachers and catch up on what they have missed out on. This means that old and tired platitudes and dogma are used. We teach them the rules but not the substance. We teach them either/or but never both.
Examine your own spiritual life. If it was healthy development then the very first thing you learned was how loving and caring God is and that God doesn’t punish or hurt people but instead stays right there with them in the midst of the pain and hurt. Be honest though, weren’t you taught that you needed to be saved and then you needed to follow the rules so you would be a good person? Doesn’t that skip a few steps?
Christ said come as a child would, with total love and total trust. No rules mentioned, no sins mentioned, just trust, which leads to deeper love. We start kids (in some denominations) with confirmation classes, when they are around 10 and that is important to learn the rules of the faith but seriously, why do we wait ten years? And if you are an adult, you don’t really get confirmation classes at all, though some churches provide such classes to all.
Beloved ones, how can we go wrong if we start with every new Christian at the point of trust versus mistrust and love? We should start at: the Creator of the Universe cares for you deeply and personally and is trustworthy to never leave you. Start at love and trust, after all, the Psalms express this very thing over and over again. That is a healthy foundation to build on, one you can always come back to, that God loves me unconditionally and if that is true, then I can learn how to love God back and love my neighbor.
And, you know what, it is not too late. Each of us can go back to the first stage and examine what went right or wrong there. We can start over again with Love and grow from there. We can return to child-like wonder and then build on the love and wonder to be healthy children of God.
TMM