What’s your spiritual growth assessment?

Every once in awhile, it’s good for Christians to pause to take a spiritual growth assessment. As Lutheran author Fred Lehr says, “Stifling the maturity process by denying it the fresh air of new insights and knowledge is (an) attachment that ensnares us.”

So, for this week’s column, let’s take a look at some stages of Christian faith development. As a United Methodist, of course I’ll rely mostly on John Wesley, but numerous Christian leaders and authors also offer valuable insights in faith development! The methodical ways the Wesley brothers had in developing their discipleship may have given us our name, but this is certainly not the only way to assess our faith development!

John Wesley begins with prevenient grace. Prevenient grace, in a nutshell, is God’s love for us when we are not able to love God back. At this stage, we are “pre-Christians,” or have turned away from God’s love. God creates within us a longing, a searching, a restlessness that, as Wesley says, “woos” us. Unfortunately, this person is still, as the song says, looking for love in all the wrong places. Some will go to extremes to look for this love and end up in very self-destructive and evil habits without learning about God’s love for them. The assurance of prevenient grace is that we cannot walk so far away from God that God will not want us back.

There’s another step that Lehr, Warren, and many others including myself would add at this point. One might call it “crowd religion.” Rick Warren, in The Purpose-Driven Church identifies a group of people who are on the outskirts of the Christian life. These are the people who came to hear Jesus out of curiosity or to be entertained with his novel ideas. If they make a commitment at all, it is a tenuous one at best, one that Warren calls a “floating believer,” who hops from church to church when the luster of one church wears off on them. They may also be those that are moved in the moment, but when the emotion of the moment passes, so does these folks’ inspiration and commitment.

I’ve seen this phenomenon during a revival led by a gifted and popular evangelist. People were moved to tears and their hearts were truly brought closer to God, but it was only for awhile. When the revival was over, many people remained unchanged. Gossips still gossiped, sourpusses got no nicer, and so forth.

The next step is a profound one. It is the point of becoming convinced of our sin — not in some theoretical, “all have sinned and fall short of God’s glory,” way. This is where we know that we have sinned — and what those sins are — and confess them before God and receive his forgiveness.

This is justification. From there we grow in “justifying grace,” according to Wesley. Most commonly, this is called being born again or saved. It may or may not come as if a bolt of lightning hit you, but it very often goes step by step. This is the point at which we are ready to profess our faith publicly and mean it. The unfortunate part is that all to often we stop there. Without nurturing our faith, however, our life in Christ remains superficial and naive.

Sanctification is the next step. It is a time of deeper spiritual awakening. Interestingly, it often is not joyful, but a time of mournful awareness, and of being face-to-face with the fact that we do not possess the truth and wisdom we thought we had. Sanctifying grace is the point at which we trust God with our uncertainties.

I think that sometimes as Christians we have the notion that everything has to be explained or defined or outlined. Be assured that this is not true. It is a deep faith in God that can pray to God and say, “God, I don’t have an answer; so I turn it over to you.”
The final stage, the point at which God’s will becomes made perfect in us is called the oft-misunderstood term, “Christian perfection.” To understand this doctrine, we must first put out of our heads that Christian perfection is an achievable goal if we just try hard enough. Neither is it a person who has learned to fastidiously avoid all sin.

Christian perfection does not mean becoming a perfect Christian! Rather, the way Wesley describes it is in a passive voice: we are made perfect by God. The more we surrender our will, our answers, our ideas to God, the more fully God will live in and through us. The paradox is that the more we try to attain perfection the less likely we are to be made perfect in love. This is because we are relying on our own understanding rather than asking God to remove all that keeps us from loving.

I must note that Wesley himself said that he did not know anyone at this point. Still, our ultimate goal is to be perfectly submitted to God and perfected in his love in order to love and serve others.

Which stage are you in? Or maybe you have a stage or two to add? Regardless, pray for God to bring you to full maturity.