Spiritual Formation

What does spiritual maturity look like? What are some markers or gauges of how you would identify spiritual maturity? How would you diagnose your own spiritual condition? What strategies do you have in place to grow in spiritual maturity? These are just a few of the questions we addressed this past weekend at our youth seminar on Spiritual Formation.

I had the opportunity to speak for a few hours on Friday night and again on Saturday morning to a group of about 20-25 teens and young adults from two different branches of the Uniting Reformed Church in Windhoek. They were a very interactive group and based on their feedback they seemed to really enjoy the material.

One of my biggest concerns in youth ministry is the focus on external religion. Many churches have youth programs simply because they want their youth to look, speak, and act a certain way. As long as they follow the rules, don't get in to trouble, and don't embarrass anyone, then they are generally left alone, maybe even ignored. But the problem is that a bunch of rules don't make a relationship with God. Spirituality isn't about the external life. You can have great looking external religion and still have no inner spirituality. Those are fakers or what Jesus called hypocrites. He railed on the Pharisees for exactly that, being externally religious but having no inner spirituality. And most of youth ministry is about exactly that, it's busy addressing external symptoms rather than treating the heart disease.

The key to youth ministry isn't trying to shape externally religious people, but internally spiritual people. Because inner spirituality can't be separated from external religion. It's an internal reality that will inevitably manifest itself in the external life. As we shape and form our inner spiritual lives, it shows up in how we look and speak and act.

So our goal this past weekend was to understand how spiritual formation works, and by understanding it, to hopefully develop a strategy for our own spiritual formation. We started by looking at what spiritual maturity looks like. Most people have a conception of spiritual maturity as external religion, but we emphasized the inner spiritual life. Then we went through 10 questions for personal spiritual diagnosis. Then, after understanding our goal and understanding where we're starting from, we looked at strategies of how to "get there from here," things like addressing sin, changing our desires, intentional community, and spiritual disciplines.

Groups studying a Bible passage	Groups drew and labeled a picture of a spiritually mature person

At the end of the seminar some of the leaders told me that many of their youth were not available to come this weekend and invited me to come back another time to teach those others also. I handed them my course notes and said, "Now you know the material so you can teach it to those others." That's what multiplication is all about, training those who will train other also. Don't be impressed, that strategy is not original to me. The apostle Paul did it first (2 Tim. 2:2) and Jesus before him. That's what it takes to turn the world upside-down.