Pathways to Spirituality, Part I: The Problems We Face

John See shared with me quite a bit about his church family camp recently. With a theme as interesting as ‘Pathways to Spirituality’ (for me at least!), I couldn’t resist borrowing his copy of the session notes. When he passed me a blue file with his name printed on it, I was impressed! Each camp participant actually got personalized files! It took me about 4 or 5 days before I finally opened the file up to read it yesterday. I was too busy I guess. The notes were actually lecture slides that have been printed out. I couldn’t understand what some of the pictures inside were for (like one depicting the famous David sculpture, with his groin area censored!), but I think I have a rough idea of what some of the brief notes are about. Here are some good points that I can draw out from it…

God’s blueprint for Ministry (Ephesians 4:11-13)

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The ‘Doing’ part:

to prepare God’s people for works of service = working for God

The ‘Being’ part:

reaching unity in faith… becoming mature… attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ = walking with God

The speaker seems to be trying to show that there needs to be a balance between what we do as Christians and what we are. He says: We must develop hidden depths in our spiritual life because it is the depth and quality of our inner life that will determine the strength and beauty of our outward service. He mentions some of the problems that we Christians face today, and I couldn’t agree more with it.

Our Problems
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- Good at ‘foundation’; poor at ‘formation’
- We assume doctrinal knowledge guarantees spiritual growth
- We wrongly equate productivity with spirituality
- We assume that the more fervently members immerse themselves into doing God’s work (the ‘doing’ part), the more productive they will become, and the more they will mature in faith and spirituality (the ‘being’ part)

I think a lot of us make this mistake of equating Bible knowledge or serving in church with spiritual formation. I have sometimes come across Christians whom when I asked them about their walk with God, they answered by sharing about the ministries that they were involved with in church. We confuse our works of service to God with our inward growth. A person’s involvement in church becomes a gauge for that person’s spirituality. The more he gives and the more he serves, the more he loves God. I would like to add to the list with some other problems that I thought of.

- We fall into the trap of gauging a person’s spirituality by outward appearances, e.g. people who never miss church, people who close their eyes and lift their hands when they worship God, people who read the Bible and pray every night, people who speak in tongues or prophesy, are assumed to be more spiritually mature.
- We assume that to help a person grow spiritually, all we have to do is just to tell them what to do and what not to do, what is right and what is wrong, what is true and what is false.
- We create false dichotomies, and assume that serving in church is more ‘spiritual’ than working at the office, reading the Bible is more ‘spiritual’ than watching a movie, listening to Christian songs are more ‘spiritual’ than listening to love songs on the radio, going to church is more ‘spiritual’ than going for shopping or playing sports.

Spiritual formation is about developing the ‘hidden depths’ of our inner life so that prayer, for example, is not just an occasional coming to God with a list of requests, but the posture of our whole being in daily communion with God.