After the sermon I had a great conversation with someone about the need for church to be a place where one can explore faith so they can move from "affiliative" to "mature" faith. He said that he could recognize himself in each of the stages of faith development described in the sermon. However, when he entered the "searching" stage, church was not a safe place for him to bring his questions. When church wasn't open to exploring his questions he finally just said, "forget it" and his faith development went out the window for a few decades.One doesn't have to think very much at all to come up with half a dozen or more topics that make people sweat (myself included) when brought up in Bible class. This long term member remarked that we as a congregation have become a safer place for such exploration than perhaps we have been in the past. To me that is evidence that we as a church are still adding rings of maturity to our faith tree! May we continue to grow.
2 comments:
That was great. I had just finished listening to your tape! It was like a two-for-one deal! Yeah!
What I think you did better this time was that you emphasized more than any given stage is not "bad". That it's not bad to have experienced faith, or affiliative faith or searching etc.
As I've been doing some searching, I've come to another conclusion. Different areas of faith can be at different stages as well. For example: faith in the existence of God and faith in prayer.
It think that is important to note. I remember when I first started searching, I thought I had lost everything because I struggled with a few. But I now realize that that is simply not the case. I feel more stable in my searching now that I have some deep roots in some of the faith areas.
This was a great topic and full of new information for me. Wow...70%? I have never heard of these categories before; once again one of your sermons has me hunting down books I've never heard of. I can see parts of my faith in each of the areas described; Like J mentioned it seems that God encourages developement in different areas at different times.
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