Fowler's Stages of Faith

In light of the last several days’ posts, I thought I’d put together a quick summary of one person’s crack at stages of faith development.  I get my information for free, and pass the savings on to you!

 

Stage 1 (ages 3-7): Intuitive/Projective Faith: Fantasy and fiction and reality all blend together; no big difference between Santa and Jesus and mom and dad.  Developing a sense of trust, dependability of the world/authority (or lack thereof).

 

Stage 2 (7-adult): Mythic/Literal Faith: Begin to grasp grander story and their part in it, connection to church stories, God as superhero.  Reciprocity a key part of this stage: if I do good, good things come, if I do bad, bad things come.  Some people stay here their whole lives.

 

Stage 3 (Adolescent to Adult): Synthetic/Conventional Faith: Us and them is key, lots of group-think [there’s that word!], authority is external, we believe the same things and they don’t, tends to be dogmatic, clear and distinct lines between who’s in and who is out, beliefs are often tacit and not very examined or thought-out.  Most youth groups, campus ministries, and churches thrive on stage 3 people—we all believe the same thing.  Religious communities trade on this stage.

 

Stage 4 (Late Adolescent to Adult): Individuative/Reflective: No longer us/them but me and the rest of ya’ll.  These people often get outside of the community and throw rocks at it, ask annoying questions, no longer feel like they fit, can become angry or withdraw from fellowship.  This stage can be fun to be a part of as a minister or a complete pain.  In I.V. nationwide, our numbers drop with Juniors and Seniors because many of them are going through this stage.  At UNC, we have more students study abroad than any other public institution, and they often come back with this posture.  If they work through this process and are able to re-integrate with the community, these people are often the most phenomenal leaders in our fellowships—they think more deeply, understand faith in a deeper and more full way.  Some people never re-connect with fellowship after this stage.  Others fear this stage and so retreat to stage 3 because it feels safer.

 

The Wall (Hagberg and Guelich)

This isn’t a part of Fowler’s stages but it’s a helpful piece to the puzzle.  By the end of stage 4, people think they have everything just about figured out.  Then life happens.  We realize we don’t have it all figured out.  The systems we’ve re-constructed on our own don’t work either.  This frequently comes at mid-life.  People move to other things to try to find happiness other than the plan they originally had.  The options here: either pain/anger/regression or press into it and begin a more significant internal journey.  There’s a new realization that the real issues are inside for those who press deeper.

 

Stage 6: Conjunctive Faith (adult mid-life): Simplicity, less self-assurance, less aggressive, simply receiving the day for what it is, living in deeper tensions and paradoxes but more settled into them. Less certain about what is to come but more trusting and hopeful at the same time.  All of life becomes the learning ground for faith.

 

Stage 7: Universalizing Faith (adult):  Only a few ever get here, but life and death is all the same, a deeper abiding trust, a child-like faith all over again, all things are in God’s hands so we can engage God’s will without concern for our lives/destinies.

 

Growing Kids Satan's Way and Perpetual Self-Righteousness Tendencies

Yesterday's post drew quite a number of responses. One comment celebrated being out of college--to her there were a greater number of opportunities for self-righteousness while in school surrounded by Christians.

I've been thinking on this today and on the one hand, I agree. When you get a community full of eighteen to twenty-two-year-olds together, passion is high. That can often get mis-directed into self-righteousness. And Craig Fowler proposes in his 'stages of faith' that we all have to go through a black-and-white stage as a part of our development spiritually, and that's typically where college students are.

But I would argue that self-righteousness is one-hundred-percent a part of the human condition. No matter how old we are or what life stage we are in, we are always looking for something to be our righteousness apart from Christ.

We're incomplete creatures. In our clearest moments we know this. God offers to complete us in Christ. But we reject that (some of us aggressively and obviously, others of us in more subtle ways) and try to find other things to prop us up, to validate us or to give us a sense of worth.

When that gets externalized in clear and proud ways we call it being 'self-righteous' about something. That takes all sorts of forms, and it's particularly ugly when religion gets involved with it, as Jesus' interactions with the religious leaders shows.

When we had our first child six years ago, one question swirling around us was were we going to "grow our kids God's way" (also a title of a book for those of you who aren't a part of my little slice of the Christian world)?

We looked at it and decided no, we weren't--at least, not all the way. Did that mean we were growing kids Satan's way? To some people, it did. That was the way, the only way, to do it correctly.

But then we started looking into the complete polar-opposite approach to parenting: attachment parenting. It has a more hippie, less religious feel to it...but the people on that end of the spectrum were just as rabid, just as "self-righteous" about it as anyone on the more religious end who were growing kids God's way.

The point is that self-righteousness is always our temptation, at every age and every stage of our lives. In this parenting world, both attachment parenting and 'growing kids God's way' advocates were expressing the exact same distorted self-righteousness, just using different outlets or forms.

All of us are tempted to be 'justified,' propped up, validated by someone or something apart from what God has done for us in Jesus: our money, our friendships, our kids behavior, what we think we know about theology or cars or music or the economy or home repair.

For those of us who claim to follow Jesus, self-righteous arrogance should be the last thing that we express. This whole project is built on the fundamental presupposition that we have no such thing as righteousness that comes from ourselves. This whole thing starts with admitting that we're broken, sinful, needy people. That's where we meet grace. That's what this whole thing is about, start to finish.

And all of our self-righteousness must go if we are ever to become fully human. Not that we don't grow in knowledge or experience or have things to offer one another in terms of correction or information or helps. But we offer that humbly, acknowledging that none of it is the "righteousness" that we were actually made to inhabit. None of it actually ever heals our hearts.

Not even if you're growing kids God's way.

Caillou Christmas

The week leading up to Christmas, the kids were watching Caillou, a PBS kids show. For those of you who don't frequent PBS kids television, Caillou is a cartoon featuring a preschooler (Caillou) and his family. It's generally innocuous entertainment for the kids.

In this particular episode, Caillou's pre-school class was having a "holiday party." At one point in the show, Caillou says he's excited about the class "Christmas party." His mother immediately corrects him: "O no, Caillou, this is a holiday party." She goes on to explain that there are other holidays during this season and that there are kids in his class who celebrate those holidays.

A couple of parenting thoughts as I've been considering this exchange and what it teaches my kids.

1. This is as it ought to be. PBS can't elevate Christmas over the other holidays, nor should they. In other words, it is not PBS's job to teach my kids about the centrality of Christmas. That's my job.

To change the venue a bit, it's also not the public school's job to teach my children about the importance of Christmas. I wouldn't want even a Christian teacher in a public school to ignore the other holidays and the students under their care who celebrate those holidays.

2. At the same time, given that my faith commitments are to Christianity and not pluralism, I don't want Christmas simply lined up with every other possible holiday celebration. I want my kids to be able to engage other faith commitments (be it Judaism or pluralism) from the starting point of God's work in Christ, not from a pretend neutral center that does not actually exist.

3. So I want my kids to be able to engage with humility and gentleness the other celebrations around Christmas through the lense of Christmas. I want them to be firmly fixed on the certain good news that God has acted decisively in human history through the coming, working, dying and resurrection of Jesus Christ at a single point in time and history.

I want them to be able to see how this coming of Christ actually fulfills all the hopes and dreams and desires and partial-celebrations of Kwanzaa and (C)Hanuk(k)ah (thanks, Daniel). But I don't want that to create this un-necessarily intense bifurcation of we're the "good guys" and everyone else are the "bad guys."

4. But as Fowler has mapped, there are stages of faith. It takes emotional and intellectual maturity to be able to hold convictions firmly while also able to enter into the complexity of the world graciously and humbly--the best of us don't usually get there until mid-life!

So where does that leave my wife, me and our five-year-old, three-year-old (today! happy birthday, Zoe!), and 16-month old?

We have to teach them and equip them as best we can to live in a fairly complex, multi-cultural world from the viewpoint of Christian faith. We have to take opportunity to explain things as best we can, with language as best as they can grasp it, all the while praying a ton for wisdom and for the Spirit to do the work that only the Spirit can do.

We could also lock them up in a closet until they're 21, but I think that might be a bit of an over-reaction.