What is spiritual growth after deconstruction?
This week we are kicking off a new series of discussions at our Thursday night Zoom gatherings. We’ll be thinking about growth. Spiritual growth. This might strike you as a totally normal and innocuous topic, or it might trigger a deep-seated religious trauma. No churchy phrase is safe! They have almost all been weaponized at one time or another.
I’ll explain my own hangups (and apprehensions) about spiritual growth.
This was a real preoccupation, even a fixation, in the evangelical Christianity I once practiced. It was very common to ask someone, “How is your walk?” which was another to say, “How’s your relationship with God?” which was another way to say: “Are you growing in your faith?”
What this growth actually meant was very rarely defined, at least not consistently. Over the course of my evangelical years my mind used quite a few separate metrics to “measure” my spiritual growth:
I will know I am growing if and when…
I am doing fewer sinful things
I am thinking fewer sinful thoughts
I am saying fewer sinful sentences
(As you can tell, we were often concerned with what we were growing out of; as you can imagine, this involved a lot of shame and beating ourselves up.)
Or we framed things positively instead of negatively. I will know I am growing if and when…
I am praying more often
I am reading my Bible more often
I am sharing the gospel with non-believers more often
While I think it’s probably better to concern ourselves with doing good things rather than not doing bad things, this was still such a pressure-heavy way to think about growth. I had to constantly monitor my own behavior and—wouldn’t you know it!—there was my old friend shame when I wasn’t meeting the arbitrary benchmarks for these activities.
Now, I don’t want it to sound like there are only terrible visions of growth everywhere you look in the evangelical world. I always enjoyed framings that accounted for both the loving work of God and the effort of the person. Some of these frameworks were based on “the fruit of the Spirit” from the letter to the Galatians.
In this kind of framework, I will know I am growing if and when…
God (with my cooperation) is producing patience in my life
God (with my cooperation) is producing kindness in my life
etc.
Again, I think this is an improvement on the first two unhealthy models. But the use of this framework was still problematic, in my experience. I was still evaluating my own behavior: how much patience am I exhibiting? Is it more, less, or about the same as the amount of patience I showed last month? (This sounds like satire, but a missions organization I worked for literally asked us to rank how much fruit of the Spirit our various colleagues exhibited.)
And yet, themes like spiritual growth and transformation are a great example, in my opinion, of not throwing out the baby with the bathwater. It’s such a rich and helpful topic. The idea that we can change, that we can become more loving, that we can be more generous—what an exciting thought!
The key, I think, is to identify the type of changes we’d like to see in ourselves without creating around it a system of performance, measurement, and shame.
I think perhaps Jesus’ words can help us here.
This is what the beloved community of God is like. A farmer scatters seed on the ground. Night and day, whether they sleep or get up, the seed sprouts and grows, though the farmer does not know how. All by itself the soil produces grain—first the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head. As soon as the grain is ripe, they put the sickle to it, because the harvest has come.
Mark 4:26-29
Think about the growth of a plant. We have a role to play: put the seed in soil, make sure it is positioned for sunlight, and water it. But the actual work of growth—and the timeline on which it will happen—is pretty much a mystery. We can delight in it, we can tinker with it if that brings us joy, but we do not need to obsess over it. We do not need to meet benchmarks or feel shame. We just participate and let it happen. (And if something goes wrong and the plant dies, we can get a new seed packet and plant in new soil.)
I hope you’ll consider joining us this month at Harbor as we think about the types of growth we hope to see in ourselves—as we participate in watering the seeds of presence, resilience, and flourishing.
