Last night at Leaders Fellowship at Cityview we explored "Stages in the Life of Faith."  This presentation was drawn primarily from two sources:  Emotionally Healthy Spirituality by Peter Scazzero, and The Critical Journey by Janet O. Hagberg and Robert A. Guelich.  Both Scazzero and Hagberg apply six stages of faith and The Wall to understanding the Christian journey.  I have found this wisdom to be helpful to myself in understanding a period of distress and darkness that converged on me about 3-4 years ago.  As well I am beginning to recognize these patterns in the faith stories of some of my close friends.

Journey is a helpful metaphor for the Christian life.  The first reference for the metaphor is found in Genesis 12.  When God calls Abraham to a life of jouney with Him.  "Leave your country, your people and your father’s household and go to the land I will show you."  (Genesis 12:1)  Through the Scripture we find people on Journey.  In fact John the elder describes the Christian life as such when he writes, "Whoever claims to live in him must walk as Jesus did."  Other Christian’s who have written about these Christian journey and stages are Augustine, Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, Ignatius of Loyola, Evelyn Underhill, and John Wesley.  Perhaps the most famous journey allegory in Western Literature is John Bunyan’s, Pilgrim’s progress.  Here is a brief description of the stages of the Christian journey:

Stage 1:  A Spiritual Awakening; a life-changing awareness of God.  Beginning our journey with Christ.  A realization of our need for God and His mercy.  A beginning of a relationship with Him.

Stage 2:  Discipleship; learning about God and what it means to be a follower of Christ.  Becoming connected with Christian community and becoming rooted in the disciplines of the faith.

Stage 3:  Serving–The Active Life; the "doing" stage.  Becoming involved and actively working for God; serving God and His people.  Taking on responsibilities; discovery unique talents and gifts for service to Christ and people.

Stage 4:  The Wall and the Journey Inward;  the wall and the journey inward are often closely related.  The wall is sometimes drawn on either side of Stage 4.  It is important to recognize that God brings us to the wall to accomplish his purposes.   We may experience the wall as a crisis of faith, as a period of intense darkness, a period of failure, the thought that our "faith is not working," a period of doubt, an inability to fix a situation or ourselves.  The inward journey requires that we "let go and let God;" that we wait on God; that we accept God’s purpose of our lives in order to offer His love from our lives.  The inward journey is a movement of self-acceptance and Christ-centeredness.
Those who go through the wall and continued the inward journey are willing to commit to whatever it takes to be surrendered to God completely.  "We are willing to let God use us in ways God chooses rather than ways we choose.  We become clay in the Potter’s hands."

Stage 5–The Journey Outward; a renewal of "doing."  But this time the doing is flowing from an inward grounding in Christ and His acceptance, a dependence on His power and Spirit, and a growing freedom from the false motives of pride, avarice, luxury, wrath, gluttony, envy, and sloth (These 7 imperfections were explained by St. John of the Cross).

Stage 6–The continued journey of being transformed by love and being loving.  It is the recognition that God keeps seeking to conform us to the image of His Son, to be a loving person fully embraced and occupied by the love of God.  With John we could say God’s love has completed us by driving out fear (1 John 4:18).  This stage is marked by surrender and obedience to God’s perfect will.
The stages are accompanied by the temptation to remain at each one, especially the first 4, or even to get stuck there because of shame, pain, and a refusal to face the wall.  This is helpful wisdom to me, because pastoral ministry is sometimes accompanied by the temptation to "make people’s pain go away."  But pastoral ministry is often about accompaning people to the Wall, helping them see Christ’s invitation to go through the pain and darkness, and encouraging them to wait on Him for healing, for understanding and englightenment.

I find that these stages have implications for our spiritual disipleship patterns in community life and even our poverty of genuine worship.  I encourage you to first get a taste for the stages in Scazzero’s book, which I have found to be a great read and extremely helpful for pursing maturity in Christ, and then to explore the stages further in The Critical Journey by Janet Hagberg and Robert Guelich.