Reimagining Spiritual Formation: A Week in the Life of an Experimental Church
Will we do the hard and costly work of hand-crafting faith in our day, or will we be content living off the antiques of previous generations and fill in with cheap imitations of our own to "freshen up" the old stuff? Are we willing to become artisans of new expressions of faith so that our grandchildren will see as their legacy the quality that came before them, so they will be stirred thereby to craft newer, more beautiful, more meaningful expressions in their own day? This book is primarily about one community and the practices of spiritual formation in it. But the creativity required to live an imaginative, experimental faith is not limited to what we do during our worship gatherings or Wednesday night dinners. Central to the types of spiritual formation discussed in this book is the need for us—not only our Solomon’s Porch community but the church as a whole—to become theological communities.  The work of theology must happen in full community. Of course it must include the ideas of those who have come before us, but to simply accept the work of our forebears in the faith as the end of the conversation is to outsource the real work of thinking, and that turns theology into a stagnant philosophy rather than an active pursuit of how we are to live God’s story in our time. The communities that are best equipped for the task of spiritual formation in the post-industrial age are those who make the practice of theology an essential element of their lives together. This is in no way a call to be less theological, but a call to our communities to be more involved in the work of theology as a necessary part of the spiritual formation process.  Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the task of both the new convert to Christianity and the experienced Christian was understood as not only believing the things of Christianity, but also as contextualizing, creating, articulating, and living the expressions of faith in their world? Page 159