For the past 11 years, July for me means a tour to Queensland with first year students from Youthworks College.
As in previous years, a team of teaching faculty and support staff set up a temporary campus of the College in Hervey Bay to present an intensive subject called, 'The Personal Life of Those in Ministry'. Being one of the units in the Australian College of Theology Diploma program, one of the aims of the unit is "to encourage candidates to pursue spiritual growth and integrity".
How do you make people grow? That's the business of ministry training colleges like Youthworks - we're not just places of learning, or even just places for training, but places where people can grow. We're a 'seminary' in the literal sense of that word.
Personal growth is also the work of ministry in general, and children's and youth ministry in particular. Our hope and prayer is for children and young people to grow into mature adults, mature disciples of Jesus ready and willing to take their part in the mission of God.
So, how do we make people grow?
The 'tour' experience for Youthworks College students has a number of critical elements: the course content covers understanding Christian spirituality, discovering personality type, investigating spiritual disciplines and ministry challenges, and reading Life Together, Dietrich Bonhoeffer's classic text on Christian community.
But it's not the content that makes people grow.
All that content is set within a context of intentional short term community: starting and ending each day with morning and evening prayer, an hour of time alone each day, two nights camping (with cold showers and no mobile phone reception), and sharing meals and recreation time together in between formal teaching times and discussion.
Yet it's not the context that makes people grow either.
It is God who grows his people. It is Christ who builds his church. It is the work of the Spirit to change us from one degree of glory to the next to be like Jesus.
But what role do we have in the process?
Two errors
In my experience, our approach to spiritual transformation falls into one of two errors.
1. We can make spirituality into the pursuit of the right technique. If we can master the right disciplines (whether it's a skill in centring prayer or memorising the psalms) or if we establish the right habits (whether it's a weekly fast or a daily quiet time) we will bring about the transformation we desire. Doing this we fall for the Galatian foolishness that, having begun with the Spirit, we now try to reach our goal through human effort (Galatians 3:3).
2. The other option heads in a more promising direction by recognising that Christian spirituality has to be more about the gracious work of the Holy Spirit in and for us rather than our work to change ourselves. Most likely this is the more prevalent understanding within our conservative evangelicalism. Yet despite our commitment to good theology and right ideas, our lives can often fall far short of the transformation into godliness that the Scriptures call us to. We can fall into the trap of being puffed up with knowledge with no corresponding increase in love (1 Corinthians 8:1). Good ideas left unpracticed, just as much as human action without grace, can have the appearance of wisdom but leave us unchanged.
The answer
The answer is not a balance of the two (one thought about grace for every legalistic action). Rather, we need to recognise the human actions that keep God and his grace at the centre of our life and identity.
Tim Chester (You Can Change, IVP, 2008) calls those actions 'means of grace'; those traditional practices of the church that strengthen faith and repentance ; Adele Calhoun (The Spiritual Disciplines Handbook, IVP, 2005) calls them 'spiritual disciplines'; practices that free us to engage more intentionally with God's work of grace. Paul refers in summary to the human tasks of 'planting and watering' that are given to Christian leaders so that God might make things grow (1 Cor 3:6-7).
As far as I can tell, here are three different ways of referring to human actions that will keep God and his grace at the centre of our life and identity so that we might experience his work of making us grow.
At Youthworks College our desire and prayer is to see every student grow into the likeness of Christ. Our desire for every child and young person in our churches is the same. As we pray for God to do his work in his people, are there practices of planting and watering that have been particularly helpful in seeing people grow?
