01.22.08

spiritual “fathering” and church leavers

Posted in community, ekklesia, formation, leadership at 6:00 am by len

Way back in 2005 Paul Fromont wrote,

“Generally I’m not at all comfortable that contemporary Western Protestant churches take responsibility for “spiritually “fathering” or “mothering” (i.e. nurturing, mentoring, growing, and maturing) followers of Jesus. Reflect for a moment on this question, “how widespread is the practice spiritual direction and mentoring within local church congregations?” In my experience it isn’t particularly widespread despite the popularity, more generally, of “spiritual direction” beyond the fringes of church. Most of us have to seek spiritual directors and direction outside of our local church contexts. In fact, given the blank looks and the spoken misconceptions I wonder how many in our Protestant congregations even know what Spiritual Direction actually is and what it’s helping to do in terms of discipleship?

“So, my sense continues to be that churches generally aren’t very good as “spiritually fathering.” They’re not all that good at nourishing, accompanying, encouraging, and resourcing growth and increasing levels of Christian maturity. I do believe that this inability is ‘forcing’ people to leave churches when they outgrow inflexible church structures and practices and unsympathetic and unhelpful leaders and congregations. At this point I’m mindful too of Alan Jamieson’s statistics which indicate that a large number of the so-called “de-churched” had been long terms members and “hands on” leaders in churches. These “leavers” aren’t loosely connected “fly-by-nighters” to the Christian faith.”

Paul points back to the essay by Andrew Pritchard that generated this reflection. Essentially Andrew is reflecting through the lens of Fowler’s stages of growth as he thinks about church leavers. Some of us did outgrow the nest; but leaving wasn’t a solution per se…

The larger issue of formation and spiritual growth remains. Some of us are discussing missional orders as a way to address the issue. We “protestants” probably need to be looking at other models including spiritual direction. But I agree.. we don’t “do fathering” very well, and in part his is because the system itself became rational more than relational and involved authority in offices rather than connecting it to wisdom. Where do we go from here?

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