Worship And Personal Growth In Christ

Personal growth in Christ may involve passage through a series of stages of faith, as the worshiper moves from a faith transmitted by his or her worship community, through a faith forged in the crucible of personal questioning and struggle, to a mature faith which is constantly expanding in the integration of profession and life. Along the pilgrimage of faith, appropriate rites can mark the passage from one stage to another. It is important to note, however, that these stages are also styles of faith, which may characterize the life of the worshiper throughout his or her lifetime.

For the Christian, baptism establishes Christian identity. Further, baptism is understood as a sacrament; that is, an initiation ritual in which God acts. People can oppose or resist God's action, but God's activity does not depend upon our doing. The Christian believes that at baptism inward and spiritual grace is given by Christ through the outward and visible sign of water; and people are thereby adopted into a family. Baptism celebrates a new birth, a new life, and the giving of a new name—Christian. This insertion into "?Christ's body,?" the church, creates a change intrinsic to the person's life. The individual can reject or deny the adoption and its inheritance, but that does not change the fact of who and whose that person is. Baptism is the means by which one becomes a Christian and a member of Christ's church. The Eucharist, the Lord's Supper or Holy Communion, is the sustaining rite of the Christian, the sacrament of continuing grace, the family thanksgiving meal of God and God's people. Baptism—and baptism alone—grants a person the right and privilege of participation in the Eucharist, an outward and visible sign in bread and wine of inward and spiritual grace. This Holy Communion sustains individual believers and the community in Christian faith and life. Confirmation is a sacramental act (necessary, but not essential), whereby to those who recognize and affirm who and whose they are, God grants God's Spirit to assume and perform the ministry to which all those who have been baptized are called. Faith, as understood in this context, represents the centered behaviors of persons, embodying their minds (beliefs), hearts (affections), and wills (actions) expressed through their lives in accordance with their growth or development. Faith, as such, is a verb. The activity of "?faithing?" has no age bounds, but appears to express itself in characteristic, identifiable ways at differing points in a person's faith pilgrimage. Styles and Stages of Faith Faith is a verb, a way of behaving that involves knowing, being, and willing. It is a deeply personal and dynamic act, a centered act of personality encompassing our hearts, minds, and wills, according to our growth and development. While each person's faith has its own unique characteristics, generalizations concerning the pilgrimage of faith can be described in terms of style. We do not give a child faith. A child has faith at birth. While the content of our faith is acquired through our interactions with other "?faithing?" people, a person's faith can expand, that is, become more complex. Expanded faith is not greater faith; and, therefore, one's style of faith is not to be judged. The style of our faith is not directly related to our age. That is, faith expands only if a proper environment exists. If this environment does not exist, faith ceases to expand until the proper environment is established. Faith's expansion is slow and gradual, moving systematically over time to acquire additional characteristics. It cannot be speeded up beyond its normal rate of growth nor can characteristics of its various styles be avoided or passed over. The expansion of faith into new styles does not eliminate the faith needs of previous styles of faith. Rather, as it expands, it only becomes more complex. If, therefore, the needs of early styles of faith are denied or neglected, a person will strive to meet those needs until all are satisfied. From a Christian perspective, God's grace is freely given to all. Though it is our potential to expand in faith, we do not earn anything by so doing. Indeed, the desire to expand in faith is, for Christians, only an act of gratitude for the gift given. We cannot manipulate or determine another's faith. At best, we can encourage and support it and its expansion. At worst, we can make that expansion more difficult. What is important is our own witness to faith and to the interaction of "?faithing?" persons in community. With these considerations in mind, we may describe four basic styles or stages of faith. Experienced Faith. An experienced faith identifies the faith of early childhood; perhaps it is better termed a pre-faith stage. In his or her early childhood development, a child observes and copies the behavior of parents or other role models. These role models become the foundation for a growing child's integrity of belief and action. The child acts and reacts, in relation to other significant persons; and in so doing ideally forms a basic trust which continues throughout life. The child explores and tests the limits of behavior in relationship to parents or other authorities. In these actions, we observe the roots of an openness or closed stance, which characterizes later life. Affiliative Faith. Affiliative faith is typical of childhood, though it is not restricted to those years. Indeed, vast numbers of adults express their faith essentially through this style, either because its needs have not been satisfactorily met or because they have not been provided the necessary encouragement and environment to move beyond it. Still, even as our faith expands, we never seem to outgrow the characteristic needs of this or any other style of faith. That is, the needs of every evolving developmental style remains with us for life. If we cease to meet these needs, no matter how far our faith has expanded, we will return to this style of faith until its needs are once again met. Affiliative faith has three distinctive characteristics. First and foremost, it is faith centered in the affections. It is expressed as a religion of the heart, more than of the head or will. Individuals with affiliative faith seek their identity in the authority of a community's understandings and ways. Similarly, they long for belonging participation and service in the community's life. People are dependent upon the community for the content and shape of their faith. They need to experience and image through nurture and ritual the community's understandings and ways. Through memories told and lived, roots are established; through creative expression, the affections are nurtured and visions of a purposeful future emerge; through trusting, caring, affirming, accepting interactions, self-worth and identity are framed and the present is made meaningful. These needs cannot be neglected or denied. In this stage or style of faith, a person identifies with "?our story,?" "?our way.?" The development of affiliative faith is the result of a search for conviction, the establishment of a firm set of beliefs, attitudes, and values. This is the stage of learning who, and whose, we are. The best way to understand youth's interest today in the variety of cults is that they provide a sense of community, intense religious experience, and, in a world of pluralism, a set of beliefs which claim ultimate truth. There is no specific time span, identical for all persons, to satisfy these foundational needs of faith; nor do we ever outgrow their requirements. Perhaps more than half of all those going through the social condition of adolescence live within the limited perimeters of this faith style, as do many adults. Therefore, our ritual life needs to be expressive of this style of faith and speak to its needs, not only for the sake of those persons whose faith is affiliative, but for us all, including those who have moved beyond its bounds. Providing that the needs of affiliative faith have been met satisfactorily, some time during the adolescent years a person can begin to acquire a new style of faith, that is, can begin to expand his or her faith to include new characteristics. This new faith style can be characterized as "?searching faith.?" Searching Faith. Searching faith is marked as a time when the religion of the head begins to predominate over the religion of the heart. The mind begins to search for intellectual justifications of faith. Critical judgment of the community's understandings and ways, as well as short-term multiple commitments to ideologies and actions, emerge as people strive to discover convictions worth living and dying for. That is, they learn what it means to give their lives away and live according to their convictions. Having been "?given?" an identity during the childhood years, adolescents, in searching faith, struggle to find their own identity; and in so doing, they typically experience the "?dark night of the soul.?" Often unverbalized questions—"?What is truth? Who am I? What communities are worth belonging to? What causes are worth living for??"—dominate life's joyous, troubling, liberating, confusing days and nights. Still, persons in searching faith long to belong, especially to a community which shares their concerns for passionate action, critical thought, and experimentation. While they struggle with and condemn the structural authority of the community, they long for moral, intellectual, charismatic, or personal authority. For many, these are the betwixt-and-between years, when the social conditions of adolescence that throw the individual into a state of limbo between childhood and adulthood (a period that can extend from thirteen to thirty) unite with the ordeal of searching faith with its sense of being on the periphery of the community. These are the years, when it may appear that faith is lost and the community's nurturing has failed. And these are the years, when a person appears to have matured into adulthood one day and the next to have regressed to early childhood. Difficult for both the individual and the community, these years of anxiety and storm must come before faith can assume its fullest dimensions. Mature Faith. The faith of adulthood can be called "?mature faith.?" It is not necessarily characteristic of all adults, for it appears that only those who have moved through searching faith can acquire its characteristics of centeredness and personal identity. People with mature faith are secure enough in their convictions to stand against their community of nurture when conscience dictates. Having begun as a heteronomous self and moved to autonomy, the theonomous self—the self in conscious, willed obedience to God—emerges. Still in need of community, individuals with mature faith reveal themselves to be inner-directed, open to others, but clear and secure in their own faith identity. Individuals with mature faith are concerned to eliminate the dissonances between rhetoric and life. Thus, the religion of the will, with its witness to faith in deed and word, predominates over the religion of heart or mind, although the mature faith encompasses both. Integrity of belief and action are realized. Of course, mature faith is always expanding; it is not to be understood as a state of arrival or conclusion. New depth and breadth emerge. Importantly, the needs and characteristics of earlier styles of faith continue. Doubt and the intellectual quest never end. Nor does the need to belong, the need to have the affections nurtured, or the need for a sense of authority disappear, though these needs do express themselves somewhat differently. Indeed, if these various faith needs are not met, a person who has reached mature faith will return to an earlier style of faith until its needs are once again satisfied. Thus, faith is never static. For example, to grow into searching faith, individuals need to have been given a sense of self-esteem and worth. They need to have learned to accept their strengths and weaknesses, to live in the hope that they will continue to grow, and to possess self-confidence. They need to have learned that they can meet the future. During the childhood years, people will, it is hoped, have experienced the grace of God in a sacramental community, where the authority of the Word and the conviction that Jesus is Lord is lived in the intimacy of a belonging, caring fellowship. To have a sense of oneness with God, to feel loved for nothing, to know that you are understood and valued are the gifts of a Christian community expressed through its common life and rituals. However, for many adolescents, even those brought up in the church, the experience of loneliness, self-hatred, family conflict, estrangement, insecurity, closed-mindedness, dogmatic authority, and an affection-depraved environment have made searching faith difficult to attain. In spite of their adolescent social condition, they need a community which nurtures affiliative faith. Those, however, who have begun to move into searching faith need a community of social concern and action; a community whose rituals unite head and heart with a concern for justice; a community in which critical intellectual judgment is encouraged, doubt affirmed, and experimentation permitted. In some cases, people have been forced out of the church in order to meet these needs. This is especially unfortunate, for these persons still need belonging participation in a passionate community to be secure in its story and ways. Each style of faith has its own character, but builds on characteristics of earlier styles. Thus as growth occurs, faith becomes more complex. The process is slow, gradual, and related to the presence of environments, which nurture development and growth. Life is not static. Each of us needs to be prepared for new conditions; and the communities of which we are a part need to have ways to reestablish equilibrium following each change in the life of one of its members. Further, a new generation needs to be prepared for and given an understanding of the changes that are part of individual and community life. A community's rites and rituals serve these important functions. Faith Stages and Conversion. The development of affiliative faith can be a significant religious experience, especially in the North American milieu with its heritage of conversion. Such faith may be an often intense and dramatic response—whether of older children or of adults—to the call into a new life and incorporation into a community conscious of what it believes and how it should live. Conversion in the stage of searching faith emerges in the context of questioning and doubt. Such conversions are often experienced as illuminations, resulting from new ways of "?seeing and hearing.?" These illuminations may appear dramatically, but more typically involve a gradual process of multiple experiences, both intellectual and emotional, in the supportive context of the witness of faithful worshipers. Some persons who have grown into mature faith have had the conversion experiences related to affiliative or searching faith, and some have not. All persons with mature faith have experienced one or more of the conversions characterized by the growth from searching faith to mature faith. Transition Rites There is a category of rites which is known by some as the rites of passage, transition, or life crisis. Instead of following the calendar as rites of the community do, these rites address the changes of our lives. Some correspond to biological changes, such as birth, puberty, and death; others correspond to social changes such as marriage, graduation, and retirement. Such moments of changed role or status are traumatic to both individuals and the community. Ritual aids us to make these changes purposeful; they reestablish order in the community and help others to understand the possibility and the meaning of change. Rites of transition are comprised of three states: separation, transition, and reincorporation. The rite properly begins and ends with a ceremonial or ritual. The intermediate ritual telescopes these three stages into a single ceremony. For example, the rite of marriage begins with a ceremonial, the engagement, and ends after the honeymoon. The ritual of marriage (incorporating these three stages) is the wedding ceremony, which begins with the couple separated, and continues with their coming together to announce their intentions, making a series of promises, and being pronounced husband and wife. The ritual ends as they are blessed and depart together to be integrated into the community as a married couple. In a life-crisis rite, once the separation from one's status or role is realized and before one is reincorporated into the community with a new status or role, an important period of transition occurs. It is, first of all, a period of limbo in which a person experiences a state of being betwixt-and-between, in this case, neither married nor single. Once a person's engagement is announced, old friends proceed with caution, checking out the appropriateness of old behaviors. During this period, the engaged couple experiences being set apart; that is, they are not typically invited either to the parties of married couples or to those of their old single friends. Normal interaction has been reduced and all the appropriate behaviors of the past have been suspended, while future appropriate behaviors are inappropriate. If this period of transition is too short or lacks the dynamic of an ordeal, the marriage and the role-status of wife and husband are apt to be less secure. The gift of this ordeal is an experience of community, but the most important aspect of this transition period is "?education.?" It is the time to acquire the understandings and ways of behavior (thinking, feeling, acting) appropriate to the person's new state or role. Typically, this education is informal, as in an engagement party. In the past, a woman's mother would hold a party for her daughter and other women. They would bring gifts, such as kitchen utensils, and exchange recipes. Today women sometimes get mixed signals and a confused education. That is, their friends also may hold a coed party and give an apron and recipes to the fiancée. To give one further example of a life-crisis rite, at one time the "?last rites?" functioned as a ceremony of separation. During the ordeal and liminal period between that ceremony and the funeral, the person's relatives and friends were prepared for death. The funeral, then, ritualized the person's rebirth into that new state the church believes exists for persons among the community of saints. I first became aware of these dynamics when I served a parish in New England. We could not bury people in the winter months. A tragic, unexpected death in the winter, with its winter funeral and spring burial ceremony, seemed to result in better family adjustment than was the case for those who suffered the same sort of tragic death in the spring months, when both funeral and burial were celebrated at the same time. It was then that I realized how important this liminal state could be if informal education or preparation was provided. Education is always a central aspect of transition rites. People need to be prepared for their new status and role. Such informal learning properly includes only that basic knowledge, attitudes, and skills required by their new condition. This does not mean they need to rehearse all past learning or need to learn everything they will ever need to know. Only foundational learning for life in their new state is necessary or proper. Typically informal learning during initiation takes place away from the initiate's home. It lasts as long as necessary to insure that the initiate is fully prepared for his or her new role or status. Most importantly, the educational methods used for learning are "?symbolic?" in nature. For example, through dance, boys and girls perform symbolic sexual acts. Indeed, girls and boys rehearse adult roles through games. Youth are tested on their knowledge of the community's understandings through puzzles and riddles. Through corporate living in simulated settings, songs, dances, and sacred stories, young people learn the meaning of community life. Transition rights, thus, embody an educational component, which operates best through informal, natural interactions of persons, in contrast to formal instructional programs. Each will also have its unique characteristic consistent with the cultural ways and needs of the people involved. There is a mystery to the pilgrimage of faith and life in the Christian community. It cannot be programmed or organized as to age or any other particular. And especially important is the acknowledgment that transition rites are dependent upon the faith and life of the church's confirmed members. Rites of Christian Identity Christians are made, not born. Identity and transition during faith's pilgrimage are a central issue for the church. Just as membership in the old Israel was never a matter of nature or birth (Israel was adopted by God to be God's people), membership in the new Israel is by an act of God. Baptism celebrated that fact in the early church. That is, baptism was understood as a symbolic, sacramental act, whereby God adds persons to God's eschatological community. Baptism—the same initiation rite for men and women unique in the history of religions—is the means by which a person is adopted into an existing community. Parenthetically, we would observe that in most societies there is a different initiation rite for men and women and that the male rite is considered the most significant. Within the Christian community, the picture is radically different. Both men and women share the same initiation rite—baptism. Thus, the Christian faith makes the revolutionary statement that men and women are equal and that in the eyes of God there is no male or female, Jew or Greek, adult or child, for in the church, they are all one in Christ. Regretfully, this is an essential affirmation of the Christian faith that has yet to be fully actualized in our corporate life. Baptism. Baptism is, in and of itself, the central rite of Christian initiation. It is a sacrament in which God is the chief actor. In baptism, the Christian church celebrates its conviction that God loves us for nothing (grace). Before we can make any response to God, God acts for our good through physical objects and actions. Later we can oppose or resist, but God's action does not depend on either our acceptance or worthiness. By God's action, we are incorporated into that tradition-bearing community, which proclaims its faith through word and deed. Still for this radical action of God to be realized, we need to make some response. That is why the norm for the church's initiation rite is adult baptism. However, the church historically has been concerned about the children of the faithful, nurtured within a faith community. This concern has resulted in child baptism. Communion. The Lord's Supper, the Eucharist or Holy Communion, is the sustaining rite of the Christian community. It makes real the continuing gift of God's grace celebrated at baptism. Baptism makes a person a full member of the church and is the only necessary condition for acceptance at the Lord's Table. However, it appears wise to wait until a person desires to commune and participate in this family meal. Therefore, first Communion is a decision of the child, granted after preparation by the child's parents. Confirmation. Only if the adolescent pilgrimage has been affirmed and encouraged can individuals in early adulthood be prepared for confirmation. Confirmation is perhaps best understood as a rite of Christian maturity characterized by a "?conversion?" or transformation, which is understood as enlightenment or illumination. At confirmation, people celebrate their coming to mature faith and commit themselves to Christian ministry. While the pilgrimage of faith continues, a new start has begun. For those who did not begin their pilgrimage at birth, the rites of baptism, first Communion, and confirmation can be united into a single rite of initiation following serious and lengthy (two or more years) preparation. These are just a few images of the relationship between liturgy and catechesis. Numerous problems remain, but perhaps new insight and stimulus have been provided for the church's educational ministry.