We Have An Obligation To Spiritual Maturity

Moving beyond an individual spirituality

I recently read a newsletter from Alan Noble on his

You Are Not Your Own Substack

about the consequences we reap when we have a drought of mentors in the life of the church. What he observed in that article is something I have personally felt and noticed as well and I am slowly taking steps toward figuring out a way to help this very need.

But this issue of a mentor drought gets at something else I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. It boils down to this: growing in spiritual maturity is an obligation we owe each other.

Failure to Launch

Noble says as much himself when he writes:

We must each pursue wisdom ardently, ruthlessly, passionately. Just as you cannot be charitable if you have no wealth to share, you cannot be a wise counselor if you have no wisdom. Be in prayer and in the Word. Read up on current events. Know the times. Redeem the time for the days are evil. Study and apply yourself. Seek mentorship from someone older and wiser than yourself.

There is a tendency for us to get stuck in spiritual adolescence, and our digital habitats encourage as much. We’re so distracted and overstimulated by what Ross Inman calls “visual noise” that we ignore our inner world, which leads to ignoring God, and produces a spiritual “failure to launch.” Inman writes about this:

We are so busy gazing outward at all there is to see and take in that we never really stop to gaze inward and examine who we truly are and who we are becoming. If the visual noise and lightning pace of our lives squeeze out any time and space for self-examination, we will gradually lose the once-cherished prize of self-knowledge, the ability to accurately know ourselves and our proper place in relation to God and others.

The mentorship drought that Noble writes about is a symptom of a larger wisdom drought that has been brought on by the one-two punch of Boomers largely focusing on growth over discipleship and younger generations losing their inner worlds in the algorithmic distortion zone of the internet. But that doesn’t mean that the demand for wisdom has dried up. Personal mentors have been replaced with online gurus of both the redpill and progressive-therapeutic sort.

This brings me back to my initial statement: growing in spiritual maturity is an obligation we owe each other.

There is a growth mindset that is inherent in Christianity because it is a forward-looking faith. In Christ, we look forward to the new creation, when all will be made right. We are called to grow in virtue. We’re marked by the virtue of hope, which is a forward-looking virtue. We believe in progressive sanctification and that we are being transformed from one degree of glory to the next. As Christians, we believe that growth is baked into the pie. That the way things are today—the way I am today—is not the way things will always be.

Beyond Individual Spirituality

We’ve spent the last few decades couching the language of sanctification and spiritual formation in individualistic terms. It’s about one’s personal spiritual journey. It’s about the individual finding meaning, freedom, peace, healing, and wholeness. Even the way we talk about community is about individuals finding a place where they feel like they belong. But none of these speak to the obligations that we have to one another as Christians.

This is one of the reasons that the local church is so important. The local church—at its best—de-centers the individual and places them in the wider context of the community. In that community, there are people who are more mature than them and people who are less. There are people with wildly different life experiences and surprisingly similar life circumstances. There is someone who can speak into almost every situation in life. The church is a well of communal wisdom that everyone contributes to and everyone can draw from.

But the supply of wisdom in the church is threatened when the spiritually adolescent don’t intend to grow and organize their life to do so. There are fewer and fewer people who are able to bear the burdens of the weak which weakens the whole body. As Paul writes in Romans 15:1-2, “We who are strong ought to bear with the failings of the weak and not to please ourselves. Each of us should please our neighbors for their good, to build them up.” If those who are now weak have no intention to grow in strength, who will bear the burdens of others? Who will be able to bear their burdens?

This is Paul’s vision of the Church. He writes again in Ephesians 4:15-16, “Speaking the truth in love, let us grow in every way into him who is the head—Christ. From him the whole body, fitted and knit together by every supporting ligament, promotes the growth of the body for building itself up in love by the proper working of each individual part.”

There is a growing up in truth and love that is expected of every believer. And this maturation process isn’t simply for the individual; it’s part of the growth and strength of the whole body that is “building itself up in love by the proper working of each individual part.” Each individual member has a role in building up the body.

The only way to end the mentorship drought is to let the rivers of wisdom flow in the church again. But the only way that can happen is if each and every member, as they are able, have a vision and intention of growing up in Christ—growing in wisdom, love, and truth—and organizing their life to do so.

As a friend told me, wisdom is experience well-reflected. But how can we reflect well on our experience if we’re consumed by the visual noise that vies for our attention and extinguishes our inner world? We must alter our habits, not just for our good, but for the good of everyone around us. We owe it to each other to grow beyond our spiritual adolescence and into spiritual maturity. Because there will be seasons when I am weak and there will be seasons when you are weak. And when those seasons come, we must be ready and able to bear one another’s burdens with wisdom, love, truth, and grace.

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I’ve written a book about deconstruction. It’s called Walking Through Deconstruction: How To Be A Companion In A Crisis Of Faith. It’s deeply personal, but it’s not a memoir. It’s an attempt to serve the church; to help the church understand what deconstruction is, what causes it, and how to walk with people who are experiencing it.