My Weekend

For me, this past weekend largely entailed spending nearly 16 hours of sitting in a room with about 20 other people. Doesn't sound all that exciting, I know, but the 20 of us are taking a Spiritual Formation Class through the School of Church Leadership. Today I am processing what I heard and what I learned, and thought I would share some of it with you.

• To start with, here is the definition of what spiritual formation is from a book we are reading together: A process of being conformed to the image of Christ for the sake of others.
  • It's a process!
  • The idea that it was for the sake of others is the most interesting/challenging thing about this definition for me
• Control was a consistent theme for me. It came up multiple times in conversations with people in the week leading up to the class, and then we hit it pretty hard right at the beginning of the class. Here are a couple lines from my notes:
  • Our view of discipleship is primarily striving instead of surrender. Another way of saying this is that our view of discipleship puts us in a position to act rather than in a position to be acted upon by God. 
    
  • Too many people believe rightly and live wrongly, but most of the tools and descriptions we have give us control rather than grant God further control

Those are just a couple of the highlights. We talked about a lot of other things, but for me everything seemed to build off of these two ideas.