• Spiritual maturity
    Spiritual Maturity

    Spiritual Maturity: An Attempt at Definition

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    Spiritual maturity is impossible to measure. I know. I have tried. When I worked for a small Christian liberal arts university, we wanted to test whether our students gained anything from all the spiritual formation groups, Bible courses, and chapels. I heard other Christian schools were trying to develop similar rubrics, but I never heard of a particularly successful measure. Measuring spiritual maturity is not like measuring knowledge. You can’t simply pass a test or write a paper.  In fact, a fair amount of disagreement exists about spiritual maturity. I think one might need to possess some to recognize it,…

  • connection - Discernment - Featured - mindful - mindfulness - Practice - senses - spiritual discernment

    Mindfulness and Discernment: Make the Connection

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    Hannah Whitall Smith, a Quaker from the mid nineteenth century, once said, “Mind the checks.”  I respect this advice deeply, mainly as a result of not minding the checks.  I once took a personality test that was supposed to determine who in the Bible my personality was most like.  Unlike the phony Facebook tests that determine which Disney princess you should have as your maid of honor, this test based itself on the Meyers Briggs personality test.  How exactly its authors determined the results for the men and women in the Bible, I do not know.  However, my test resulted in…