Read about the balance between self-awareness and community awareness. 

Knowing our place in God’s eyes helps us to now our place everywhere else.

Another highly important and influential book in Spiritual Formation.  Hagberg and Guelich deal with the developmental process of growth into the life of the Spirit.  Spiritual Growth passes through five stages–Stage 1 “The Recognition of God”,  where we are drawn to God by a sense of our helplessness an awe,  Stage 2″The life of discipleship,” where we learn the basic skills and disciplines of the faith and form a connection with a particular place in Stage 3  “The Productive life,” Where we focus on putting our knowledge to use.  Stage 4  “The Journey Inward” where we pass through a period of disillusionment and renewal into a more personal relationship with God,  Stage 5  “The journey Outward” where we have learned to walk daily with a newfound grace and confidence and become more productive than ever before,  and Stage 6, “the life of Love”  Where love of Christ and others truly becomes the motivation for all we do.

In addition to the book, Janet Hagberg has a website that offers materials for self-evaluation to help you determine where you are in these stage.

What can we say about this wonderful book?  Trevor Hudson sees the central issue for believers is to both know and feel that we are God’s beloved children.  Our Spiritual identity does not come from what we think of ourselves but from what God thinks of us.  Each chapter includes spiritual practices, called “holy experiments” to strengthen our acceptance of God’s love for us and our love for God.  Hudson’s gentle,  winsome style goes a long way to help us see ourselves as truly God’s beloved.

Demarest provides another pattern for Spiritual formation and growth, which is very simple–Initial orientation,  Painful disorientation and Joyful reorientation.  What makes Demarest’s book helpful is his appendix “Spiritual Journey Paradigms, classical and contemporary”  comparing several paradigms of spiritual growth.   

This is a series of messages based around the “Psalms of Degrees”—psalms  120-134.  These psalms were arranged to tell the story of Israel’s return from Exile.  They may also be interpreted as a map of the pilgrimage of their own life, from worldliness and separation to intimacy with God.  This trip involves five stages  Seeker,  Servant,  Settler, Sufferer, and Saint.

Foster’s book will do more than make you think. It is a book of seven metaphors that help us grasp the changed in our lives that lead us to Spiritual Formation. He explores them as they appear in the writings of great saints throughout history. These metaphors are the ordering of life around love,  Life as a journey to God,  The recovery of Knowledge about God,  intimacy with Christ,  experience with God,  Actions and experience, and growth in grace and knowledge.   This is deep stuff, but Foster makes it accessible, His connecting th4se pathways to a variety of people through church history makes it a particularly satisfying read.