Meeting of 25 October: Rev Jan Crombie
‘Faith Formation and Community’
On matters of faith Jan said ‘Our own life our own experience is as valid as any other input’. True to this belief she then took us through a number of activities intended to help us reflect on key aspects of our lived experience. Only in the light provided by this reflection on practice was she prepared to move on to explore the tidy theories of others.
We were first invited to share some of the family taboos that we had beenbrought up with in childhood – don’t chew gum in public don’t swear‘mixed’ marriages are bad and the like. Then we were asked to recall an experience that had affirmed our sense of meaning in life – seeing a rainbow hearing of gross social injustice the recovery of a very ill relative etc. Finally we wrote (in note form of course) five ‘chapters’ of our life’s story with a focus on our beliefs at each stage. What was our sense of ‘the other’ at each stage? What kind of God if any did weimagine?
Jan then spoke briefly of her approach to widening the faith community in the parishes that she had led: She tried to connect the Christian services and festivals to the people’s own life experiences including rites of passage like baptism marriage and funerals. In her work she had been helped by her study of a number of writers on faith development. The one she was most influenced by – her guru – was James Fowler a follower of Piaget Erikson and Kohlberg who identified seven ‘stages’ of faith or spiritual development. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fowler’s_stages_of_faith_development andStages of Faith: The Psychology of Development and the Quest for Meaning.)
Members naturally tried to decide which stage they were at and became rather judgemental about the stages at which various religious institutions seemed to have come to rest.
After discussion amongst those present Jan spoke of the Exploring Faith groups that were operating in the Grovely Parish. In these it is assumed that faith development is a life-long transformational process and that the faith community plays a crucial role. Jan said ‘We try to create an experience of Christian community in everything we do as a basis for faith development.’