spiritual formation on Building

Da Vinci painted one Mona Lisa. Beethoven composed one Fifth Symphony. And God made one version of you. He custom designed you for a one-of-a-kind assignment. Mine like a gold digger the unique-to-you...

I’ve often shared the story of my first experience of solitude and silence at the beginning of 1990. It was led by one of my mentors, Wayne Anderson, as part of a class I was taking at Fuller Seminary...

Over the years, I have led hundreds of retreats that have at their center a few hours to be alone and quiet in listening prayer. At one such retreat, one participant shared a conversation she had wit...

In his highly insightful work, Inside Job , Stephen W. Smith provides an important analogy about the importance of spiritually preparing ourselves for the adversity and challenges that come with su...

[Speaking about art] As you climb the stairs of quality, you’ll meet individual works that you’ll need for the rest of your life, works that will thrill you, energize you, lift your soul, soothe you, ...

We are being shaped into either the wholeness of the image of Christ or a horrible destructive caricature of that image—destructive not only to ourselves but also to others, for we inflict our brokenn...

The difference between forming ourselves and being formed is the vital issue of control.

Technology is a brilliant, praiseworthy expression of human creativity and cultivation of the world. But it is at best neutral in actually forming human beings who can create and cultivate as we were ...

That Christ be formed within you,” is the eternal watchword of Christian spiritual formation (Galatians 4:19, PAR).

In their excellent book, Invitation to a Journey , M. Robert Mulholland and Ruth Haley Barton describe the foundation of life as being spiritual in nature. This means we are constantly be “form...

In their excellent book Invitation to a Journey, M. Robert Mulholland and Ruth Haley Barton describe the Biblical understanding of the process of spiritual formation over and against the “self-help” p...

Christian character is not an act but a process, not a sudden creation but a development. It grows and bears fruit like a tree; it requires patient care and unwearied cultivation.

In a fundamental sense, worship language, like all of worship, is formative. The words we hear, sing, and speak in worship help form our images of God; our understanding of what the church is and does...

Spiritual formation is, in practice, the way of rest for the weary and overloaded, of (Matthew 11:28-30), of cleaning the inside of the cup and the dish (Matthew 23:26), of the good tree that cannot b...

When I think of masterpieces, I think of art. But what is art? I like the way that Thomas Hoving, who was the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, put it: “Art happens when anyon...

Gracious God, in six days you created all things. On the seventh day you finished your work by resting. You also blessed and hallowed the seventh day, setting it aside as a day of rest. Teach me, Lord...

Why is it that countless American school-children memorize the Gettysburg Address each year? Is it a simple civics lesson? An opportunity to learn about the Civil War, a turning point in American hist...

The process of spiritual formation in Christ is one of progressively replacing . . . destructive images and ideas with the images and ideas that filled the mind of Jesus himself.

By failing to come to grips with how cultural dysfunctions deeply impact the health of the church, our leaders will continue to fail to discern an essential reality concerning the nature of change: Cu...

It takes at least three years to for a grape vine to begin producing fruit. The planting site must be carefully chosen, the vine planted at just the right depth and at just the right time of year, the...

Ancient lighting took  Work I remember watching a movie (I think it was The Mummy ) where the protagonists descended into an underground structure built by the ancients. The structure was completel...

We can “know” something to be true, and then find it is not true after all. I recall confidently assertive to a student that, of course, the name of the region Perea (to the east of the Dead Sea) appe...

Here is the heart of the paradox: Technology is a brilliant, praiseworthy expression of human creativity and cultivation of the world. But it is at best neutral in actually forming human beings who ca...

Sabbath is not primarily about us or how it benefits us; it is about God, and how God forms us. It is not, in the first place, about what we do or don’t do; it is about God – completing and resting an...

Quod vitae sectabor iter. Translation: Who do I want to be? And: What path will I take?

My transition into my 40’s came with the obligatory hip surgery. The only way to stop the cycle of hip pain was to literally carve out some bone. Those parts had to be removed. But recovering my funct...

I want to suggest a pretty radical idea about what family is for. Family is about the forming of persons. Being a person is a gift, like life itself—we are born as human beings made in the image of Go...

Spiritual formation has become one of the major movements of the late twentieth century. Spiritualities of all varieties have emerged on the landscape of our culture—Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, Zen, vari...

Henri Nouwen once directed my attention to a lovely picture hanging in his apartment and said simply, “That is lectio divina .” The painting depicted a woman with an open Bible in her lap, but her g...

A Friend's Question: How Do I Go Deeper? I was having coffee with a good friend, which everyone knows is the best place for conversation, when he blurted out the question: “How do I go deeper ...