Spiritual Formation (6)
If you had a free hand to run a church with no boundaries, how would spiritual formation look like at its best integrated form?
If I had a free hand to run a church with no boundaries, spiritual formation would take place in small communities of believers. However, I must quality this with my strong reservation regarding the contemporary cell group movement which tends to mechanise church life and regulate communal involvement for the express purpose of numerical growth in the church - this goes entirely against my most basic idea for the being of the church itself.
I like the name given by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Kuala Lumpur to these small communities – basic ecclesial communities (BEC), although I do not know enough about this structure to discern if it is entirely coherent with my idea of spiritual formation.
In my understanding, each small community should have a spiritual formator within it to regulate the common life of the said community. This spiritual formator has to be someone wise in understanding life and faith, not necessarily someone who has had formal credentials or theological degrees, but someone who possesses deep spiritual wisdom. He/She becomes the guide for every life within the said small community.
The believers within each community, with the guidance of this spiritual formator, share in a common life. They spend time with one another daily, redefine the boundaries of their families and their private space, share a common commitment to Kingdom life, and together seek to deepen their understanding and praxis of the perichoretic life of the Triune God with one another.
Within these communities, each individual embraces the values of simplicity, obedience and purity. As communities of faith, they together share in the values of relationality, mutuality, grace, offering, and missionality. All these values are tied in with the principle of sacramentality and are to be defined theologically. Whilst these values may sound abstract, the outworking of these values must be concretely observable in the common life of each community.
Comments (3)
I wonder how my CG agenda should be like. My cg's agenda has 2 Es (Evangelism and Edification). So, taken from your perspective, it sounds like we should have 2 more agendas 'Being godly and sharing needs'. If no. is not important, how do you express ur intentional to win more non Christian to Christ with the increased of godless nations (1 Cor 9)??. For me, I can't help to see godlessness in this world, and I always encouraged cg to have targets at least to push themselves to have intentional purpose to touch the more non Christians and win them through persuasions + love!! Finally, last question, how would you package your CG agenda then if you were to run a training on cg.? At the moment, our cg derived from FCBC model and so, the agenda is 2 Es (evangelism and edification). Perhaps we may need to think to do some repackaging on our cg agendas.
Posted by CK Lee | August 7, 2007 10:21 AM
one yah, in addition to above, to achieve 2 Es, we need to do 5 Ws (Warm up, Worship, Word, Works, Wallup(food time)). So, how would you construct your activities in cg then from your perspective ???
Posted by CK Lee | August 7, 2007 10:23 AM
Hi CK,
I used to be an ardent follower of FCBC's cellgroup structure, thinking that it would propel my church towards the numerical growth that enables people to "get saved". Now, I see it as nothing more than a mechanism for that very purpose that I no longer personally endorse.
How should a "cell group" look like to me? It should be a small little community of people being together daily, eating together, sharing in the common life, and sharing in all their possessions. Beyond all our evangelistic efforts, I think our Gospel message speaks the loudest when we can live together in such a manner.
But if we were to live together in such a way, it wouldn't look quite like the thing we call the "cellgroup" today, would it?
Posted by sk | August 7, 2007 11:11 AM