What are the three greatest needs of your church? How relevant is spiritual formation in addressing these needs?

In my observation, the three greatest needs of my church are as follows:

i) cultivating followers of Jesus who understand the message of the Kingdom and who are adamantly desiring to embody that message in their lives;

ii) cultivating a theological understanding of the church as a “Kingdomic community” and actively attempting to express this idea of community in concrete ways; and

iii) cultivating leaders who see themselves as more than administrators, organisers and decision-makers; who see themselves as spiritual guides of the community.

I do not think there is any form of concrete theological reflection or a deliberate consciousness for an undertaking of any sort of spiritual formation at this point of its life journey.

Like most other Protestant churches I observe, my church is most of the time majoring on how to do church rather than seeking to understand how to be church. No doubt, it is one of the best of the Protestant churches I have ever been a part of (I mean this sincerely); but there is still much for us to learn in terms of understanding that our task is more of cultivating Christians who will be rather than Christians who will merely do. But for that to happen, we need a strong theology of the church.

In other words, I am saying that the spiritual formation of my local church is not effective in addressing the said needs. In fact, the notion of spiritual formation might not even be a part of the consciousness of the local church. It often seems like we do what we do because “these are things every good church must do”.

If we had a proper theological understanding of the nature of the church, a new consciousness would emerge, shifting our preoccupation from what we need to do to who we need to be; or in fact, who we already are.