Please read this introduction completely before moving through the other links to insure you understand our aims, how we intend to achieve them, and how we intend to help you achieve them.
On this site we are presently considering the issues involved in locating reliable information about Christian spiritual formation and from those reliable sources we are then attempting to create a penetrating analysis of its nature. We are also very concerned with living what we learn “out,” so to speak, through our own lives and, when appropriate, offering spiritual guidance to people who have already become followers of Jesus Christ and are interested.
It would be foolish to think we can come to such a project completely without any bias of any kind, but we do want to be as fair as we can and keep an eye on our assumptions and tendencies because from these starting points come nearly everything else. Ideas matter—especially the underlying assumptions.
We believe this sort task initially involves asking the right sort of theological, philosophical and hermeneutical questions in order to grasp what God intended for His people. However, asking the right questions is easier said than done. Further we want to organize what we find in a way is easy to access and understand at one level, but also provide opportunities for digging deeper.
In short, our aim is to produce a thinking person’s collection of resources to help discern the general topography and many of the details in the landscape of spiritual formation in the orthodox Christian faith. So in this introduction we will list what we consider to be a family of related “correct” questions to ask to get to the bottom of things and then in other parts of our site offer resources to develop answers for those questions.
The process we are identifying starts in two sections, listed below and then further explored within the tabs listed above--at the top of the page. In order to make this easy for you, we will name and provide links to those two areas of questions we wish to pursue (below):
1) What are the foundational and procedural questions that need to be considered?
With these large areas of interest in mind we begin our journey to put together resources for you so that you can better locate yourself on your journey and further serve the body of Christ’s followers by providing lucid and useful guidance.
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What is currently published is Phase I of an envisioned 3 phases of development. Phase 2 will be a review and upgrade of the entire site so as to include as many additional relevant resources as we can locate and make available to you. We will specifically explore the relationship between OT spiritual formation practices and NT spiritual formation practices. We will also provide resources for exploring contemporary ethical analysis in order to develop our own critical analysis of it and to consider what we can learn from it.
In Phase 3 we will prepare substantial resources to review Christian formation traditions within the church beginning in the classic period up to contemporary times. We are involved in a two year project of reviewing the literature and designing ways for our site to make this easily accessible.