Month: January 2005

Is Spiritual Growth Measurable?

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A reader wrote me a thoughtful note in response to the post “What Constitutes Spiritual Growth?“. I started to write her an answer privately, but I thought I would instead share my answer with everyone.

Her question was the same one I asked six months ago: “How can we measure spiritual growth in people?”

This question is a profound one. I have asked many people how they measure spiritual growth and largely get blank stares and shrugs, and yet everyone agrees that it is critical. What is true discipleship if we cannot put a frame around it and how it should function? How can we teach or hope to train up people in righteousness without some defining standards? The fact that the comment section on that posting went empty was troubling to me.

Is spiritual growth measurable? Personally, I don’t believe you can measure spiritual growth like one measures IQ. Not all answers are found in pure science. A “scientific,” quantitative measure will always elude us.

Still, I believe the signs of growth are there:

1. Reproduction—I have had arguments with many Christians over this issue, but I cannot escape it. With spiritual maturity MUST come reproduction. We move from childhood to adulthood. Children do not reproduce, but adults do. We show people who do not know Christ who He is and ask them to come to Him. We teach the new in the faith so that they may grow up into adulthood, too. A parent can have a child, but part of parenting is raising that child to adulthood. So it is with the spiritually mature and the young in the Faith.

Some people are better evangelists and some are better teachers. I do not believe that one or the other is superior when it comes to reproduction. But we Christians must side on one of those two. I think a hockey analogy works here. In hockey, both the player who shoots the puck into the net and the player who passes the puck to the player who took the shot get credit for the goal. In our case, both the sower and the reaper rejoice together.

Growing Christians reproduce.

2. Fruit of the Spirit—Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Are they deepening in a person’s life as time goes on? We should be able to note this.

Stuart Briscoe of Elmbrook Church in New Berlin, WI is a prominent evangelical pastor. Briscoe once said something startling to me. He does not call anyone a Christian unless that person has demonstrably walked with the Lord for at least five years. Five years may be more than I would go, but I think it is a wise belief nonetheless for us to take care and to observe the fruits of repentance. A real conversion will “take” but a phony one will not.

Growing Christians progressively exhibit the fruit of the Spirit.

3. Gifts of the Spirit—I consider myself a charismatic, but a careful one. I think much of the modern charismatic movement has gone off the deep end. That said, I still believe that the gifts of the Spirit are an indicator of God actively working in a person’s life.

Now we know from Acts that many brand new Christians exhibited the charismata at their moment of conversion. This should not keep us from understanding that a mature Christian wields those gifts in a mature, wise way. You would not give a howitzer to a ten year old, and neither does God bestow true charismata to those who cannot handle them wisely. The Spirit of the Prophets is still subject to the prophets.

(A side note: Leonard Ravenhill, the great British revivalist, once said that a dove cannot fly without both wings. And just as a dove has nine primary flight feathers on each wing, there are nine Fruits of the Spirit and nine Gifts of the Spirit. I believe this is great wisdom and why I put both “wings” here.)

Growing Christians flow in the charismata with grace and humility.

4. Mirroring Jesus—If we know Jesus, then we know when people are becoming changed daily into His likeness. One of Jesus’ own will grow up to look like the Lord. We should be able to see that in the lives of people who are reaching maturity. He must increase as we decrease.

Growing Christians grow to resemble Jesus, their Lord.

5. Loved and Hated—People who are growing in Christ will be progressively loved by the true Church and hated by the World. This is a promise the Lord made to us. They hated Him and so they will hate us (see #4.) If we do not engender increasing opposition from the World as we live out the message of Christ, it is a sure sign that we have instead slept with it. Being a Christian costs something, and growing Christians cannot escape being hated for what they proclaim.

Likewise, the Church loves its own and recognizes its own. A person growing deep in the Lord will be loved by the saints. We Christians must also not fear being eclipsed by a younger generation if they are more vital than us in their love for Christ. Our body is not one of division, but wholeness, and we are always called to love the brethren.

Growing Christians will be loved by the Church and hated by the World.

So why do we do so poorly with this?

I believe that in large part the fault rests with leaders within the local church. I know that leaders are always an easy target, but ultimately the blame cannot go anywhere else.

We are failing in growing people to maturity largely because leaders are not actively watching their flocks. It is the responsibility of church leaders to guide the less mature. If we church leaders and are not involved in the active duty of watching to see if these five growth indicators are increasing or decreasing in our charges, then we have failed.

Deep calls to deep and the Spirit to the Spirit. Only the Spirit can discern growth in people; He is the measure of all things. But we leaders cannot do that discerning if we are not paying attention to the lives of our charges and the Spirit’s attesting to their growth (or lack of it.) It is not enough to preach a blistering sermon if we are not following up on how it affected people in their inmost Man. It is not enough to teach the Bible with authority if we do not take the time to ask the Lord to reveal the growth in the lives of our students.

With maturity comes responsibility. One of the responsibilities of the mature is to be actively involved in the spiritual growth of the less mature and to evaluate that growth against the Bible and the revelation of the Holy Spirit. If we do not do this, then we should not be shocked when so little comes of our ministry. The Church of Jesus Christ is a transformational entity charged with raising up the next generation of saints. We must know the standard and bring people to that point, drawing alongside to ensure the successful transition from childhood to adulthood in each believer. That calls for effort and discernment.

God help us all if we do not take that seriously.

Who I Am & Why Cerulean Sanctum—Part 2

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Ten days is too long between posts, especially when you are telling your life’s story.

I’m a freelance writer, so I spend quite a bit of time typing on my Mac and PC. Yeah, I know—”What a profligate! He’s got two computers.” Well, my heart bleeds Macintosh, but being rural and remote, my satellite modem requires a PC (thank you SO much Microsoft for being an investor and REQUIRING Windows-only compatibility), so there you go.

Anyhow, business has been good and the blog has suffered under that windfall and the book completion. Unfortunately, the book has suffered, too. I’m hoping for completion in time to catch the next Christian Booksellers Association convention in July. We’ll see. My final draft may not be so final!

Where was I with my life? Oh yeah…I was at camp.

After my first summer at camp, I knew campining ministry was the way for me. I felt God leading that direction, but despite being promised a full-time position after camp ended, the camp didn’t take me on, supposedly because I didn’t have a degree. By that time Fred was no longer running the place and things had changed. Oh well.

I didn’t go back to college. It didn’t fit anymore. I didn’t fit anymore. I took a job as a fitness instructor (I was pretty buff back then), but that felt miserable many days, and even though I helped some people dramatically lose weight and get fit, it still wasn’t what I felt God calling me to do.

My life changed dramatically when Apple debuted the Macintosh. I’d always been a computer freak, and this new computer blew my mind. I saw the future. Tagging along with a buddy’s dad as his tech expert, we went shopping for a Mac and I so impressed the store’s sales crew with my knowledge that they offered me a job. Within a few months I was making a small fortune selling computers. I was soon buying all the fun stuff I could lay my hands on: a car, more drum equipment, and a guitar to supplement my drumming. Heck, you can’t work in a camp and not play guitar, right?

Camp. Even though I was doing very well financially, I couldn’t get past camping. I was volunteering for a ministry into my old high school, and working with youth still tugged at my soul. I had to get back to camping.

On a retreat back to Lutheran Memorial Camp, I once again encountered my old friend Fred. He’d been asked to come talk to the youth group I was helping with and he gave another Spirit-filled message to the youth. And then something odd happened. I was chatting with some other leaders when I felt God tap me on the shoulder and say, “Turn around.” I did and I was looking at this woman in the center of the room. Fred was looking at her, too. God told me to go pray for her, and as I started to walk to her, Fred did, too. Without saying a word to each other, we started praying for this woman who needed healing. Something happened right there.

I talked with Fred about it afterwards, and he said that the Spirit of God was all over me. He could see His Presence on me. As I walked back to my cabin that night, it was almost the same night as the one when I’d accepted the Lord. It was uncanny. Same kind of night. Many of the same people. Same place.

As we were going to bed, I started talking with the youth in my cabin and I was on fire. I gave probably the best message about the Lord I’d ever shared. I could just feel Him welling up within me like no feeling I’d ever had. Something was indeed happening.

It was three in the morning when things finally peaked. I woke up and just felt electrified; I was speaking in the most beautiful language, but it was not English or any other one I recognized. I couldn’t stop speaking, so I ran outside in my longjohns into six inches of snow and just started dancing around and praying in tongues. I can remember that as if it were yesterday. The love of Jesus was just pouring over me, a mix of electricity and warm oil on my head. I could actually feel that oil cascading down around me. It was astonishing.

From that day, I entered the charismatic brotherhood. I am harsh on the charismatics here at Cerulean Sanctum because I believe they have lost all propriety and discernment, but I can say with all certainty that the warm glow that Wesley’s heart felt among the Moravians is a real blessing, no matter what some people may say or however it may be misrepresented by the less discerning. There are fillings and more fillings on top of that if we are open to being used of the Lord and believe that His Spirit still works in mighty, supernatural ways.

While some people were behind me on this new part of my journey, I had to go elsewhere to explore where I was moving. A lot of folks had no idea what I was talking about after my experience. I gracefully left the Lutheran Church and started attending an Assemblies of God church that was pastored by my neighbor. It was a bit of a drive, but I found nourishment there and another way of thinking about the Christian life.

Let me say this here for people who are searching. I do not advocate jumping ship with churches. But I also believe that young people raised in one denomination need to explore others, if only to see a wider flavor of Christianity. The river is wide and we sometimes stay too close to our own tributary. I like to believe that one of the reasons I have been able to walk with the Lord as long as I have is that I was able to take the best parts of the denominations I have been affiliated with over the years as I moved from place to place and forge those best ideas into a stronger theology. I’m a mongrel in the faith, and if you talk with any dog breeder, you know that mongrels have far fewer genetic weaknesses than do purebreds.

Now a person of forty still dallying with different denominations is in for trouble, but young people need to see something other than what they grew up with. Later in life I finished college at Wheaton College, and I was always struck by how timid the young people at the school were in their willingness to consider the strengths of other denominations and the weaknesses of their own. (Trying to get a Presbyterian student at Wheaton to darken the doorway of an Episcopal church for even one Sunday was like pulling teeth.) Not me. I took advantage of being in “The City of Churches” to see what other churches were doing—and it did me a whale of good.

Anyway, I hear the clock chiming 1:30 AM and once again, I am turning into a pumpkin. Thanks for reading this self-revelation. I’ll try to wrap it all up —fat chance, I can promise already—in the next installment of my spiritual journey. But I have a few ideas for new “real” blog posts coming up, such as

*Living a life of abandon to God and each other.
*Will persecution be good or bad for the American Church?
*Developing a Christian worldview for the 21st century.

Keep coming back folks. I know there are more and more great blogs out there. I hope you’ll continue to consider this one one of the better ones.

Blessings!

Who I Am & Why Cerulean Sanctum—Part 1

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I wanted to start the year off right by doing a “person dump,” my way of letting you know who I am—and that I don’t truly bite despite what some may say. 😉

Some things here might puzzle people, so I also want to eventually weave into that story line the reason that Cerulean Sanctum exists. I get letters from people telling me how blessed they are to stumble across this blog and that means something as the blogosphere expands and there are more and more voices to heed. That anyone comes here at all is a blessing in itself, when I consider it.

Dan Edelen is a tall, linebacker-sized guy who inhabits thirteen acres of real farmland outside Cincinnati, Ohio. I’ve lived in Ohio for most of my life and it has always felt like home despite the longings I have to see the world. Call it a base of operations then, if you will.

I’m married to the lovely Danei and have a precocious son named Ethan. We’re trying to revert our once-farmland back into farmland, but it’s been slow going and we’ve had many diversions over the last few years. We hope to get our orchard up this spring and wine grapes in maybe next year. I like to tell people that being a farmer is always a little bit of “We’ll see….” Right now I work from home as a freelance writer, tend to my son’s education, and try to finagle this farm-living thing about as well as Eddie Albert did in Green Acres.

I grew up in a Lutheran home. At one point, in my twenties, I was a part of the Assemblies of God and someone told me I had the worst testimony they’d ever heard: I was a good kid who always did what his parents told him to, got straight A’s in school, never got in trouble, and mostly kept my room clean—and then I found Jesus. Actually, Jesus found me at age fourteen on a catechism retreat at Lutheran Memorial Camp in Fulton, OH. The most amazing man I have ever met, Fred Gliem (a bona fide charismatic Lutheran, of all things), talked about Jesus that night and it all finally made sense not only in my head, but in my heart, too. I gave my life to Christ outside on that cold January night in 1977, underneath the stars, a huge wooden cross before me in the semi-darkness of a snow-covered outdoor chapel. I’d wandered outside into the chill night air to consider Fred’s message and found the Lord of the Universe waiting for me.

From early on I knew my call: I was to be a Barnabas. That man of God stood by the young Paul and ushered him along, all the while knowing the once-persecutor of the Lord would eclipse him one day—and it was God’s will for that to happen, too. I am a discipler. That is why I am here.

I worked with young people for many years, discipling any who were interested. During that time, I wound up at Carnegie-Mellon University studying Artificial Intelligence & Robotics. Initially, CMU was a dark time with few Christians for companions my freshman year. It was the first time I encountered people who were openly hostile to Jesus, too, and it shocked this Midwest boy. While that first year was one of searching for Christian companionship, the second year landed me in InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. IV changed my life even further, opening me up to world missions, and best of all, inquisitive, earnest, growing Christians my age. I was quickly leading a men’s Bible study on campus and everything was suddenly a dream come true.

Except it really wasn’t. It was clear to me in the final days of my second year that AI was not where I needed to be. God had put a calling on my life and I had to pursue it. That summer I decided to work as a counselor at the camp where I’d first encountered Jesus. After the summer, it was clear: Christian Camping was the way for me. (Having an angelic encounter that confirmed this, only made it more clear. But I’ll have to tell that story later.)

In fact, I’ll have to tell the main part of this story later. It’s almost 2 AM here.

Thanks for stopping by and for enduring a little self-revelation. If nothing else, some of you regular readers of Cerulean Sanctum just might understand this blog a little better.

Blessings till the next installment!