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Reimagining
Spiritual Formation:
a
Week in the Life of an Experiemental Church
During the spring of 2003 the members of Solomon’s Porch
embarked to write a book. The book was a cooperative effort
that included more than 25 people. The reason for writing
the book was to attempt to make a contribution to the growing
conversation of hopeful, creative Christians around the world.
The book is for sale at Amazon.com
and on occasion at Solomon’s Porch.
There will be a book release party at Solomon’s
Porch Friday, February 6 at 7:30 PM. We have created
a website to elicit conversation. www.reimaginingspiritualformation.com
The following are excerpts from the book.
Reimagining Spiritual Formation
Back cover
copy
Reimagining Spiritual Formation isn’t a book about
quick-fix methods or bulleted how-to lists. It’s a book about
striving, about trying, about experimenting with the idea
that the old forms of spiritual formation might not be the
only means to living lives in harmony with God in our day.
As you join the people of Solomon’s Porch for their weekly
gatherings, meetings, and meals, you’ll get a glimpse of life
in a community where spiritual formation has moved beyond
education-based practices by including worship, physicality,
dialog, hospitality, belief, creativity and service, not as
add-on’s to spiritual formation but as means of it.
Step inside this community and see what can happen
when inspired, creative, deeply committed Christians gather
together to explore what it means to live in the way of Jesus
in this time and place. Get a glimpse into the lives of six
people of the Solomon’s Porch Community and track their successes
and failures with different approaches to spiritual development.
Uniquely first person and disarmingly honest, these narratives
rest inside insightful commentary by emerging church pastor
and author of this book, Doug Pagitt.
Ideal for emergent thinkers, church leaders, pastors,
and anyone seeking fresh ways of life with God, Reimagining
Spiritual Formation reveals new insights into cultivating
deeper relationships and effective spiritual growth among
those with whom you minister.
Excerpts from Reimagining Spiritual
Formation:
Perhaps you are among the many wonderful people—pastors,
teachers, lay leaders, new Christians, lifelong Christians—who
are not interested in a model program or approach to spirituality,
but are searching the stories of others to find permission
to pursue their own deeply held, unspoken intuitions about
how faith and church could be. In some ways this book is an
act of poetry; it is an attempt to put words around our experiences
and desires to allow others to step inside. – Page 19
Will we do the hard and costly work of hand-crafting faith
in our day, or will we be content living off the antiques
of previous generations and fill in with cheap imitations
of our own to “freshen up” the old stuff? Are we willing to
become artisans of new expressions of faith so that our grandchildren
will see as their legacy the quality that came before them,
so they will be stirred thereby to craft newer, more beautiful,
more meaningful expressions in their own day?
This book is primarily about one community and the practices
of spiritual formation in it. But the creativity required
to live an imaginative, experimental faith is not limited
to what we do during our worship gatherings or Wednesday night
dinners. Central to the types of spiritual formation discussed
in this book is the need for us—not only our Solomon’s Porch
community but the church as a whole—to become theological
communities.
The work of theology must happen in full community. Of course
it must include the ideas of those who have come before us,
but to simply accept the work of our forebears in the faith
as the end of the conversation is to outsource the real work
of thinking, and that turns theology into a stagnant philosophy
rather than an active pursuit of how we are to live God’s
story in our time. The communities that are best equipped
for the task of spiritual formation in the post-industrial
age are those who make the practice of theology an essential
element of their lives together.
This is in no way a call to be less theological, but a call
to our communities to be more involved in the work of theology
as a necessary part of the spiritual formation process. Wouldn’t
it be wonderful if the task of both the new convert to Christianity
and the experienced Christian was understood as not only believing
the things of Christianity, but also as contextualizing, creating,
articulating, and living the expressions of faith in their
world? - Page 159
At Solomon’s Porch we are seeking a spiritual formation that,
in its essence, is not about individual effort but communal
action involving a spirituality of physicality, centered on
the way we lead our lives, allowing us to be Christian in
and with our bodies and not in our minds and hearts only;
a spirituality of dialog within communities where the goal
is not acquiring knowledge, but spurring one another on to
new ways of imagining and learning; a spirituality of hospitality
that is not limited to food before or after meetings, but
is intended to create an environment of love and connectedness
where people are formed and shaped as they serve and are served
by one another; a spirituality of the knowledge of God where
the Bible is not reduced to a book from which we extract truth,
but the Bible is a full, living, and active member of our
community that is listened to on all topics of which it speaks;
a spirituality of creativity where creative gifts are not
used as content support but rather as an invitation for those
so inclined to participate in the generative processes of
God; a spirituality of service, which is the natural response
of all seeking to live in the way of Jesus and is not reserved
for the elite of the faith. Our hope is that this will be
evident in a community not limited to supplemental small-group
programs but valued as the cultivating force in which lives
with God are the claim and invitation to Kingdom life. - Page
32
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