Catholic Spiritual Growth Requires Faith Community!

Catholic Spiritual Growth Requires Faith Community!

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In this spiritual growth tutorial on Practical Prayer, we have seen how important it is to focus our spiritual growth and prayer on our personal relationship with God. We then discussed why we need to continue to learn about our faith so we can grow in intimacy with God.

In this article we’re going to cover our need to seek our spiritual growth as members of a community. The message here is simple. Don’t go it alone! There are many practical reasons for growing in your faith as a member of a community. But there are also deeply spiritual roots to our need for community. Let’s start with the practical benefits then build to the deep spiritual reasons. In the end, we’ll discover that the only real way to succeed in spiritual growth is to grow as a member of the Family.

Spiritual Growth as part of a community give us new insights

As a stay-home father with my two children, I was invited to join a mom’s group. Yes, I was the token guy in an all-ladies group. Yes, I was a fish out of water amidst pregnant and nursing mothers who shared an intimate bond of the Feminine Genius. But joining that group was one of the best things I have done for my spiritual growth. We met for both study and prayer. I was invited by a good friend to help teach the group. Since I love teaching the faith I could hardly turn down the invitation. But I learned at least as much as I taught in that group. As we discussed verses of the Bible and living our faith in our families, I gained such great insight from these mothers into what it really means to live self-sacrificing love, what it really means to be all-in for Jesus as a Catholic, and how many of my struggles and challenges and temptations that I thought I faced alone are shared by so many other people.

Our spiritual formation is primarily guided by
1. The Holy Spirit who guides us to all truth through Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition
2. The Magisterium who is also guided by the Holy Spirit to help us properly understand Scripture and Tradition.

But as individuals we can still pretty easily go astray when we are left to our own devices. So we are also called to learn our faith together as members of a learning community. That way our understanding of the faith can be guided by insights and experiences of many people rather than the narrow perceptions we can create for ourselves. This is one of the most practical reasons to seek spiritual growth as part of a community. I found this to be true even as a theologian and teacher. It’s not really a matter of clarifying doctrine, but of clarifying how to live the Christian life and what is necessary to live our vocations and to grow in our relationship with Jesus.

Spiritual Growth as part of a community gives us accountability

There has been a movement among our Protestant brothers and sisters of having “accountability partners.” This movement has been downplayed by many Catholic teachers. After all, we have the sacrament of reconciliation with accountability built right in. Now there is some truth to this. Part of the accountability movement among our non-Catholic brothers and sisters is filling a vacuum. The sacrament of reconciliation gives us accountability to Christ directly, whose forgiveness and love are tangible through the sacrament. We feel – or should feel – a very real sense of accountability to Him. We also have accountability to the priest who acts as our spiritual adviser. I know that if I keep coming back to the priest with the same sin I feel like I haven’t been taking my spiritual growth seriously enough.

On the other hand, our Protestant brothers and sisters are on to something with the accountability group movement that we Catholics really need to learn from. Catholics claim that we are not saved as individuals, but we are rather saved as members of God’s family. We need each other. Non-Catholics are more likely to theologically stress the individual relationship with Jesus. Catholic theology stresses our membership in God’s Family. But in practice, Catholics don’t always live what we believe. Accountability groups is an expression of the belief that we’re all in this journey together.

As Catholics we should not feel the need to confess our sins to each other in place of Reconciliation. But how else could we use accountability groups to accelerate our spiritual growth? I see accountability groups more like spiritual growth goal setting groups. Would it be easier to form the habit of daily prayer (for example) if you set the goal as a group and you knew that next Monday you’d be reporting to the group how you are doing? Especially when you know that Jim is going to tell you he has prayed every day because that’s just how Jim is. And that’s great of Jim! Because the flip-side of keeping each other accountable is modeling the faith for each other. I mentioned above the Mom’s group I was part of. Seeing these faithful Catholic mothers striving to grow in their faith with 2-year-olds literally pulling on their pants leg was a great inspiration to me. I definitely inspired me to take my own growth more seriously. Yeah, I think I see the power in that kind of accountability. How about you?

We Are Family

These are some very practical reasons that participation in a community is vital for your spiritual growth. But there is a deeper, more spiritual purpose for community. We are created to exist in Family! From the very beginning, God designed our relationship with him to be experienced in the context of relationship with each other. In fact, we can only be fully the image of the Triune God when we are in a loving relationship with others. And the only new command that Jesus gave us was to love one another as he loved us. As I said earlier, we are not saved as individuals. Jesus makes us children of God and co-heirs of the Kingdom. He united us to himself in the Holy Eucharist, but also to each other. Jesus prayed that we would all be one. Do you really need more evidence that God created us to live in communion with each other? So not only does community help us in practical ways to grow spiritually, without community no true spiritual growth is even possible.

Of course, the question is left open here – how do we go about creating effective, loving faith communities that can really lead to our spiritual growth? That will be a question we tackle in a future course.

What have been your experiences of the value of a faith community? My experience was with a mom’s group. I have friends who have been meeting for Bible study and faith formation in their home for over 30 years! Share your experiences with faith communities below! What has been good about it? What challenges did you face?

Brought to you by Jeffrey S. Arrowood at From the Abbey, dedicated to helping you rediscover the JOY of learning and living your faith so you can grow in intimacy with God.

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