Christian Formation Opportunities

What is Spiritual Formation?

• “[The] process of being shaped by the Holy Spirit into the likeness of Christ, filled with love for God and the world” (1)

• “[T]he biblically guided process in which people are being transformed into the likeness of Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit within the faith community in order to love and serve God and others” (2)

Education is about formation and transformation as much as it is about information.

The three goals of spiritual formation:

1. Believers acquiring a Christ-likeness at the personal level

2. Believers becoming a people of God at the community level

3. Believers establishing the Kingdom of God at the missional level

Dr. Alex Tang has suggested three goals of spiritual formation, which he derived after examining the formative strands of spiritual formation as proposed by Dr. Angela Reed in her “Quest For Spiritual Community: Reclaiming Spiritual Guidance for Contemporary Congregations”  (2011). Both Tang and Reed believe that spiritual formation is not meant to be confined at the individual level but has a progressive missional component that facilitates the community of God to bring transformation and healing to the whole creation. However, transformation at the community and missional levels can only take place when true spiritual formation takes place at the personal level.  

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(1) “A Call to Spiritual Formation”, presented at the Renovare International Conference, 2009

(2) Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU), 2011

(3) Wilson Teo, Christian Spiritual Formation, Emerging Leadership Journeys, Vol 10, Iss 1, Regent University, 2017

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