Teaching for spiritual growth is an ongoing goal for ministry leaders. As my doctoral research bears out, believers may not know how to grow in knowing God in their everyday lives.
The Problem
Teaching for spiritual growth is a perpetual problem for ministry leaders everywhere.
Believers may feel God’s presence occasionally in worship, yet most do not have the skills to experience God in daily life.
In a culture obsessed with informational knowledge, many people have not cultivated knowledge of God or His ways.
Most people do not live with an awareness of His presence, nor do they hear His voice.
However grim the situation may seem, my research proved it is possible to teach people practical skills to use every day to come to know God intimately and grow spiritually.
The Research
One of the most concerning observations in the pre-survey results was that 81 percent of participants did not feel confident they had the practical skills they needed for spiritual growth.
They did not understand how to pursue God or grow toward knowing Him intimately. This number was disconcerting considering 93 percent of participants had been Christians for longer than 21 years.
Ministry leaders should be stirred by the implication that current methods are not producing believers confident they have skills to grow in their personal, intimate relationships with God.
It is not enough to teach and preach believers “should” live in a personal intimate relationship with God. Equipping ministries must teach “how” believers can grow in knowing God intimately.
Research has proved that teaching and preaching impact people’s willingness to engage in spiritual activities but teaching and preaching alone are not enough to close the gap between participants’ understanding of the importance of devotional practices and actual practice.
The Difficulty in Teaching for Spiritual Growth
This researcher understands how difficult it is to teach, model, and experience these types of spiritual growth skills in the traditional Sunday morning service.
To be more effective, teaching about God must include more methods that address the affective and behavioral domains.
Cognitive content alone cannot produce a growing intimate knowledge of God. Knowing God includes understanding, yes, but it also includes a heartfelt experience that translates into action in believers’ lives (James 1:22–25).
Believers may even feel motivated to know God more intimately, but they may not know “how” to pursue intimacy or know what intimacy with God looks like for them.
The Test
I addressed the problem that believers do not know “how” to pursue intimacy with God by facilitating a seminar designed to help increase participants’ awareness and experience.
My focus was to use a teaching methodology that combined cognitive information with affective and behavioral domain exercises. Participants learned practical skills (aka spiritual disciplines) they could take home to use every day in their personal spiritual journeys toward knowing God more intimately.
Knowing God concerns more than knowing about God. It depends on developing a relationship with God through experience over time.
Knowing God is a matter of increasing degrees of relationship.
Since relationships are built upon communication, the seminar lessons and exercises showed practically and experientially “how” participants could know God more fully by increasing degrees of awareness and communication.
Participants gained practical skills that helped them become more aware of God’s presence individually, through experiencing Him in the Bible, and apart from worship at church.
I taught believers specific strategies on “how” to position themselves to experience God’s presence. I also gave participants a safe and structured environment to practice learning how to settle down, be quiet, listen, and sense His presence through His Word and worship.
The participants resonated with the teaching and were excited by the opportunities for practical experience and application.
Many people indicated that learning to ask questions, quiet down, listen, and journal “stretched their thinking about God.”
One man said he had read a book about this type of journaling but had never practiced it before. He was ecstatic about his experience and excited to begin practicing at home.
Positive experiences in the group setting provided increased motivation for participants to begin to incorporate the exercises into their personal devotion times.
Adults need time and freedom to ask questions and discover for themselves.
People learn from experiencing God more than from hearing about God alone.
Adults also need time to process what has been experienced.
I was disturbed to realize that Christians have been in and around the church for 21 plus years and feel they do not know how to seek God or pursue spiritual growth.
As my research has proven, it is possible to teach people “how” to become more aware of God’s voice and presence in their lives.
I challenge other leaders to structure interactive events where this experiential type of learning occurs.
Skills to Grow Spiritually Can Be Taught
However, disappointing the state of immature believers may be the problem can be reversed. My research results showed that skills for knowing God more intimately can be taught.
In the post-survey results, 100 percent of participants indicated that they had the ability to hear God’s voice daily if they chose and had the skills to pursue spiritual growth. These were astounding results.
The evaluation comments showed participants felt like they had gained the ability to distinguish God’s thoughts from their own and had confidence, after practicing and discussing their experiences, to say they could hear God’s voice every day.
The seminar evaluation statements left no doubt that the seminar deepened participants’ awareness of and relationship with God.
Respondents wrote statements like, “I found new ways to recognize how to hear Him more clearly,” and “It made me realize how much He truly loves me,” “It made God feel nearer,” and “It has made me closer to Him.”
The Group Process Component
The strength of the project for participants seemed to be learning the characteristics of God’s communications and the times of practice learning to be quiet and listen.
Participants learned to distinguish God’s voice from their own, and they learned the importance of asking questions and writing down what they heard, without judging until after it was written down.
There was tremendous value in participants being able to share with the group. The opportunity to share gave each one confidence and validation as the day progressed. When individuals began to see God speaking to their peers, they became more confident in what they themselves were receiving.
Even though the work of God happens in the hearts of people. He used the group process to bring about a synergy that only happens in the corporate group.
Each person brought his or her own contribution, and the Holy Spirit wove it all together into a beautiful new experience for each person.
The sharing and discussion time was immensely valuable. The facilitator encouraged participants to freely ask questions and discover for themselves. One participant said, “I would not be able to share so openly in a regular church service.”
On the evaluation, when asked what was the most significant aspects of the seminar, some of the comments were, “The presentation and interaction,” “I got to participate,” and “I loved hearing how God moved in my brothers and sisters here.” One man indicated he already had a lifetime of serving the Lord, yet he experienced how to hear God in fresh new ways.
The Need for Community in Spiritual Growth
The results prove that participants desire a place to share, experience, and grow together in a community environment.
The same or similar results would presumably occur in most situations where believers experience training on “how” to know God more intimately, then have the opportunity to practice spiritual exercises and share their experiences together.
The positive results of this implementation would not have been possible had the seminar been structured without the participation exercises.
Christians know Bible reading and prayer are important, but few believers practice consistently.
The research results suggest that many individuals may not know where to start or what to do when faced with quiet time and an open Bible. Many do not know where to begin in seeking to know God.
Thus, teaching “how” to practice spiritual exercises becomes crucial if we want to teach for spiritual growth.
Characteristics of Adult Education
New skills need to be practiced over time to create a new habit. However, all adult education is continuing education, and every learning experience leads to further learning.
There may be some people that never use what they learned my research seminar, and some may quickly incorporate the experiences into their personal devotional times. Then some may set what they learned aside for a time and come back to it later.
In any case, all learners are stretched in some way when presented with new information and practices, whether cognitively, affectively, or behaviorally. This pattern of forward-backward-forward movement is the nature of learning for adults.
What Does This Mean for Spiritual Growth?
Overall, the research results revealed that it is possible to teach believers how to become more aware of God’s presence and how to hear His communications to them.
The results are significant for equipping ministries because many believers do not experience God’s presence outside the walls of the church. It is also significant in that leaders can teach for awareness of God’s presence through His Word, and it can be accomplished in the class/workshop/seminar-type setting.
Teaching for Spiritual Growth: Recommendations for Leaders
It may benefit leaders to think in terms of training rather than teaching or preaching.
Workshops, interactive seminars, and/or Bible study-type classes could be offered that explore practical methods (the disciplines) more thoroughly. One need not start new groups necessarily, but one could adapt affective and behavioral teaching methods to existing groups.
Richard Foster describes thirteen spiritual disciplines in three categories: (1) the inward disciplines of meditation, prayer, fasting, and study; (2) the outward disciplines of simplicity, solitude, submission, and service; and (3) the corporate disciplines of confession, worship, guidance, and celebration.
Typically, in the body of Christ, Sunday mornings are structured toward the corporate and outward disciplines. The inner disciplines receive much less attention and instruction. When they have been emphasized, motivation rises, yet there remains a lack of understanding of “how” to implement such practices.
Albeit unintentional, according to research results, there seems to be a serious lack of practical teaching that focuses on equipping congregants in their journey toward knowing God intimately.
Sunday morning services may attract new believers and encourage old ones, but it is simply not enough to produce the strong and powerful Christians needed for these changing times.
One can know God in the corporate and outward disciplines and continue to remain unknowing in the inward being.
This researcher recommends that ministry leaders more seriously consider the importance of the inner practices, for ultimately it is the inner practice that determines entrance into the kingdom of God.
Believers need to know God intimately as never before. Believers need to know Him, not only in word but in Spirit and power (1 Cor 2:4; 1 Cor 4:20; 1 Thes 1:5).
The practice of spiritual exercises is not a new concept in the body of Christ; maybe the teaching of such should be reinvigorated for a new generation.
You May Also Be Interested In:
- My Seminars & Speaking
- How to Feel God’s Presence: Tips for Spiritual Growth
- The Surprising Secret to an Intimate Relationship with God
- Hearing God: What Does God’s Voice Sound Like?
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