Figuring Out Stages of Faith and Life
Discovering that we all go through defined stages of faith and life is both comforting and frightening.
Perhaps one of the hardest lessons to learn in life is that while we are unique, we also share personality traits and life stages that are universal to humanity. It’s a truth most of us resist and don’t like hearing. But when we start to understand the automation process of the human mind and heart, and the way in which society and community work, it becomes clear that life has some predetermined truths to which we are all subject.
In my last post, I shared something of my story and what it was like to realise that faith didn’t work the way I thought it did. In this post, I’ll describe some of the science worked out by people much cleverer than me. There are essentially five stages of human and spiritual development that look pretty similar to each other.
The first challenge is that spiritual birth happens after physical birth, ranging from a few years after to a lifetime later. This leads to the physical and spiritual stages being worked out at different times and stages of life. The five physical stages can be seen in the work of Robert Kegan, who talks about them in Constructive-Developmental Theory. The spiritual stages can be seen in the works of Hagberg and of Fowler, who talk about Stages of Faith for those interested in diving into the mechanics of the models.
Snapshot of the Physical Stages
Clip time 13 minutes
On the physical side, it starts at birth to age six, focusing on instinctual needs and learning about boundaries and rules. Stage two runs until the late teen years and focuses on the development of self and identifying strongly with social groups, including family, tribe, or nation. Stage three happens somewhere post-teen years when people become socially focused and figure out how they live and contribute to society.
Let me stop here to say that stage four is the hardest phase of both physical and spiritual development. It’s the hardest because it’s an inward journey that requires truly understanding identity and involves detaching from society or other people’s view of the church. More on this later.
Stage five in the physical world is about becoming comfortable with ambiguity, paradox, and multiple perspectives. It’s a stage of continuous learning.
Snapshot of the Spiritual Stages
Clip time 12 minutes
The spiritual stages are remarkably similar. Stage one is about recognition of God, being a new believer, and experiencing the excitement of knowing Jesus. Like a toddler, everything is new, and there is lots of experimentation and also getting into trouble a lot too!
Stage two is about discipleship, learning how faith, church, and discipleship work, and finding your place in the Kingdom of God, just like children who come to understand their place in a family.
Stage three is a period of learning spiritual gifts and contributing to the life of the church. It corresponds well to the social phase in the physical model.
Stage four, as mentioned, is the hard stage, realising that the walk of faith is not easy. Facing suffering, trauma, and when God’s will is hard and not what we hoped for surfaces in this stage.
Stage five is about surrendering to God and learning to live the way Jesus did in communion with his Father. It’s about finding the way of love and learning to live horizontally again after the lonely, vertical stage four of a grapple between us and God. Most models split stage five into two, but I’m leaving it as one for the sake of comparison.
The Wall
What’s clear in both models is that there is a point where things go pear-shaped, sideways, you drive off a cliff, midlife crises – pick your metaphor. This is one of the two things that make this journey hard. The other is that most people aren’t aware of the stages or which one they are in themselves. When you try to talk to people about some of the questions and difficulties you face in the transition periods between stages, there are very few people who have the knowledge and awareness to talk about it.
Getting back to that wall, it’s the most decisive period in anyone’s life after physical or spiritual birth. And it’s hard to even describe what it is. Most people just say it’s when you feel stuck, and everything stops working. This is only helpful on an empathetic level and has little utility.
The best way I can describe it is that there are default patterns of behaviour, thought, and emotion that have been formed through our growing up, family of origin, how we have responded to challenges in life, and our personality. There are also parts of us that have been left behind. What basically happens at the wall is that those unconscious (default) elements of us stop giving us utility in life. Also, we realise that we can’t live without the parts of us we have left behind. God takes us on a journey of understanding to help us learn to live outside of the conditioning living life has moulded us into and to reintegrate parts of us that have been left in what the clever people call the shadow self.
At the wall, we also learn about margin, a sustainable pace for life, Sabbath, and rest. We come to realise that stages one to three became more about external living and how we show up to ourselves and others than what is happening in our spirits. The life Jesus lived of spending time with the Father and only doing what He says snaps into focus. It’s about things like acceptance, surrender, forgiveness, walking in step with the Spirit of God (Gal 5:22), finding meaning in the hard things in life, and ultimately learning what it is to walk in love. Basically, it all sounds very woo-woo until you’re in it, and you think, “Oh ********** [your expletive of choice], this is what those weird people were talking about.”
The Conundrum
What makes the stages hard from a societal perspective and for church leaders is that those who move past stage three drop off the radar and find it hard to contribute or even be a part of the whole. They feel misunderstood, unsupported, and like they’re free climbing up a cliff with no safety ropes and could die at any moment. And they can’t really articulate why their life is hard other than they hit this weird metaphorical ‘wall’ and nothing seems to work anymore. This tends to happen somewhere between the ages of 37 and 45, with the years of 45 to 50 being some of the hardest years of life as people try to find purpose and meaning again.
It’s a hard thing to hear for those running community organisations, churches, exco's, spouses, or friendship groups, because there are tasks to get done and that is hard to do when people seem to suddenly go AWOL on you and they can’t really articulate the problem.
And yet the people who emerge from the wall really do become the best of us. Eugene Peterson, Tim Keller, Mother Teresa, Mahatma Gandhi, etc. The sage-like quality of these people and the wisdom and love they bring to society is invaluable. The only pieces of advice I have for people hitting the wall is to try to find people who understand, and if you can’t, listen to a lot of John Mark Comer and Pete Scazzero. They probably talk about this stuff more than any other leader and really help to make sense of it.