Jared has a great post up at GDC on spiritual maturity and the ways we in the church try to measure it; I commend it to your reading, because I think he raises some important questions and concerns.
But generally speaking—and here I’m not at all picking on the REVEAL survey but on the evangelical Church’s approach to gauging spiritual maturity in general—our measuring stick amounts to Participation and Feelings.And here’s where I get hung up: I’m not sure spiritual maturity can be quantified that way. . . .The way this gets boiled down so often amounts to “How much church stuff do you do?” and “How do you feel about yourself?”And frankly, some of the most spiritually mature people I know are very insecure about their sin and their own brokenness and are struggling to find their place in the modern church.
One wonders what we would make, given this approach, of someone who led a major ministry and spoke all over the place, yet confessed privately that they had no sense at all of the presence of God in their life. Would we conclude that Mother Theresa was spiritually immature?The truth is, I think Jared’s right: I don’t think we can measure spiritual maturity. I don’t even think, as he suggests, that we can count on time to bring spiritual maturity—in my experience of the church, I’ve been sadly disappointed on that score more than once. You can’t put a yardstick on love, or weigh out joy on a scale, or measure the volume of someone’s peace with a tablespoon. Ultimately, I think when it comes to spiritual maturity, we have to borrow a line from Justice Potter Stewart (used of a very different subject, of course) and just recognize that we can’t define it, but we know it when we see it.This is, I think, even true on the church level. I do believe that a more spiritually mature church will tend to pray more, be more involved in missions, and so on, but correlation is not causation; there are churches that do a great deal but are very shallow in their corporate theology and relationship with God. Contrariwise, Aberdeen, Scotland’s Gilcomston South under the Rev. Willie Still had very few programs but grew deep, strong, mature Christians. (I trust that it still does, but I have no direct knowledge of it since his death.) I understand the desire—I want to know if the church I lead is growing spiritually, if the work I’m doing is bearing any real fruit—and I think these questions are worth asking, because they do give us real information; we just need to be careful to recognize what they aren’t telling us.