|
James Fowler's Stages Of Faith
Ken and I will share an approach to understanding and finding pattern in the infinite varieties of human behavior developed by the psychologist/minister, James Fowler, in his book Stages of Faith. Inspired by the work of the developmental psychologists Piaget, Kohlberg and Erikson, Fowler interviewed people from age three to eighty three, to analyze their ways of living in and finding meaning in their world. What can Fowler's six stages of faith tell us about the work we need to do as Unitarian-Universalists to build a healthy church that supports each of us grow in our faith and to rediscover ourselves?
Fowler defines faith, not necessarily as faith in God or the creed of a particular religion. Faith, to Fowler, is that which gives meaning to one's life, that which motivates and explains an individual's view of the world. Faith for one individual may center on financial success, on relationship, on power, on agnosticism or atheism. He does, however, state that those individuals who attain the later stages know a spiritual dimension which anchors their faith and their actions.
Fowler's Stages of Faith rely on chronological identification with the developmental stages of Piaget, the stages of moral development of Kohlberg and the psycho-social stages of Eric Erikson. In Fowler's interviews the youngest age at which the characteristics are identified define the stage. Therefore, some adults find that the ways of seeing and being in the world at stage
two or three meet their needs for a lifetime, while another may more closely follow the chronological timetable outlined by Fowler. Fowler emphasizes that "Each stage has the potential for wholeness, grace and integrity and for the strength sufficient for either life's blows or its blessings."
Stage change comes about through some cognitive or emotional dissonance. We are shocked into discovering that our comfortable way of being in the world no longer works. We must change.
Instead of looking at the stages as confining boxes, consider the image of concentric circles. The youngest, most ego-centric stage at the center, moving out to more universalizing stages which include the behaviors and attitudes of earlier stages. None of us is consistent in responding to the world in one particular way. In one situation, my response may be at Stage 1 and in another situation Stage 5.
Fowler's Six Stages of Faith are in your order of service. As we summarize the stages,think of how your actions, your beliefs and those of the people in your life are reflected in each stage.
In Stage 1, everything is real and has power. We think "magically". "Step on the crack and break your mother's back." My parents are the ultimate authority. I trust that they know everything, and will provide everything I need. My image of God is parent-like: He, like my mother, has eyes in the back of his head, watches out for me, protects me and punishes me when I do wrong.
At stage 2, my beliefs and understandings are less magical, more literal. An absolute authority, outside of me, a parent, a teacher, a boss, a minister, God, makes the rules which I follow without question. "My teacher says... The Bible says..." An ego-centric Fairness rules. If you do that... then I will... The world is black and white, good and evil.
At Stage 3, I begin to break away from the imposed external authority which has shaped my life. I identify with a sub-group which shares and validates my emergent independent thinking. I begin to think abstractly and delight in discovering metaphor.
At Stage 4, I develop my own identity within a selected sub-group. During this stage, I am so caught up in discovering and defining my roles, personally and professionally, that I become an absolutist, a critic. There is only one right way, my way--"Back to Basics", the Democratic party, raising my children the way my parents did--or didn't--raise me! I have it all figured out and nobody (outside my group) can tell me otherwise.
At this stage I am becoming an abstract thinker. Symbols convey meaning at an analytical, intellectual level. I am either a scientific rationalist or a religious absolutist. I do not yet feel the universal power or passion that symbols may evoke. The Christian cross, for example, is a symbol of a belief system that I reject, rather than a symbol of universal love and connection to the holy.
At Stage 5, I have confronted enough in life to know that my "one right way" does not always provide satisfactory answers, that
there are other ways to see the world, to choose to live in the world. I am comfortable with paradox-- I see that life is not black and white. I know that an individual may act in ways that promote good and later act in ways that promote evil, that even though I value the logic and rationality of science, I know there are things that cannot be explained--and rather than feel threatened by that paradox, I find it comforting and awe-inspiring. I don't need to be in control. I don't need to know all the answers. I have given up arrogance and discovered humility.
Coming to this understanding means that I do not have to make others wrong in order for my ideas to be right. I don't need to live critically or judgmentally. Rather I can accept that others choose to live and think differently from me. Rather than identifying with a specific group, separating myself from others, I now see my connectedness to other groups and to my environment. At Stage 5, it is not a question of being too Christian or too Buddhist, but rather opening your heart to knowing that these are all paths to the same vision, the same way of loving the world.
Finally, at Stage 6, a few people move on to a stage where they must live lives of deep commitment. They demonstrate a selfless passion for all beings, they know that all life is interconnnected and therefore they feel the pain and the joy of all beings. They live a life of love, but they hold their life loosely, and like Jesus, Ghandi or Martin Luther King, they are ready to die for that commitment.
The Stages Of Faith: A Stage Five Church
The word itself comes from the Latin word "fides" which means trust. Faith is a certain kind of trust. Fowler gets more specific about this and maintains that faith is a matter for all of us, whether or not we happen to belong to an institutional religion. For him, faith is one of those religious matters that transcends specific religious institutions and has to do with religion as a universal human activity. To quote him directly,
Prior to our being religious or irreligious...we are already
engaged with issues of faith. Whether we become nonbelievers, agnostics or atheists, we are concerned with how to put our lives together and with what will make life worth living. Moreover we look for something to love that loves us, something to value that gives us value, something to honor and respect that has the power to sustain our being.
And that is faith. Faith is whatever it is that allows us to trust our lives. We have faith in whatever it is in which we put our ultimate trust, and the need for this kind of trust is surely not a restricted to institutional religions, but rather is a function of a healthy human life. Christians talk about having faith in God. Buddhists don't talk about faith but about taking refuge and say that they take refuge in The Buddha, The Dharma, and the Sangha. Humanists talk about Reason and place their trust in it. It's all talk about the same thing. It's about discovering how to trust our lives. It's about faith.
Of course, this is a rough and ready sort of understanding. There is simple faith and deep faith, blind faith and profound faith. Folwer's whole investigation is about the development of deep and profound faith, and it is important to note that his work is primarily descriptive. This is what he sees when he looks at the growth of faith through the lens of developmental psychology. At no point does he suggest that anyone "ought" to have any particular faith or to be at any particular point in the developmental journey. All he is saying is that we go through identifiable stages in our religious development that are analogous to the stages we go through in our intellectual journey, in our ability to conceptualize the world.
Anne has explained the other important point to keep in mind about Folwer's scheme. While he presents it as if it is linear, it is better thought of as a series of concentric circles. The linear scheme suggests that we go through one stage and are done with it, but
that is not the idea. We go through a stage and go on, but we retain the previous stage in our repertoire. There are times when it is appropriate to fall back into a previous way of thinking and behaving. Even though I may spend most of my time at, say Stage 4, sometimes I need to be able to be at Stage 3 or Stage 2.
Flower also notices that churches tend to attract people at a certain Stage. For example, really large churches, what are sometimes called mega-churches, tend to be filled primarily with people who spend most of their time at Stage 3 and to have charismatic ministers who spend most of their time at Stage 4. It's a very stable combination: people who are ready to believe-and the belief is genuine-because their minister tells them this is the truth and because everyone around them believes as they do, and a minister who genuinely believes that he understands God's eternal truth.
Fowler also remarks-almost in passing-that Unitarian Universalist churches tend to be filled with people who spend most of their lives at Stage 4. That, I suggest, is one important reason why we do not have any mega-churches and why we have always been a small movement. Most of our churches are what may be thought of as Stage 4 churches. What is a Stage 4 church like? Most you could answer that question. On the positive side, such a church will have its rituals, as all churches do, but those rituals will have developed out of a context of meaning. It will have little patience with empty ritual, ritual for the sake of having a ritual. Such a church
will spend a lot of time helping people in their search for meaning in their own lives, insisting that people take responsibility for their own discovery of meaning. The Stage 4 church will also be reflective, sometimes very rational in its reflection and other times quietly emotive, as befits the situation.
On the negative side, such a church will often-and somewhat paradoxically-fall into a kind of rigidity. It's as if the people think that in having found meaning in their lives, they have also found The Meaning of Life, and anyone who looks for something else has just missed the boat. Related to this, having spend so much time on their own individual search, it is sometimes hard for Stage 4 people to be able to bend to the needs of others. A kind of inflexibility and even intolerance can set in. In churches of this sort, for example, you sometimes see people having difficulty accepting the will of the community when it goes against their own opinion.
Let me give a specific-and fictional-example of this. Consider the case of the First Church of East Podunk, a good and even healthy Stage 4 church. After much debate, sometimes acrimonious and sometimes not, and after expending a lot of energy and time and even money on research, the church has voted to relocate to West Podunk. As befits a Stage 4 church, this decision was made democratically and very rationally. Every effort was made to allow anyone who had an opinion to state it and to listen to the ideas and opinions of others. But a faction of the church believes that it knows that it would be mistake to move. They have done their
own study and come to their own conclusions. In an effort to prevent the move, they threaten to withdraw their pledges. When that doesn't work, they resign from the church. As I said, this is the negative side.
If there are Stage 4 churches, surely it ought to be possible for there to be Stage 5 churches. A Stage 5 church would be filled with lot of people who spend most of their time at Stage 5. What would such a church look like? One of the most important features of Stage 4 is the particularization of truth as people seek to discover their own integrity, and one of the most important features of Stage 5 is the universalization of truth as people seek to discover the true breadth of life and to see beyond the self to the universal. I think that the most striking feature of the Stage 5 church, then, is that it incarnates a radical openness to truth from whatever source.
Now I know what that sounds like to most of us: "Well. Yes...." But think about it. A Stage 4 church might be very tolerant and open to truth from some sources but not others. For example, some Stage 4 Unitarian Universalist churches might not be open to truth from Christian sources, while a Stage 5 Unitarian Universalist church would be. A Stage 4 Christian church might not be open to truth from, say, the fundamentalist wing of Christianity, but a Stage 5 Christian church would be. And so on.
Another characteristic of a Stage 5 church is that it is far less doctrinaire than Stage 4 church. When you think about it, that makes sense. At Stage 4 people are concerned to discover their truth;
at Stage 5 people are concerned to see their truth as one truth among many. A Stage 4 church, then, tends to be committed to its own collective understanding of truth, while a Stage 5 church tends to look beyond itself to see how its collective understanding fits into the interdependence of understandings.
One final feature of the Stage 5 church is that its deliberations tend to be less acrimonious than those of the Stage 4 church. Stage 5 people, who are less concerned that their view prevail than reaching the best decision for the whole community, find it easier to listen to one another without anxiety and to allow others to change their minds. They do not have to have the last-or the loudest or the definitive-word. And as a result, at meetings, in classes or informal discussions, they find it easier to attend to one another, and conflict is usually more creative than at Stage 4. Rather than thinking about what they will say next or how to counter what someone else is saying, they listen to discover what this other person has to teach them. And they are ready to give credit where it is due.
Well, I am running out of time and I still have two things to say. First, I have drawn these pictures as if the Stages are discrete and separated by quantum jumps. They are not, of course. There is no firm and absolute boundary between the various stages, and people and churches go back and forth from one to another. That is, as I remarked earlier, as it should be. And yet these Stages are nevertheless real and tell us a lot abut ourselves and about what it is to be human. People move from one stage to another as they deepen
in their understanding of who they are and what they need to do to become more and more comfortably human. By the same token, churches also move from stage to stage as they grow in their institutional maturity and become more and more comfortable with their ability and their calling to bring the universal truth of religion to life.
And second, I want to ask you to reflect on our church. How is it a Stage 4 church, and how is it a Stage 5 church? What are the barriers that tend to hold us back from maturing more fully into Stage 5? How can we challenge ourselves to move ahead, to grow ourselves and our church into its fuller maturity? What changes do we need to make in our religious education program, for example, to help move both our children along from Stage 2 to Stage 3 to Stage 4, and our adults along from Stage 3 to Stage 4 to Stage 5? And since these maturational changes are usually difficult and anxiety producing, how can we comfort and nurture one another through the difficulty? What about our Social Justice Program? What about our Arts program? What about our governance?
One of the things that I have observed in my ministry is that churches tend to feel threatened when they are challenged to move ahead, and yet, this is exactly what I have been talking about: moving ahead in maturity as human beings and as religious institutions. So let me leave you with this thought: if we truly believe, as we say we do, that truth is infinitely complex and beautiful, then the life that seeks the deepest embrace of that com
plexity is both the most human and the most mature life. So, I say, damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!
What is your reaction to this sermon? Please send comments to Reverend Ken Collier
by Anne Anderson
Reverend Kenneth W. Collier
I want to begin with a word about the word "faith." It's one of those words that tends to be difficult for people. For some, it is one of those church-y, off-putting words that make them squirm. It reminds them of their own difficult childhood religion and tends to shut the discussion down rather than opening it up. Others do not have this kind of reaction to it but simply don't understand what the word means. It's one of those words that gets tossed around freely by people and everyone thinks they know what's being talked about. But when you get right down to it, they really don't. It means too many things to too many people, so that if you ask what it means you get puzzled looks and multiple definitions.
|