All too many people who identify as being spiritual never reach maturity as such. Christianity is explored here as a case example, with observations from history as well as contemporary life.
Christianity, like other religions, establishes an ideal way of living which we often fail to match. Our intentions are good but we’re a bit short on delivery, some of us more so than others.
This was a topic addressed by Professor Bruce Hindmarsh at a lecture given at the Brisbane School of Theology on 15 February 2025. Hindmarsh, who is the James M. Houston Professor of Spiritual Theology and Professor of the History of Christianity at Regent College, Vancouver, entitled his lecture “Failure to Launch: Why Some Christians Fail to Mature: A Perspective from Church History.” Notably, and I think encouragingly, the event was well attended.
The subject of maturing in the spirit is important for us all but especially so for progressive Christians, for it addresses not just the regressive forces of society at large but regressive forces within the Church itself. The present article outlines historical factors identified by Hindmarsh, then looks at the role of challenge and support as aids to growth. Particular reference is made here to experience in religious institutions. Without understanding these things, we’re not likely to be able to move on and reach the heights of which we’re capable, and which Christ and others have set for us as standards.
The meaning of maturity
In the context of progressive Christianity, what is Christian maturing? We should not assume it is necessarily becoming progressive, though one might argue that all Christianity is aiming for something better and, in that sense at least, progressive. Hindmarsh gave a definition that one can hardly disagree with, that is, conformity to Christ. He cited Paul who in Ephesians 4: 15 talks about reaching maturity as a human being, “measured by nothing less than the full stature of Christ.”
What does this mean? Wisely, Hindmarsh did not offer any detail on this point, asking us simply to reflect on the question: if Jesus was here with us in our time, how would he live? We in contemporary Australia might identify as marks of Christian maturity such things as publicly stated love of God, unreserved love and support for other people, love of and care for creation as a whole, and a commitment to the pursuit and promotion of truth, even when it gets uncomfortable. A mature Christian would delight in the beauty of other religions, honour and embrace the specialness of minorities, and work to bring down barriers to freedom so that all God’s children can participate fully in the richness of life. And this is just the beginning.
Why we may fail to mature
There may be many reasons why Christians fail to launch or to mature. Hindmarsh focused on five:
First, lack of a clear sense of purpose in our lives or a sense that we are aiming for a goal. Too often it’s assumed that Christian living is just being good, going to church, taking part in church activities and contributing to church funds. Paul in his letter to the Ephesians presented a different view. He saw creation as essentially teleological with each of us having a special gift that contributes to the overall body of Christ and its ability to do good work. With this understanding, we should be able to see our lives as a deliberate process of growing up into Christ (Ephesians 4: 13).
Second, the idea that maturity can be achieved only by an elite, in earlier times thought of as the elect. This is a distinctive (though not unique) feature of sixteenth century Calvinism. The counter argument is that growth as followers of Christ is open to all, being something we all have freedom to choose. The hard question which comes next is: how?
Third, the idea that it’s sufficient to follow the prevailing norms of the Christian tradition in which we’re located. Over centuries the Church developed hand in hand with the state, such that it was all too easy or common to identify oneself as (for example) English and therefore Anglican, or Italian and therefore Catholic. Following local norms became sufficient in themselves, so we had the idea that works and church attendance and adherence to certain customs and ways of thinking were enough. True maturity in faith, however, demands much more. It demands discipline and a constant struggle against sin and suffering. Teresa of Ávila is cited as an example, with her various stages of prayer and Christian living. Francis of Assisi (though not mentioned by Hindmarsh) is another example.
Fourth, lack of a proper sense of our need to grow, which is described by all sorts of terms, like brokenness, barrenness, and guilt. We know that we’re imperfect and unhappy but fail to reach out for healing. In the words of Romans 8:2, “In Christ Jesus the life-giving law of the Spirit has set you free from the law of sin and death.” And further in Romans 8:6, “those who live on the level of the spirit have the spiritual outlook, and that is life and peace.”
Fifth, over-dependence on methods for raising the self that are arguably, in Christian terms, only substitutes for the real deal. These include disciplines that are person-centred or centred on something other than God – self-improvement courses, yoga, meditation, mindfulness exercises and so on. Undeniably they have their value but they don’t in themselves produce full Christian maturity.
The weight – but also uplift - of history
Hindmarsh presented his material in roughly chronological sequence, starting with Paul’s teleological view of human life then going on through the Reformation (Calvin, Luther etc.), Pietistic Lutheranism (Johann Arndt), the Catholic Reformation (Teresa of Ávila), and the Enlightenment (William Turner) to modern times (the rise of alternatives to Christianity). As foreshadowed by the title of the lecture, Hindmarsh used church history to not only illustrate but also explain the different types of failure to mature. Notably he avoided contemporary controversies like the rise of fundamentalism, the prosperity gospel, and the conservative-progressive divide, but he found plenty of material from the Reformation onwards to show how failure to mature has become an ongoing issue in Christian life.
Reading between the lines, I detect something of a pattern running throughout this history. For one reason or another, church life has all too often settled into ways of being that reflect humanness rather than divinity. Examples include inertia, legalism, clericalism, undue love of forms, and – worst of all – turning a blind eye to need and suffering. These are what I mean by the phrase “the weight of history”, where the church has become just like any other corporation, and not in any real sense distinctively Christian. This is an absolute failure to launch, a surrender to the burden of current times. It is a denial of Christ’s assurance that “my yoke is easy and my burden is light” (Matthew 11: 30).
Thankfully, there is also the uplift of history, beginning with the resurrection of Christ himself. Uplift is the response of God’s Providence to bad times. Paul was an agent of this Providence, giving leadership and uplift to people in the early church, and numerous others have followed in his wake. Hindmarsh in his lecture named some – people like Luther, Arndt, and Teresa of Ávila and in modern times there have been other stellar examples like Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King and Pope John XXIII. Progressive Christians today aim similarly to give uplift through public advocacy, “promoting a generous and future-focused understanding of the Christian faith.”
The necessity of challenge
Another concept that needs to be mentioned here is that of challenge. Arguably, growth into a higher state of maturity cannot occur in any field without challenge. This may come either from any direction, outside or in, but to be truly meaningful I think a lot of it has to come from within: we have to push ourselves to grow. Challenge is implicit in some of Hindmarsh’s ideas, e.g. the idea of working to a goal or deliberately setting oneself to go past prevailing norms of behaviour. I like to think of challenge as adventure and to bear always in mind the paradox that God is both the ultimate reliability in life and the ultimate adventure. Sadly, I think, the sense of adventure is all too often lacking in the soul of religious institutions. This is especially the case in matters of doctrine, social teaching and practice.
As life becomes more complex by the day and questioning from the secular world gets even more intense, we face increasing challenge in the realm of doctrine or belief. Here are two examples from my own experience, both of them issues where I’ve had long internal conversations that have ultimately produced (I hope) more maturity.
The first is the observation that the Divine was conceived in the human imagination as the ultimate power, the God to be feared, the Almighty God. The fear of God has been translated into all sorts of human structures, including churches, missing the New Testament point that the Divine is also love and many other things besides. Our appropriate response has to be to love God without reservation (Matthew 22:36-38) and without cherry-picking from the list of attributes. Out of this comes, more or less inevitably, the urging to love our fellow creatures as well, without reservation (Matthew 22:39). Or in the language of the late Bishop John Spong, to love wastefully.
The second example concerns the nature of the human soul in regard to good and evil. As Hindmarsh said in his lecture, Christianity has a long history of struggle with the burden of guilt, not only the idea of original sin but also the ongoing manifestations of evil, which in our own time continue to be so distressing. Where does the human being stand in all this? All too easily we can be consumed by feelings of inadequacy, both collective and personal. Somehow we have to find an accommodation with reality and accept, with due humility, that we are not bad but simply limited – and this applies to other people as well, even tyrants and murderers. Our overriding feeling should not be one of despair, though this is instinctive, but rather one of joy, for relief is at hand. Relief is always at hand, sooner or later. Its truth is recognized across the spectrum of religious faith traditions.
Out of belief comes practice. Here again is a massive area of challenge. How far can we push ourselves in living the word of God? How far are we willing to push ourselves? There are wonderful examples of Christian practice – people who spend their lives volunteering, fundraising, lobbying and so on – and we give thanks for them. However, it goes much further than this, for Christian identity that is properly played out needs to enter everything we do, even down to the smallest things like washing dishes and behaving with decency to others in the supermarket. This is how we demonstrate Christian maturity.
Communities which fail to mature
The discussion so far has focused mostly on the individual, but it is far more than just an individual matter. Whole faith communities can fail to mature. The most stark evidence of this in recent times has been the abuse of people in care and the readiness of church leaders to protect abusers. Less extreme but also distressing is the continued refusal to fully acknowledge and embrace minorities – women, gays, addicts, lawbreakers, divorcees and all the rest. These and other problems exist not just at the top but throughout certain church organisations, beginning with failures in discernment of the word of God, then compounded by hierarchy which stifles dissent. Hierarchy can be very oppressive, even in modern times when supposedly we as a society are all encouraged to question everything.
Other factors can enter into play here, such as the size and composition of the organization, the rules by which it operates, and the prevailing culture. After two millennia we are all too familiar with the culture of protection and self-protection, where not the faith through its all-too-human body has built an enormous edifice of devotion, self-justification and modus operandi, which is not easily set aside. Part of the difficulty here is the matter of scale, for there is much to protect, some of it admittedly quite beautiful in its way. In such an environment it’s not hard to understand the lack of inclination to change, and correspondingly the lack of a sense of challenge, seeking out new ways of being. A large organization with diverse membership may well contain a coterie of questioners, people who will say “hey, there is another way of thinking”, but this does not mean their views have to gain traction. To use a metaphor from the sea, churches are like large ships which are hard to turn around.
Communities can help or hinder (or both)
Community is important also in the sense that fellow members can help or hinder an individual in the quest for maturity. There are institutional ways of doing this and private or personal ways as well. By institutional I mean such things as church or community or interfaith discussion groups or support groups or counselling services. The private or personal supports can be things like home visits with fellow parishioners, chats over coffee, offers of mediation or accompanying someone to a difficult interview. At the very least, we all have an effect on others simply through the way we live our lives, modelling the excellence of being Christian. And the way in which we do this is no less important, for joyful and optimistic spirituality is one of the most potent weapons we have.
Implications for progressive Christians
What does all this mean for progressive Christianity, not only within the soul of each individual but also in outreach to the community? Firstly, we have a lot of work to do to stay up to the mark. We cannot slacken. The factors which lead to failure to launch are always with us, potentially impeding our progress. Secondly, however, and more optimistically, we are wonderfully equipped in having an objective standard to guide us, namely likeness to Christ. Two thousand years after Christ walked the Earth it’s not easy to answer the question how would Christ behave in our situation, but we have each other to help in finding answers and then crafting them into a modern idiom, one which is suitable for our contemporary environment.
There is a great temptation facing religious people to think that we have “arrived.” We have worked out for ourselves a set of beliefs we can live with, and identified other issues where conviction is lacking but a more or less comfortable compromise can be struck. An example from Christianity might be the Virgin birth. We may not be sure whether Mary was impregnated in the way described, but in broad terms we’re prepared to accept Jesus as the Son of God, for this is, after all, what matters. Having worked out for ourselves what matters and what might be the consequences for us in terms of action, we then consider ourselves more or less complete as Christians.
A recent lecture by Professor Bruce Hindmarsh sets this “achieved” Christianity in a somewhat different light. How do our lives stand up when “measured by nothing less than the full stature of Christ?” Centuries of church history reveal various modes of thinking which have led individual Christians into – to use Hindmarsh’s words – failure to launch. On the one hand there’s failure to realise our spiritual need and the necessity for action, while on the other hand there’s confusion or wrong assumptions about the way to meet this challenge.
“Challenge” is a key word here, for it’s apparent that spiritual maturity cannot be achieved without ongoing challenge. The challenge might come from without – changing circumstances of individual life or changes in society at large. It certainly must also come from within, meaning a determined and ongoing effort to question every aspect of our belief, and then to push our personal boundaries through action which is focused on helping others.
Discussion of maturity cannot be limited to the individual, for there are whole institutions, or sections within institutions, that routinely demonstrate backward ways of thinking or going about their business. A church that allows people in its care to be abused is seriously backward. A church that devalues women or gays is also backward. And the same has to be said too of a church that thinks truth begins and ends with the Bible, with interpretations of text that are seriously at odds with the best of modern scholarship. All of this is a failing in institutional spirituality as much as personal spirituality.
To be mature in spirituality is to be open to the full height and depth of life in our relationship with the Divine, while being aware that there are no absolute boundaries. The Divine being infinite, it is we who, knowingly or unknowingly, set informal boundaries. The stranger in need that we walk by, the religious or ethical dilemma that we allow to rest unresolved – these are the markers of our current boundary line in respect of spiritual maturity. And till our dying day, we are on the path to maturity, with the boundary ever capable of changing.