Yes, I believe our faith is from God. Yes, I believe he's the one actually growing it. But we have to take action/respond to his prodding/be open to him, however you want to semantically put it.
I think it's important to assess our spiritual growth from time to time and how we view our own path of development. To find ways to help ourselves along, you know?
A good way to do that is by asking yourself these three questions:
- What is one thing someone else (a church, a pastor, a mentor, etc) could do for you that would help you grow?
- What is one thing you could do for yourself that would help you grow?
- What is one thing you could do for someone else that would help them grow?
The experiment
Yesterday I started a small experiment. I manage North Point Church's social media outlets, and I asked a loaded question to our nearly 5,000 member community:
What is one thing we could provide that would help you grow on your spiritual journey?
Within 45 minutes, it had a good dozen comments on it. Right now between Facebook & Twitter we've had over 30 responses.
Some of the responses were pretty great, and gave me some good food for thought of how to better help others along their journey.
Others came with caveats such as "Now, I know this isn't very 'North Point,' but..." and were very obviously "pet projects" that people miss from churches they used to be a part of.
Several were even requests for programs or events that we actually already offer! Which makes me think that our communication strategy for getting our message to our people is ineffective.
Today's question
But as good, or bad, as the feedback was...and as interested as I am in the responses...the experiment continues today with a new question:
What is one thing you could do to help yourself grow on your spiritual journey?
That's been up for an hour now. As the first question got a dozen responses in this amount of time. Want to guess how many today's question has received?
One. (1)
I'm curious to see what the end of the day brings for this one. It seems most people are able to think of things other people should be doing for them...but when it comes to what you should be doing for yourself? Well...that's a different story.
Wonder what kind of responses the 3rd question will bring? ;)
What about you?
How would you answer either (or all) of those 3 questions?
- What is one thing someone else (a church, a pastor, a mentor, etc) could do for you that would help you grow?
- What is one thing you could do for yourself that would help you grow?
- What is one thing you could do for someone else that would help them grow?
I'll go first (in the comments)
