The Essential Ingredients of a Growing Faith

It's the fall of 1995 and I’m sitting in a friend’s basement with the original North Point staff hashing out the mission and strategy statement for our newly formed church. It was within the context of this lengthy discussion that the subject of spiritual formation first surfaced. We began wrestling with questions such as:

What should our discipleship model look like?
What is our goal for the people who choose to partner with us in ministry?
What does a mature believer look like?
What role does the church have in developing Christ followers?

More than anything, we wanted to create a model that would actually facilitate spiritual maturity. We had enough church staff experience to know that in most churches spiritual formation was not the driving force behind programming (or budgeting, for that matter). We wanted to be the exception. We wanted everything we did to focus on building mature followers of Christ. And we knew that if we weren’t intentional, spiritual formation would get lost in the plethora of activities that tends to gobble up valuable time and resources.

The mission statement we had settled on was (and still is) to lead people into a growing relationship with Jesus Christ. But we felt like that needed further definition. If someone is in a growing relationship with Christ, what specifically is growing? Her hair? His beard? To make a long series of conversations short, we determined that faith is what grows in a growing relationship. Specifically, a person’s confidence in God. Confidence that God is who he says he is and that he will do what he has promised to do.

Faith, or trust, is at the center of every healthy relationship. As trust goes, so goes the relationship. A break in trust signals a break in the relationship. Sin was introduced to the world through a choice not to trust. In the Garden of Eden, humanity’s relationship with God was broken when Eve and Adam quit trusting. God has been on a quest ever since to reengage with mankind in a relationship characterized by trust. The entire Old Testament is the story of God saying, “Trust me.” It’s no coincidence that God didn’t give Israel the law until they first learned to trust him and follow him. With that as a backdrop, we shouldn’t be surprised to discover that at the epicenter of Jesus’ message was the word believe. Just as humankind’s relationship with God was destroyed through a lack of faith, so it would be restored through an expression of the same. At its core, Christianity is an invitation to reenter a relationship of trust with the Father. At the cross, sin was forgiven and we were invited to trust. It makes perfect sense that salvation comes by faith, not obedience. Intimate relationships are not built on obedience. They are built on trust. Walking by faith, again, is simply living as if God is who he says he is and that he will do everything he has promised to do. As a person’s confidence in God grows, he or she matures.

As our team continued to wrestle with the relationship of faith and spiritual maturity, we all agreed that we were way more inspired by the people who have the kind of faith that endures a no from God than those who claim their faith arm twisted a yes out of him. Big faith is a sign of big maturity. We concluded that the best discipleship or spiritual formation model would be one designed around growing people’s faith. The model most of us had grown up with was designed around increasing people’s knowledge. The models we were exposed to were primarily teaching models. We wanted to go beyond that.

But how?

If our mission was to lead people into a growing relationship with Christ — a growing relationship equated to growing faith — then we needed to know what grows people’s faith. So the conversation quickly turned to these questions: What fuels the development of faith? What are the ingredients that, when stirred together, result in greater confidence in the person and promises of God? That’s when I introduced my findings to our team.

Essential Ingredients

I explained the five things I had found that show up in everybody’s faith story. One by one, the members of our team acknowledged how each of these five dynamics had played a role in their spiritual formations as well. It was a defining moment for our team. We decided that if this was how God grew people’s faith, we should create a ministry model that continually pointed people back to these five dynamics. If these were the essential ingredients to big faith, we should build our entire model around them. So that’s exactly what we did.

The Five Faith Catalysts:

• Practical Teaching
• Private Disciplines
• Personal Ministry
• Providential Relationships
• Pivotal Circumstances 

As you might expect, you won’t find this list anywhere in the Scriptures. Remember, this list is the result of what we’ve observed. We’ve made no effort to make the list complete or balanced. These five things are what surface on their own when people tell their faith stories. Since those early days, we’ve tested our theory on numerous occasions. For several years, Reggie Joiner incorporated the five faith catalysts into his leadership training for student pastors. In one exercise he would write each of the five on a three-by-five card, turn them over so no one could read them, and then attach them from left to right across the top of a planning board. Then he would ask his audience to think through the things that contributed most to their spiritual development, good and bad, and begin calling them out. He would write down whatever came to their minds on cards and tack them under one of the five catalyst cards across the top of the board. When everyone had finished sharing, he would turn the cards over to reveal the five catalysts. Time after time, summer after summer, everything these leaders threw out as major factors in their spiritual development fit at least one of the five.

We are absolutely convinced that these five things reflect the way faith is developed. We’ve presented this idea to church leaders from every church background imaginable. Each time we do, we walk away even more convinced that these five things represent the common ground for faith development. I’m convinced this is how God works in spite of how we organize and program our churches. But imagine what would happen if we actually organized and programmed in concert with the way God works? We believe that what we’ve seen over the past seventeen years is a direct result of our efforts to do just that.