The Crisis of Christian Immaturity in Our Age
My Essay from Westmont College's "The Crisis Among Us" Conference
To Be a Christian “Grown-Up”: Formation as a Goal, Not Just a Practice
Nijay K. Gupta
*The following essay was a presentation given at the Martin Institute of Westmont College on the topic of “The Crisis of Christian Immaturity in our Age” (2024). The essays from the conference will not be published, but my essay will be revised and incorporated into a future book I am writing. This essay is wide-ranging, but the main section is on how the apostle Paul used the Roman (“coming-of-age”) toga ceremony as a focal image for the expectation that Christians must “grow-up” in their faith into the full maturity that is modeled in Jesus Christ. From that perspective, “formation” is not just a kind of spiritual discipline, but has a clear end-goal of integrity, morality, wisdom, and virtue-cultivation, conforming to the full stature of Jesus Christ. We have a crisis of immaturity in our churches today because we don’t help Christians begin their faith journey with the end in mind.
I love coming-of-age stories, what academics call bildungsroman, and maybe that’s because I grew up in the 1980s, the heyday of coming-of-age films like The Breakfast Club, Stand by Me, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, The Karate Kid, and Tom Hanks’ Big. Of course, this genre is not new with the 80s. We could go all the way back in Antiquity to young hero stories like Homer’s Odyssey and the Jewish tale of how Moses went from Pharaoh’s court to YHWH’s prophet. And, of course, we have the great Western classics in the English tradition like Oliver Twist, Little Women, The Jungle Book, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Color Purple.
Why are we so fascinated with these stories? I think it’s because we all have the same experiences of having to grow up, and that unites our shared human struggle and hope. Physically, we experience “growing pains,” and existentially we do as well. Most of us come to a point where we truly have to take responsibility for ourselves and point our life in a certain direction. Put simply: We gotta be a “grown-up.” But the reality is that some people never really wrestle with that phenomenon, for one reason or another, and they become old without reaching their potential. We call that “immaturity.” This collaborative workshop has afforded me the privilege of looking at Scripture through this lens: what does the Bible, God’s Word, have to say about maturity? And as we reflect on this theologically, what does it mean for each of us to be a “Christian Grown-Up”? It certainly doesn’t happen automatically. The Bible is full of people who are stuck in spiritual adolescence, some even in infancy. It is surely a question of formation. But what I discovered in my research is something that hadn’t really dawned on me before: even though formation is a common and popular Christian buzzword, I’ve always taken it as a posture or practice, but in fact it is a goal. It is not an endlessly iterative practice, the whole idea of formation is becoming something complete. We would call that “mature,” the New Testament writers use the word teleios, “complete,” as in, what we are supposed to be in the end.
In my research, I had set out at first to find the sections of the Bible that deal with maturity; I expected to discover a few major portions and lots of little bits. I shouldn’t have been surprised to discover: this is actually what the whole Bible is about: growing up into full human being through God—and the end goal is to conform completely to the image of Christ. The biblical writer that has the most developed and consistent interest in this is Paul, no surprise there, so we will focus our attention on the theologian of Tarsus. But we begin with a sweep of the Old Testament and the teachings of Jesus to help set the stage.
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