Imago Christi
A Community of Spiritual Formation Ministry
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Guiding Convictions 

 

  1. The goal of spiritual formation is a mature love relationship with God. Personal holiness, ministry effectiveness, and personal wholeness are all results of a transforming union with God.
  2. The process of spiritual formation is accomplished by the work of the Holy Spirit within the believer in conjunction with the believer's intentional cooperation.
  3. Spiritual formation happens best in an actual community.
    • A community of trust, truth and clear expectations fosters the courage to be obedient to God's calling.
    • A spiritual formation community must express vulnerability, availability and accessibility.
    • Ultimately, facilitating spiritual formation must happen in the local church.
  4. The Spiritual Formation Community must be missional in nature.
    • Its purpose must be to impact the church culture but Community members must also live their personal lives in a missional way. (By "missional", we mean the intentional effort of the member to share the ministry of spiritual formation beyond the boundaries of Imago Christi.)
  5. The relationship between Spiritual Formation and leadership development: Spiritual formation is the lens through which we understand leadership development rather than a part of one aspect of it.
    • Healthy Christian leadership is a response to and an expression of the call and work of God. Therefore, "followership" to Christ is the core of Christian leadership. The calls to love and obey Jesus are the most basic call in ministry. Only a genuinely Christian spiritual formation can serve as the foundation for biblical leadership.
    • The spiritual formation of the church leaders must precede the spiritual formation of the church itself
  6. The study and development of Spiritual Formation resources should involve a method which is participatory in style.
    • Our Spiritual Formation paradigm and language must be biblically faithful, historically validated, descriptive, developmentally sensitive, experientially validated and culturally contextualized.
    • The development of spiritual formation resources must be interdisciplinary: integrating biblical studies, history, theology, psychology and comparative religion, using resources that are inter-/non-denominational, cross-cultural, and anthropologically and gender inclusive, drawing on the wealth and history of the whole Church.
    • Spiritual Formation tools and resources are to be recommended based on the Community's personal experience with them, rather than mere acquaintance.
    • Transformation of the Church through spiritual formation is a worldwide work of the Holy Spirit. Therefore the work of Imago Christi will attempt to reproduce learning communities around the world.
    • At a most personal level spiritual formation research and development should arise out of weakness and an awareness of one's own need, not one's competence or strength. In the same way, suffering is affirmed as an important way that God forms us.
    • Comparative and competitive stances in spiritual formation are not appropriate, rather a humility born out of one's own self awareness before God.