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Citation: Sweeney, Thomas. "The Mid-Faith Crisis: Introducing Evangelicals
to the Dark Night of the Soul." D. Min., Tyndale University College &
Seminary, 2019.

***** Begin Content ******

Tyndale University College & Seminary

The Mid-Faith Crisis:
Introducing Evangelicals to the Dark Night of the Soul

A Research Portfolio
submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Ministry
Tyndale Seminary

by

Thomas Sweeney

Toronto, Canada

November 2019

i



Tyndale University College & Seminary

Research Portfolio Approval

The academic requirements for this Doctor of Ministry research portfolio have
been satisfactorily completed.

Approval Date: October 30, 2019
Student’s Name: Thomas Sweeney

First Reader:
Peter Schuurman, PhD Research Portfolio Advisor

Second Reader:
Marilyn Draper, PhD Assistant Professor of Practical
Theology

Third Reader:
Mark Chapman, PhD Associate Professor of Research
Methods; DMin Research
Projects Coordinator

ii



Copyright © 2019 by Thomas Sweeney

All rights reserved

iii

DECLARATION AND DISCLAIMER

Statement 1. This work has not previously been accepted in substance for any
degree and is not being concurrently submitted in candidature for any degree.
(Signed),
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(Date)

Statement 2. This portfolio is the result of my own independent work, except
where otherwise stated. Other sources are acknowledged with explicit references.
(Signed)
(candidate)
(Date)

Statement 3. The views expressed in this thesis are my own and do not
necessarily express the views of the thesis readers or Tyndale Seminary.
(Signed)
(candidate)
(Date)

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TYNDALE
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The Mid-faith Crisis : Introducing Evangelicals to the Dark
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v



ABSTRACT

	The mid-faith crisis is a qualitative shift in our faith experience as God
weans us of the spiritual delights lavished upon us in the initial stages of faith and
leads us on an inner journey of awareness, repentance, and surrender. This
typically occurs in middle age and often in the midst of successful ministry, so it
is often misdiagnosed as falling away from faith rather than progressing in faith.
Such strong medicine is necessary because it addresses a serious affliction: the
false self which has smuggled itself unseen into the Christian life and forms the
great obstacle between us and God as well as us and those around us. Through the
mid-faith crisis, God invites us to lay aside the false self and its tools for
navigating life, accept who we really are, and to grow ever more into our identity
as the beloved of the Father. While the mid-faith crisis is divinely initiated and
sustained, there is room for human participation in the work.

	This research portfolio explores the author's own mid-faith crisis,
proposes a model for the phenomenon and reports the results of an action research
project to develop and deliver a curriculum that introduces conservative
Evangelicals to the mid-faith crisis. It concludes by identifying further potential
development of the model and the curriculum.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF TABLES .... ix

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION .... 1

CHAPTER 2: SPIRITUAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY .... 6
	Seeker .... 6
	Student .... 16
	Servant .... 30
	Sojourner .... 41

CHAPTER 3: MODEL OF SPIRITUAL FORMATION .... 52
	When Does a Mid-Faith Crisis Occur? .... 55
	  Stages 1-3: Seeker, Student, and Servant .... 56
	  Stages 4-6: Sojourner .... 58
	  Limitations and Extensions to the Model .... 61
	Why Is a Mid-Faith Crisis Needed? .... 65
	  The Nature of the False Self .... 66
	  Turning from the False Self to the True Self .... 69
	What Does a Mid-Faith Crisis Look Like? .... 73
	  The Dark Night of the Senses .... 74
	  The Dark Night of the Spirit .... 82
	How Can One Participate in God's Work in a Mid-Faith Crisis? .... 86
	  Get Real .... 87
	  Linger with What Provokes You .... 90
	  Huddle Up .... 92
	  Assisting Another in a Mid-Faith Crisis .... 93
 	  Conclusion .... 96

CHAPTER 4: ACTION RESEARCH PROJECT .... 99
	Introduction .... 99
	  Problem .... 100
	  Response .... 101
	  Supervision, Permission and Access .... 101
	Context .... 102
	Models and Other Resources .... 103
	  Background from Model of Spiritual Formation .... 104
	  Other Resources .... 106
	Project, Methodology, and Methods .... 106
	  Field .... 106
	  Scope .... 108
	  Methodology .... 109
	  Methods .... 109

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	  Ethics in Ministry-Based Research .... 112
	Findings, Interpretation and Outcomes .... 115
	  Findings .... 115
	  Interpretations .... 119
	  Outcomes .... 124
	Conclusions and Implications .... 127

CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION .... 130
	Outcomes .... 131
	Future Implications .... 133

APPENDICES .... 136

APPENDIX A: CONSENT FORMS .... 137
	Expert Panel Member Consent Form .... 137
	Observer Consent Form .... 137
	Observer Non-Disclosure Agreement .... 138
	Learner Information Cover Letter .... 139
	Learner Consent Form .... 140

APPENDIX B: PROMOTIONAL COPY .... 142

APPENDIX C: PARTICIPANT FEEDBACK .... 144
	West Highland Baptist Church, October 21, 2018 .... 144
	Bethany Community Church, October 27, 2018 .... 144
	North Burlington Baptist Church, November 25, 2018 .... 145

APPENDIX D: CODES .... 146

APPENDIX E: THE CURRICULUM AFTER THE FINAL ITERATION .... 147
	Learning Objectives .... 147
	Lesson Plans .... 147

APPENDIX F: QUESTIONS FOR THE EXPERT PANEL .... 151

REFERENCE LIST .... 152

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LIST OF TABLES

Table 1. A comparison of the various models of developmental
spirituality .... 62

Table 2. Phases and timetable for action research .... 112

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CHAPTER 1:

INTRODUCTION

	I had a spiritual formation class to teach that night, and I realized that it
was the last thing in the world I wanted to do. This came as quite a shock to me,
as teaching was one of my favourite things to do. I never felt more alive and more
used by God as when I put my spiritual gift of teaching into practice. And there
was nothing that I loved to teach about more than spiritual formation. Yet here I
was: actually dreading the thing that I loved to do the most.

	The more I thought of it, the more I saw that it was the culmination of a
long, slow spiral to this point. I was living my long-standing dream of being a
missionary, teaching Christian spirituality at a seminary in Brazil. However, I
wondered if I was really supposed to be there. Hadn't I just forced my way
overseas, taking my legitimate call from God to be a teacher and trying to realize
it in my time and my way, like how Abraham fathered Ishmael to fulfill God's
promise? I told myself that God helps those who help themselves, but I always
had a nagging doubt that I had grabbed for the steering wheel. My ministry
appeared to be fruitful, but I wondered if God was achieving His goals in spite of
my action rather than because of it.

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	At the same time, I felt exhausted. My wife's health was poor and care for
my infant son was placing extra demands on my energy levels. These were
already low due to my bivocational rhythm of working as a software developer as
well as fulfilling my teaching role at the seminary. Unsurprisingly, my spiritual
life felt anything but lively. I hardly ever prayed or read the Bible, and yet here I
was teaching future pastors about spiritual formation. My indisposition to teach
was as much about avoiding further hypocrisy as it was about burnout. I had kept
on going to this point due to a stubborn refusal to quit. A message I had carried
from my family of origin was that I was a quitter, so I grimly carried on doing my
duty. But my eyes were as dead as my soul seemed to be. The promises of
abundant life I would teach from John 10:10 seemed a cruel joke to me at that
time.

	I didn't realize it at the time, but this season of darkness was an invitation
from God into a deeper life with Him. While I had achieved to a certain degree
the outer life I desired - the right job, in the right place, doing the right things -
my inner life could not support it. That was why it was tumbling around my ears.
God was clearing the ground so a new, stronger foundation could be built. He was
drawing me into a way of living based, not on the masks I wore or the lies I told
myself, but on my true identity as the beloved child of the Father, one in whom
Christ dwells and delights. The years that followed my ministry burnout were
dark and difficult, and much of the time it felt like nothing much was happening
at all. But all the while, the Holy Spirit was working unseen and when the fruit of
this divine work was slowly revealed, it was glorious.

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	While this journey was deeply personal, it was not unique. It is the lived
experience of too many people in conservative Evangelical churches today. It
seems that whenever I speak with earnest believers from this tradition as a part of
my ministry teaching and preaching about spiritual formation, they often admit to
similar phenomena - often without any prompting on my part. They are
sometimes cynical, sometimes despairing, and sometimes just longing for
something more. I soon learned about developmental spirituality and identified
that these dear saints were exhibiting many of the symptoms of the transition from
the spirituality of the initial stages of faith to that of the later stages - a sort of
mid-faith crisis. While this difficult season of faith can be mistaken as
backsliding, it is actually a divine work of stripping away the false self and
ushering the believer into their true self in Christ. The 16th century Spanish mystic
John of the Cross poetically described this experience as the dark night of the soul
and understood it as a necessary purgative step on the spiritual journey. Armed
with this knowledge, I would always then be sure to include a word on this
transition whenever I had a forum to teach on spiritual formation. If they could
see their discomfort and doldrums as part of the pilgrimage of faith rather than a
dead-end, it would bring some hope where there was only distress.

	Even as my ministry was enriched by this concept, I felt like a bit of a
fraud whenever I taught it. After all: where was my own crisis of faith? Was I
simply teaching about something of which I had mere head-knowledge? It
certainly felt that way. But people were being helped and no one ever raised the
awkward question of my own experience with the phenomenon, so I carried on.

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But I was soon to discover that my dark night of the soul was already underway -
and had been so for almost two decades and reached its nadir in my missionary
burnout.

	When I entered the Doctor of Ministry program at Tyndale Seminary, I
was hoping to develop further proficiency in my ministry of spiritual formation as
well as to pick up a useful credential for future professional opportunities. But I
encountered far more than that. In the first year, my spiritual autobiography
identified certain long-standing patterns that I had not perceived before. At the
same time, the requirement to meet with a spiritual director led to the discovery
that I had been suffering from acedia for many years - a sort of spiritual
despondency that saps its victim's energy and motivation. Finally, the assignment
to experiment with fixed-hour prayer for two months led me to extend the practice
through the entire liturgical year. This was a salutary prescription for my acedia
and it formed a trellis for other discoveries and spiritual practices. In the second
year, the research for my model of spiritual formation opened my eyes further to
the nature of my mid-faith crisis and uncovered paradigms and practices that
would define the contours of my new experience of faith. In the third-year action
research project, I developed a way to effectively bring this deepened (and far
more personal) understanding of the mid-faith crisis to others in my Christian
tradition.

	This portfolio chronicles that journey into mid-faith crisis. In chapter 2 I
will recount my spiritual autobiography, with particular emphasis on my own
mid-faith crisis. I follow my journey through the four stages of faith: seeker,

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student, servant and, finally, sojourner. Chapter 3 is an attempt to systematize and
generalize that personal experience, drawing on the resources of Scripture,
Church history and modern scholarship to develop a model of the mid-faith crisis
phenomenon. This model explores four key questions about the mid-faith crisis:
when it presents itself in the journey of faith, why it occurs, what it looks like and
how we can participate in the work. Chapter 4 then describes my effort to
disseminate that model by creating and refining a small group experience to
introduce conservative Evangelicals to the mid-faith crisis. In that report, I
document the cycle of continuous improvement by which I monitored the delivery
of the curriculum and implemented improvements in the experience, with the help
of key partners. I conclude this chronicle in chapter 5, summarizing the key
discoveries I made on the way and exploring the future implications for myself
and my ministry of spiritual formation.

	A greater awareness of the mid-faith crisis provides a helpful corrective to
the modern Evangelical tradition. Becoming more familiar with the dynamics of
the mid-faith crisis and the journey from the false self to the true self tempers our
triumphalism. It challenges the theology of glory that leads us to assume that the
spiritual life is forever “up and to the right” (like the revenue chart for a
successful business). Instead, knowledge of the mid-faith crisis helps us to re-
appropriate some wonderful elements of our own tradition that these glittering
visions have blinded us to, like the Puritans' healthy self-suspicion (Packer 1990,
24) and the Holiness movement's view of the spiritual life as a race, not up to
glory but down to self-sacrificial service (Hurnard 2010, Location 2954).

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CHAPTER 2:

SPIRITUAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY

	Midway upon the journey of our life
	I found myself within a forest dark,
	For the straightforward pathway had been lost.
	— Dante Alighieri, Inferno, Canto 1

	The mid-faith crisis is not merely an interesting religious phenomenon to
me. I have experienced it from the inside as I passed through my own stages of
faith. This is the story of that journey.

Seeker

	The story begins in upstate New York, where I was born in 1973 to lapsed
Catholic parents - my mother a French Canadian and my father an American of
Irish and Italian descent. My brother and I were raised with no particular religious
instruction. I was sent to the Vacation Bible School at the nearby Presbyterian
church a few times, but my parents merely saw it as part of the well-rounded
education and moral instruction necessary for functioning members of society.
From what I recall, no lasting spiritual impact was made on me there. However,
things did start happening in early 1990. During my junior year in high school, I
attended an overnight conference for a school club. Packed in four to a room, I
couldn't help but notice Derek Williams, another member of our club, reading his

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Bible before bed. I was taken aback, as I didn't realize people actually read it
anymore. What is more, I thought religious types were oddballs, but he definitely
wasn't - he was a senior and one of the more popular guys at school (academic
achiever, sporty, charismatic and good-looking).

	Never one to leave a person in need (nor miss a chance to display my
intellect), I took it upon myself to enlighten this poor, benighted rube and started
making what I thought were slam-dunk objections to the Bible. Happily, instead
of becoming offended or combative, he graciously engaged me in conversation,
patiently countering each of my arguments with a plausible answer. Once I ran
out of steam, he turned the tables on me. “If we were both to die tonight, I know
I'm going to heaven. How about you?” he asked. I mumbled something about
being a decent person so probably, yeah - but neither of us was convinced.
Mercifully, he did not press me on my answer, and we went to bed. The next
week, Derek stopped me in the school hall and gave me a copy of C.S. Lewis's
Mere Christianity (Lewis 1952a). “This might give you a better idea of what
Christianity is all about,” he explained. Derek then retreated to the background of
my life, and as far as I can remember we never had similar conversations again.

	I'm not sure that I would recommend Mere Christianity to a 16-year-old,
but it was the right thing for me at the time. It cut through the hazy view of
Christianity I had cobbled together from TV and films and presented its essence
completely and correctly. When I finished, I had developed an appreciation for
Christianity and had a new-found intellectual respect for its adherents. But I
didn't see what it had to do with me.

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	That connection came a few months later. I was in the doldrums,
inhabiting one of the many dark periods of my teen years, when I met with
another Christian acquaintance. This was an even more tenuous connection than
Derek - a girl my age whose family hosted international students like mine did.
Since she attended another high school, we had only met a handful of times and
would only meet a few times more after that fateful day. Her father and my
mother were both attending the same trade show in Baltimore, and I met her there.
She opened with a harmless question, “How are you doing?” For some reason,
that inquiry burst open the floodgates of emotion and I blurted out all that was
troubling me and how I felt - and how tired I was of feeling that way. After
speaking straight for what must have been a half hour or longer, I looked up to see
what her response would be. She replied with a simple, “Have you thought of
accepting Jesus into your life?” Again, her simple words went straight to my heart
and I resonated like a fine Waterford crystal goblet. “I just read something about
that!” I exclaimed. I concluded that my current situation was the result of running
my life my way. Since God was perfect, I reasoned, letting Him run my life would
make things go better. Not that I expected things to go perfectly - I was not so
naive as that - but I thought that His way was the path to the best possible life. So,
I decided to follow Jesus - April 20th, 1990, at about 10 p.m. in a Baltimore hotel.

	Sociologists like to attribute conversion to shifts in one's social network.
In Rodney Stark's study of converts to the Moonies, he discovered that

	of all the people the Moonies encountered in their efforts to spread
	their faith, the only ones who joined were those whose
	interpersonal attachments to members overbalanced their

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	attachments to nonmembers. In effect, conversion is not about
	seeking or embracing an ideology; it is about bringing one's
	religious behavior into alignment with that of one's friends and
	family members. (Stark 1996, 16-17)

However, this dynamic was not in play when I converted. When I recounted this
story to my wife almost a decade later, she remarked how amazing it was that
God reached down and plucked me out of agnosticism, without a single Christian
among my family or social circle to influence me. The two people involved were
very loose acquaintances who did not know one another and who had almost no
contact with me after their key conversations. I've always seen it as a miracle and
thanked the Father for His prevenient grace.

	I didn't know much about following Jesus in those early days, but
fortunately I knew two things: I had to read His word to understand what His way
really was, and I needed to meet with other believers. Therefore, I soon equipped
myself with a Bible, and the next Sunday I showed up at the nearest building with
a cross on it. Thankfully, it was a mainstream Christian church and not a cult
(Ballston Center Church, an Associate Reformed Presbyterian congregation in
upstate New York). The first thing my new Lord taught me was that I was a
sinner and needed to be saved, so I readily repented of my sin and, after some
classes on basic Christianity, I was baptized. That event was a strange
combination of wonder and disappointment. I invited my family and they came
(much to my surprise and pleasure - more on that later), and I was delighted to
declare my new faith to them and the congregation. However, the Presbyterians
baptize by aspersion - sprinkling the candidates with water the way the Israelite

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priests sanctified people by sprinkling them with blood. I was somewhat surprised
that this was all there was to it. Today, I would baptize by immersion - not as a
more Biblical mode but as a more richly experiential one. Nevertheless, I
considered myself truly baptised.

	Every new day brought a new discovery - I learned about the life of Jesus
and His instructions on how to live. I was especially drawn to the teaching
sections of the gospel of Matthew (I'll never know why we send seekers to John -
Matthew's practical instruction always appealed to me more) and the second half
of all Paul's letters (when he switched from being theological to teaching how to
live). I devoured every sermon, soon filling the inside back cover of my new
Bible with three-point notes. I ransacked the small church library, with Jungle
Pilot (Hitt 2017) and The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life (Smith 1985) being
early favorites.

	My early growth wasn't merely intellectual, however. Within two weeks
of my conversion I noticed that the explosive temper that had plagued my teen
years had entirely evaporated. Many years later I learned from John of the Cross
that new converts often experience miracles and great consolations to firmly
establish them in the kingdom. This deliverance from my tempestuous explosions
was my housewarming present from my new Lord.

	As rich as my private exploration of the Way of Jesus was, it was
connecting with others that bore some of the greatest fruit. I joined the youth
group right away. A few months later, I learned that Young Life was seeking to
open a chapter in my high school, and as a preliminary effort was establishing

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Bible studies for students who were already Christians. After meeting for a year,
these Campaigners groups would then form the nucleus of a Club meeting that
our non-Christian friends would be invited to. My Campaigners group consisted
of myself and the pastor's son, and we were led masterfully by Joe Paolella.

	Joe was like a spiritual personal trainer. He guided us through several
Bible study guides and encouraged us to memorize Scripture. He also
demonstrated the importance of sharing our faith with those around us -
especially our fellow students. This was an especially hard point of obedience for
me, as I was painfully introverted and saw high school as an indignity to be
suffered patiently until I could escape to university - preferably out-of-state. Most
of these students had either actively bullied me or had passively looked on as I
was bullied without interfering. I was therefore disinclined to show any kind of
vulnerability before them, let alone do something as risky as share my faith.
However, both what I was learning in my own Bible reading as well as Joe's
patient tutelage showed me that keeping my faith to myself was not an option.

	Thus challenged, I tentatively began to reach out to those around me. It
was hard to emerge from my defensive shell, but God was gracious to infuse my
halting obedience with the power of the Holy Spirit. One time, I noticed a girl I
didn't know sitting curled up against the wall crying quietly. As I proceeded to
walk by like I normally would - no sense borrowing trouble - I felt an inner voice
prompt me to stop and care for her. Unsure exactly how to respond, I asked her if
she was alright. She was taken aback by my concern and mumbled that she was
fine as she dried her eyes. Unsure how to proceed, I simply gave her a big smile

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and wished her a good day. I have no idea what impact I had on her, if any, but it
was the first time I had been directed by my Lord and I walked on air the whole
rest of that day!

	Another episode occurred in the high school library. It was one of my
favourite haunts, as I loved to read and I was safer from harassment there - it was
not a popular hangout spot. One day, however, my sanctuary was invaded by
three guys at the next table who started mocking me. I just wanted to hide, so I
got up from where I was sitting and went to hide among the books in the stacks
until they left. However, as I was scanning the book titles without really looking
at them, I felt the Holy Spirit address me. I forget the exact instructions, but I was
filled with boldness and confronted the guys directly but in love. I didn't call
them out, but rather sat down and engaged them in civil conversation. Confused
by the unexpected turn of events, they quickly made an excuse and left. For the
first time, I had overcome bullying through the power of the Spirit, rather than
hateful fists or a cutting word.

	A third manifestation of the Holy Spirit came when I was speaking with
my friend Julie. She came from a difficult family background and was sharing a
recent painful episode with me. When I opened my mouth to offer some advice,
some powerfully comforting and challenging words poured forth. When I
finished, she remarked, “Whoa, that was deep.” This echoed my own internal
response exactly. Later, I read in Matthew 10:19 that Jesus taught His disciples
that when they would be arrested by the authorities, “you will be given what to
say.” Those experiences of being spoken through have always come unexpectedly

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and richly blessed those I was addressing. Every time has been a high honour and
a humbling experience, and I long for the next time.

	It was also at around this time that I discovered my gift for teaching. I had
just re-read Mere Christianity (Lewis 1952a), and I was particularly taken with
the chapter on pride. I arrived at the next youth group meeting with my well-worn
copy and thrust it into the hands of Jason Lang (the adult volunteer leader), telling
him how great the chapter had been and how the other teens in the group would
benefit from his teaching it. He smiled benignly and said, “Sure, I could teach it.
But I think it would be better coming from you. You do it. Next week.” I was
terrified. Not only did I feel painfully shy, but I thought myself completely
unqualified. After all, the other teens had been born into the church, while I was a
Johnny-come lately who still couldn't always find the selected passage in his
Bible (especially if it was in that extended Jewish preface called the Old
Testament). I tried to beg off, but he insisted: if the material was to be taught, it
would have to be by me. I agonized with it over a few days, but then made my
decision: the material was too good to keep to myself, so I was just going to have
to do it.

	Everyone knew something odd was up when Mr. Lang opened the
devotional time in prayer as usual, but then broke tradition by sitting down and
smiling at me. I nervously arose and, hiding behind my notes the whole time,
explicated Lewis's instruction on what pride was, how dangerous it was, and how
to fight it. You could have heard a pin drop. Instead of the usual goofing around
and (repeated) admonitions to pay attention, the group was dead silent. I was sure

13



I had bombed, and I was crushed that I had let my hero down by not representing
him as well as he deserved. I scuttled back to my seat and the evening carried on.
I went up to Mr. Lang afterwards and told him how badly I thought it went, as
was evidenced by their silence. He assured me that I had done a good job, and
their silence was simply due to their being unaccustomed to being addressed by
one of their own number.

	That was the start of a life-long practice of discovering a particularly
powerful or interesting idea and wanting to share it with others. Whether in
Sunday School or small group, Bible college classes or doctoral seminars, I
happily grabbed a mic wherever one was on offer. Lewis once observed that, “we
delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but
completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation” (Lewis 1952a, 81).
Similarly, I found teaching was the consummation of learning. If I ever were to
stop learning (Lord, forbid it), I would no longer feel the desire to teach, and
teaching the same thing over and over becomes tiresome to me; I want to go and
learn something new and share that. When I later learned about spiritual gifts, it
became quickly apparent that I had the gift of teaching - or perhaps more
accurately a gift of learning whose overflow takes the form of teaching.

	Unfortunately, it was not all peace and power in my first years as a Christ-
follower. My parents grew steadily more opposed to my church activities as time
went on. At first, they were pleased that I had acquired a taste for religion. In their
eyes, church would be an encouragement in my moral development, a new circle
for developing social skills and friendships, and an arena for volunteerism and

14



leadership development - all good things to equip me for life as a well-
-functioning member of society (and things that look good on a college
application). My older brother had experienced a religious renewal of sorts at
about the same age, which had faded in a year or two, so I'm sure they expected
much of the same thing. It was just a good thing while it lasted, but simply a
phase that I would invariably pass through on my journey.

	However, services every Sunday morning became youth group on Sunday
night, to which was added Bible study with Joe on Monday night. The parental
encouragement evaporated and was soon replaced by comments on how, “too
much of a good thing is bad, you know.” I insisted, explaining to them that if
Jesus was the most important thing in the world, then there was no such thing as
giving Him too much of my time. It was not an answer that allayed the fears of
nervous parents. Fortunately, the pastor was a neighbor, and so they trusted that I
wasn't being drawn into a cult. I further complicated things by being brash in my
witness to them. I perpetrated more than one “drive-by prophecy” (Pohl 2012,
132), speaking into their lives without humility and love. Unfortunately, the
offense I gave had less to do with the essential offense of the Gospel and more to
do with my arrogance. I burnt relational bridges with my family in those days that
I still haven't managed to rebuild, to my great sadness.

	For many years as a new believer, I was envious of those who grew up in
a Christian home. However, as time passed, and I got to know more and more
young adults who grew up in Christian families, I realized that for all that I lacked
with my non-Christian upbringing, there was one thing I had that few of them did.

15



I never doubted that my faith was real, and that it was my own. I never wondered
if I would have been Buddhist had I grown up in a Buddhist family. My faith was
such a break with my family of origin, that I owned it right from the start and
never wondered if I had merely taken the easy option. I felt lost at times as to how
to walk this road, but I never wondered if it was truly my own.

Student

	I went to McGill University in Montreal, Canada, to study Civil
Engineering. I chose this due to pragmatic factors, including my aptitude for math
and science, the low tuition (10% of the cost of the American school I was also
considering), and the fact that it was a field useful in missions but which my
parents would be willing to pay for. I attended the nearby People's Church, which
became a safe haven for me during the difficult first year at McGill. The
educational experience itself was fairly positive, and I got on well with my
neighbours in the dorm, but spiritually I was under fire. The typical dorm bull
sessions were opening me to new ideas, and it seemed every week brought a new
crisis of faith. I would corner the pastor after the Sunday service or the adult
education class and pose to him my latest burning question. He was very gracious
to me, mostly, I think, because he discerned that I was genuinely wanting to find
an answer and was not just playing stump-the-pastor. I clearly remember about
five crises in, as the familiar panic started to rise, saying to myself, “Every one of
my previous doubts has been settled easily. Why not just give God the benefit of
the doubt this time and only start panicking if the pastor doesn't have an answer?”

16



It was a major turning point, and I haven't experienced doubt the same way since.
I have doubted, but I've always approached it with the same default posture of
trust.

	The pastor at People's also helped me in another key way. I had played
Dungeons and Dragons for several years prior to my conversion, and I became
convicted upon reading in Acts 19 how the converts of Ephesus burned their
books of sorcery, despite their expense. I threw out my extensive collection of
source books for the game, but always had a sense of worry about what demonic
influences I might have opened myself up to. My first church didn't promote this
idea - my demonology was derived entirely from Frank Peretti's This Present
Darkness (Peretti 1986). Halloween every year was an especially uneasy time for
me after I converted, but during my first year at McGill the terror became almost
unmanageable. I turned again to the pastor, going so far as to book a counselling
session with him during the week - no quick question after Sunday school was
going to cut it this time. He took my concerns seriously but did not fan the flames
of the fear by magnifying the power of Satan and his demons. Instead, he pointed
out to me that Halloween was originally a holy day and that Satan was just
puffing up his feathers on that day to distract me from the good things to
celebrate. He completely allayed my fears and I never again worried about
demonic oppression from my past.

	When I returned home from that first semester at university, I couldn't
wait to see my church family and friends. What a difference from the spiritual
environment at school - instead of being assailed by doubts and fears, I enjoyed a

17



happy reunion with friends and mentors, where everyone knew me and I knew
them. It was like being wrapped up in a warm blanket in front of a fire after
coming in from the cold. As I returned to McGill in January, I mourned the loss of
that comfort and faced the prospect of another semester with little fellowship and
a constant struggle with dread. It was as though I had held my spiritual breath for
3 months, gulped down air over Christmas, and was about to hold my breath again
for another quarter. Thankfully, the Lord stepped in and I felt challenged to do
something about my situation. After all, only two years ago, I had no Christian
friends, and in that short time (for me) I had managed to grow a network of
relationships whose support I had just enjoyed. Surely, with God's help, I could
do it again.

	I returned to school with a mission - to build a Christian network for
myself in Montreal. The first step was to make one good Christian friend, so I
started praying each day that God would bring the right man along. Wandering
into the engineering building later than usual, I bumped into an acquaintance
leaving. I had met Lester Loud at a People's Church young adults' event but
hadn't seen him since because I stopped going to those events. He was a fellow
McGill student, but our paths had never crossed on campus because he was a
graduate student who worked in the electrical engineering department and keep 9-
to-5 hours, whereas I frequented the civil engineering quadrant of the building,
hung out in undergraduate circles and had most of my classes in the morning. It
was pure coincidence that we met within a week of my return to school in winter

18



- although I've found that God orchestrates such coincidences more often when I
am praying for them.

	I had an immediate sense that this was the friend I was seeking - a sense
that, in hindsight, I see as a prompting by the Holy Spirit. I greeted him
enthusiastically and insisted that we have a meal together. He agreed, but I
pressed for booking a time right then - I was afraid that it would never happen if
we relied on a vague intention to meet. He was a bit taken aback but agreed. We
shared a meal at his small apartment just up the street from the engineering
school, during which I dove straight past the chit-chat, shared my story -
especially how I had held my breath the previous semester - and asked him if he
would be willing to meet weekly to read the Bible together. I'm sure I was
coming on way too strong, but I was desperate, and the only model I had for
forming Christian fellowship was in a Bible study with Joe and Adam. He
graciously agreed to do so, and a wonderful friendship began to form. I would not
have to hold my breath again, and I had learned a pattern of proactive engagement
with Christian community that I've used throughout my life as I've moved from
place to place around the world. Fellowship is an empty bucket: it doesn't come
already full; it only contains what you put into it.

	In my second semester, I also joined the Canadian Army Reserve.
Although I declined a US Air Force scholarship to Boston University, I had been
working towards a military career for so long that I still had the desire to serve. I
learned that, unlike in the States, Canadian reservists had no fixed period of
enlistment. That is, one could muster out just about any time you liked. The

19



philosophy was that if you didn't want to be there, they didn't want you there
either. The result was a small force of highly motivated personnel who were
routinely tapped by the Regular Force (i.e., career military) to help them fulfill
Canada's peacekeeping commitments. When I learned that Canadian Air Force
reservists were not typically pilots (but rather filled other roles like ground
crews), I enlisted in the Canadian Army reserve. I chose the Royal Montreal
Regiment because I learned they were the toughest unit (unlike the Black Watch
and Canadian Grenadier Guards - the other two English-speaking Army reserve
units in Montreal - whose ceremonial roles affected the amount of real soldiering
they did).

	In my second year, I joined Lester at Westview Bible Church, an
independent congregation on the west part of the island of Montreal. This, more
than any other, was my home church during my university years. Some Sundays it
took over two hours by public transit to get there - which was a bit hard to take in
the Montreal winters - but the preaching and community was worth it to me.
They had a vibrant young adults' ministry and Pastor Ross Hastings's sermons
were exceptional. I still remember one in which he differentiated the Greco-
Roman ideal of hero-leadership from the biblical model - something very helpful
to me as a young leader in the military who had thus far been steeped in the hero
approach.

	While at Westview, I met Sean Jardine, an IT professional in his late 20s.
We shared a lot of interests, including taking our faith seriously and a love for
technology. I enjoyed his generous hospitality many times, and he never missed a

20



chance to fill an always-ravenous student with good food from his home country
of Trinidad. I even did some causal work at the company where he worked,
helping him with some low-skill IT tasks. He was a good friend and challenged
my faith when, at times, it flagged.

	When the time came to take my arts elective in my engineering degree, I
selected a course from the Religious Studies faculty. Since I couldn't go to Bible
college, I could do the next best thing and take a Synoptic Gospels course. I found
myself sitting uncomfortably between two camps - the pierced, tattooed and
colourfully-coifed youngsters my age from the Religious Studies faculty on one
side, and the strait-laced, middle-aged, second-career pastoral trainees from the
seminaries affiliated with the Montreal School of Theology on the other. My age
and outlook matched the first group, but my confessional stance fit the other.
Therefore, I sat in the middle (the two groups were literally divided, seating
themselves on opposite sides of the classroom). The lecturer cheerfully adopted a
neutral stance, where neither party could tell if he was on their side. During that
semester, I learned a great deal about the historical-critical method and how to
apply it to understanding the troublesome passages in the gospels. However, I
paid a great price for those skills. For almost two years after, I could not open my
Bible without falling into that analytical mode. My devotional reading of the
Bible - fairly regular until that point - took a nose-dive, and it took years to get
back to reading it as God's love letter to me. I had learned to master the text but
had forgotten how to allow the text to master me.

21



	In my final semester at McGill, I suffered my first major depressive
episode. I had always had bouts of melancholy but never thought anything of it.
Other times, I wasn't so much sad as unmotivated to do anything, even the things
I usually loved to do. Today I recognize this as the classic sign of depression, but
at the time I just chastised myself for being lazy and urged myself to get focused -
usually unsuccessfully. But during my last few months at McGill there were days
I couldn't get out of bed until noon. I had a capstone project with a team of
classmates and often missed our meetings, resulting in a low peer-review grade.
In fact, if it hadn't been for my friend Eric on the team - who covered his own
work and some of mine as well - I probably wouldn't have passed at all. I wasn't
even well enough to be frightened by what had come over me. All I wanted to do
was avoid any responsibility or pressure. After graduating, I went back home to
New York and slowly recovered over the summer.

	After that summer I faced a decision point. I had been on a railroad up to
that point - elementary school, middle school, high school, then university.
Suddenly the railroad turned into a wide-open field. I could go anywhere and do
anything; nothing made that more obvious than when September came around and
I did not have anywhere in particular to go. Ever since a missionary from Mercy
Ships did a presentation at my church in New York, I had a yearning to go into
missions. I still had that yearning, but I had no idea how to bridge the gap from
where I was to missionary service. My very limited research showed that most
missionaries had to fundraise their monthly support, and I was very turned off by
that prospect. Surely there was some way I could serve and earn a salary at the

22



same time? This lack of faith would plague much of my ministry career - the
money question always had to be sorted out first before I would step out into
something. I quickly learned that the few places that paid missionaries required
more than just a degree - they wanted prior overseas experience.

	I therefore set about to force my way overseas, one way or another.
Through correspondence with a university buddy, Matt, who lived in Calgary, I
learned of a non-profit that collected donations of medical equipment and other
supplies and shipped them to needy places around the world. I worked out an
unpaid internship where I would be housed and fed, so I packed up my old van
(inherited from my parents) and drove across most of the continent.
Unsurprisingly, the internship didn't pan out, but it did lead to a position with
Waterworks Technologies, a small water treatment company based in Calgary
that worked in a few locations around the world. I was shipped off in short order
to Malaysia, where I began work designing and building small water treatment
plants for factories. I had made it overseas!

	However, the elation quickly faded. I had to work 6 days a week, as
Saturday was a half-day due to Friday being a half-day to allow the Muslims to
attend mosque. Only, since we were non-Muslim, we just worked all day Friday,
and then Saturday afternoons to finish things up. I wasn't building water
treatment systems to bring safe water to the poor - I was building systems to
allow mega-corporations to meet water emissions standards. In fact, we even
quoted on treating wastewater from a cigarette factory. Finally, even on my free
Sundays, I never sought out a local church - mostly because I was too tired -- and

23



my one or two attempts to find an English-speaking congregation failed. While I
enjoyed the people and their culture, I did not like the work at all. Worse still, my
spiritual life was at an all-time low for lack of fellowship and neglect of my usual
devotional practices.

	Disappointed and burnt out, I looked for something to do back in North
America. On my drive out to Calgary, I had stayed overnight with my friend Sean
from Montreal, who had since moved to the Toronto area. He was working for an
IT services company, running a team of technicians for a large desktop upgrade
project for a big bank. He was dissatisfied with the quality of the team's work and
offered me a position since we had worked well together in the past. I wasn't
ready at the time, but I remembered his offer when things soured in Malaysia. I
emailed him (still a pretty new thing in 1997) and discovered that the position was
still open, so I flew back to Calgary and drove to Toronto.

	I soon realized that I had grabbed at the first chance to go overseas and
didn't have a real plan on how to engage in mission. Just being overseas wasn't
enough - I needed to learn how to go about doing mission while I was there.
Furthermore, I had to figure out how to stay spiritually vital while doing it. I
returned to Canada with my tail between my legs, chastened but with the mission
fire still burning in my chest.

	In short order, I established myself in the West end of Toronto. Sean made
it easy - I rented a room in his home, I worked for him, and I attended his church
(a Plymouth Brethren church called Erindale Bible Chapel). One fringe benefit of
the latter was that I met my future wife, Karen, there. A former missionary kid

24



who grew up in Brazil, she was as eager to get into missions as I was. She had
done her bachelor's degree at Bethany College of Missions and was working for a
few years in Canada to get to know her parent's home country before heading out
into a life of missions herself.

	Once the dust had settled, I turned to the task of properly re-entering the
mission field. I very quickly learned that any mission agency required at least a
year of theological study. Once again unwilling to give up my regular salary, I
looked for some option where I could study on evenings and weekends. Since I
already had a bachelor's degree, I was encouraged to attend a seminary, and so I
found myself at Tyndale Seminary. Although I only intended to do the minimum
one year of study, I was deftly upsold into the new Modular MTS program. This
had two things going for it: I only had to go on campus one night a week, yet I
would complete the program in three years. Since this meant I could continue to
work full-time (again that lack of faith with finances), I enrolled.

	I was concerned about attending seminary. If a single Bible course put me
into a devotional tailspin that took years to recover from, what would a whole
degree - seventeen courses - do to me? I could be in deep trouble. But I needed to
proceed. Not only was my own missions calling pushing me forward, my new
fiance was even more interested in missions than I was, so I had to get this done!
So, with great trepidation, I enrolled in the program.

	I showed up at Tyndale on a hot Monday night in August 1998 for a
disagreeable orientation. The seminary had grown out of its new space and
sometimes used the undergraduate classrooms in the old building, which had no

25



air conditioning. Ever since collapsing from heat exhaustion during a field
exercise in the Army, I haven't handled heat very well. But that wasn't the real
problem. The Modular MTS operated on a cohort system, in which all the
students starting on a particular semester would work through the same seventeen
courses sequentially together. The upside was that you could throw yourself
entirely into each course as it came, as you would only work on one course at a
time. The downside was that the program was a railroad, not a highway - you had
no options and no electives. This wasn't too bad, as I didn't know anything about
theology, and the few class titles I could understand were basically what I
expected. But the very first class on the list was Elements of Christian
Spirituality. What sort of namby-pamby, touchy-feely, navel-gazing nonsense was
this? I came to seminary to learn the Bible, not some mystical garbage that was
probably deeply compromised by New Age practices. But there was nothing for it
- that was the program, take it or leave it. So I showed up for the first class, arms
crossed, determined not to learn a thing.

	My first hint that the course wasn't going to be what I expected was the
professor. Donald Goertz was trained academically as a historian but had also
worked as a missionary and pastor and had known great loss. In the Army, we
would say that those few soldiers who had served in combat had seen the
elephant. Donald had seen the elephant, in ministry, in life and in prayer. He
spoke about life with God in a quiet, humble way that made it seem both
marvelous and attainable. There was no bombast of the triumphalist and no
deliberate vagueness of the guru; only an honest casting of a vision of what

26



relating to God could be and a patient instruction on the means of going about it. I
was disarmed by this man's demeanour and found myself opening up to where he
wanted to lead us.

	Of the many things Professor Goertz taught us in that class, I was most
profoundly impacted by two things. The first was a survey of the history of
Christian spirituality. This opened my eyes to Christian spirituality as an
academic field of study. I was immediately hooked for three reasons. First, it is
primarily a historical discipline in its methodology, and I'd always enjoyed
history. Second, being focused on how people live the Christian life, it was an
applied discipline. I still had the heart of an engineer, and engineers use
theoretical knowledge to solve practical problems. But the greatest reason was
that the concerns I had entering the program were allayed. Here was a discipline
that demanded all my analytical rigour, but which, by nature of the subject matter,
forced you to keep close to the beating heart of the Christian faith. It was far
harder for me to disconnect my head from my heart when studying prayer than
when studying the redactive history of the book of Isaiah. I was reassured that
seminary would not be the ‘cemetery' for my faith that I feared it would be.

	Even more fundamental than my attraction to the study of Christian
spirituality was the self-discovery I made through the Myers-Briggs evaluation.
As part of the Elements course, we all had to do the MBTI assessment and learn
what our profile meant with the help of a facilitator. Two ground-breaking
personal revelations came from this exercise. The first was that certain personality
traits that I had long ago written off as character flaws were revealed to simply be

27



preferences that were neutral in and of themselves. My introversion was no longer
mistaken for misanthropy, but merely the way I gain my energy. Furthermore, my
intuition - which had long been denigrated in my family of origin as being flighty
and having my head in the clouds - was validated as a how I perceived the world
around me. To be sure, each of these preferences had their weaknesses that I
needed to work on, but they were no longer entirely problematic. The liberation I
felt as a result of this discovery is hard to overstate. The second revelation that
came from this was that all four of my preferences - introversion, intuition,
thinking and judging (INTJ) - were very strong, and Mulholland warned that it
was vital to pay attention to one's shadow side (Mulholland 1993, 57-59). I
became convicted that my faith was one-sidedly analytical, and I needed urgently
to develop my feeling side.

	After the initial course on Christian spiritualty, there were some semester-
long spiritual formation exercises. The first was journaling, which I struggled
with for a whole year until it finally started to feel natural and pay dividends in
the form of being able to plot the trajectory of God's recent work in my life.
Second, was meeting monthly with a spiritual friend. Through these and other
spiritual disciplines, God began to develop the feeling side of my faith.
Particularly helpful in this regard was Jonathan Edwards's classic, Religious
Affections (Edwards 1984). It was recommended by Professor Goertz in our
Church History II class as a book that should be kept in a glass case at the back of
every church with the instructions, “Break glass in case of revival.” Intrigued by
this endorsement, I picked up James Houston's paraphrase where, in part one, I

28



learned that “affections are the evidence of true religion” (Edwards 1984, 3).
Beyond orthodoxy (right belief) and orthopraxy (right behaviour), the Christian
life also essentially consists of orthopathy (right feelings). Happily, I quickly
discovered that I could not generate these feelings within myself, nor was I
expected to. Just as obedience to the ethic of the Sermon on the Mount is beyond
the reach of human effort, but possible only with divine assistance, so too were
Edwards's religious affections purely a gift. There were, however, things I could
do to intentionally place myself before God to be quickened - the spiritual
disciplines.

	Over the course of my studies, my heart began to soften and burn with a
passion for God. There is no better evidence of that than the notice my new wife
took of the change occurring within me. She often remarks today that she
witnessed a remarkable growth in my sensitivity to the feelings of others, as well
as a growing piety and zeal. I praise the Lord for this work within me, and even
today I perceive a qualitative distinction between my Christian life prior to and
after seminary.

	The other course that had a significant impact on my life and faith was Dr.
Jeff Greenman's Work, Vocation and Ministry. Up to that point, I had always
seen my secular work as merely a way of financing ministry. It also had some
instrumental value as a venue for connecting with non-Christians for evangelism
purposes, but that was about it. If I were relieved of the need for a paycheque, I
would gladly have left the secular workforce and taken up full-time ministry.
However, Dr. Greenman opened my eyes to a new way of looking at things.

29



Surveying the Scriptures, he showed us how ‘the Lord's work' was executed in all
kinds of workplaces, not just at churches. For example, artists and parents imitate
God's creative work; mechanics and cooks participate in the Lord's sustaining
work; therapists and garbage collectors do redemptive work; teachers and
cartoonists undertake revelatory work. So the work I did Mondays to Fridays had
intrinsic value in and of itself, beyond any instrumental value it generated.

	This gave me a new-found respect for my secular work and (the
beginnings of) a model of how to do it to the glory of God; these were joined to
my missions calling through my discovery of tentmaking. Taking its cue from
how the Apostle Paul made tents (Acts 18:3), this movement in missions sought
to use secular work as both an instrumental means of providing sustenance for the
missionary and a point of contact with locals, as well as a way to supply benefits
intrinsic to the work itself. The related field of bivocational ministry, which was
what pastors not working overseas called working part-time outside of the church,
supplied me with some further helpful ideas on how to do this well. By the end of
it all, I was firmly convinced that intentionally bivocational ministry was for me.

Servant

	When I graduated from Tyndale in the summer of 2001, I faced another
decision point. My wife and I lacked any sort of geographical element in our
missions calling. Having read too many missionary biographies, we had the
impression that a real missions calling included a calling to a location - the more
specific the better. However, we lacked any draw to a location - only the general

30



desire to serve overseas. After praying for a season revealed no guidance in that
department, we decided to go to Brazil. After all, her parents were still in the field
and needed help, and we figured that God would have an easier time steering a
moving car rather than a parked one, so we went ahead. We joined her parents'
mission and prepared to go.

	Neither of us were big on deputation (what missionaries call fundraising,
which felt at the time like asking people who work for a living to give you some
of their hard-earned money so you can swan about in an exotic locale), but for
different reasons. I was embarrassed to beg - especially without a proper missions
calling story - and reluctant to rely on others remembering to give every month.
Furthermore, I was convinced that the tentmaking model of missions was best.
Karen's reason was more spiritual - her parents belonged to the Muller school of
missions finance and never asked for funds.1 She had grown up seeing God
supply miraculously time and time again for her parents, so she thought that was
just how it worked. With this antipathy firmly in place, we informed our church's
mission board that we were heading overseas for two years and asked them to
support us in prayer while we were gone. Lacking Muller's faith, I fervently
hoped they would read between the lines and send the occasional cheque, too. I
looked for a software job when I arrived in Brazil and found one at MindQuest, a
__________																	
1 George Muller ran an orphanage in 19th century Bristol, England for decades -
raising over 10,000 orphans - and established more than 100 schools
(Christianity. com 2010). He did all this never once asking for money, instead
receiving unsolicited donations of money or goods - sometimes mere minutes
ahead of the need.

31



business education firm that localized training materials from English-speaking
business schools for the Brazilian market.

	Working full time limited my church work, as did my poor language
ability, so all I really did on that front was start a spiritual formation group for
English-speaking missionaries from several different mission agencies working in
the city. It was a rich experience of fellowship, and we made some life-long
friends there. Meanwhile, Karen took up her ministry where she had left off and
enjoyed the work. But I struggled. The spiritual formation group was invigorating,
and the software work was good overall, but living at the mission base and the
limited work I did there were hard for me. This was mostly due to my selfishness
- not wanting to participate in the life of the community when I got home after a
long day of work. Furthermore, I was resentful of being an appendage - I was
known as Karen's husband, or even Andy's son-in-law. I found it a hard shadow
to live under, despite his always being respectful of me. I chafed under the
conditions there and found a way to cut my term short by a few months. Deeply
disappointed in myself, and once again despairing of how my foray into missions
had gone, I returned to Canada in 2003, shamefully thankful to be home.

	After being back in Canada for a few months, I reflected on my time in
Brazil. I noticed that, of everything I studied at seminary, spiritual formation was
the material I found myself using again and again while in Brazil. I also hungered
for further transformation, as it had become clear from my less-than-stellar finish
that I needed a lot more maturing. I returned to Tyndale part-time and enrolled in
every spiritual formation class they offered over a four-year period. I also took

32



some related courses in the form of an advanced theology course on soteriology,
two courses on education, and a stint as a student research assistant for Dr.
Greenman. I was a sponge whose thirst could not be slaked.

	All of these established a much more solid foundation for my spiritual
formation ministry - and my own spiritual formation, as well! However, the
greatest single impact was my 10-month long spiritual direction practicum under
Dr. Duncan Westwood. It was a perfect fit for me in three ways. First, Duncan
was cross trained as a psychotherapist and a spiritual director, so he had a broad
knowledge of all forms of soul care, and he worked at the Missionary Health
Institute in Toronto, so he understood the world of missions very well indeed.
Second, the course was largely self-directed. With Duncan's help, I was expected
to produce a personalized reading plan for the practicum. I got to read as much as
I wanted on what I wanted, under the careful tutelage of an expert. It was like I
had died and gone to heaven. Finally, as a practicum, the other mode of learning
was to actually do some spiritual direction under Duncan's supervision. This fed
my inner engineer, who wanted to use all this wonderful knowledge I had been
accumulating to help people practically.

	I was paired with another student, and we met as a group one week and
alone with Duncan the following week. I was intimidated, as she and Duncan
were both the quiet, contemplative types who had filled most of the spiritual
formation classes I took after my return from Brazil. I am shy, but once I get
comfortable, I enjoy laughing and cracking jokes. That somehow didn't seem
appropriate - not in keeping with the gravitas of what we were studying. I also

33



discovered along the way that I did not pick up on the emotional wavelength that
my fellow students seemed to be aware of, and no one else seemed to have the
kinds of questions my analytical mind ceaselessly kicked up. So I was quite
withdrawn at the start of the practicum.

	One day, Duncan had enough and cornered me like a rat (in Christian
love, of course). In one of our role-playing exercises, he laid out a scenario where
someone wanted help in learning how to pray. I desperately hoped he would call
on my far more qualified classmate, for whom prayer seemed like a native
language. For me, prayer remained a challenge, and all my efforts were qualified
successes at best and dismal silences at worst. But he turned to me and asked,
“Tom, what would you do?” I had the integrity to throw up my hands, confessing
the sham of my participation in a course on spiritual direction when my own
prayer life was so weak. He smiled, and gentled prodded me to provide an answer
anyway. Despairing, I cast aside my ill-fitting contemplative mask and simply
laid out how I would teach the person a number of different ways to pray and then
see which one of them was the best fit for their personality and stage of faith. It
wasn't the spiritual approach; it was just plain old instruction. How pedestrian,
how cognitive. Settling back into his chair with a broad smile, he announced that I
was rabbinic, and urged me to practice that style of direction. I sputtered my
objections, but he assured me that the Church needed me to direct with integrity,
instead of aping some other style of which there were already many practitioners.
My classmate, who had recovered her composure after the initial shock of this
outpouring from her erstwhile mute colleague, graciously shared how, as a piano

34



teacher, she could never teach playing by ear. It came naturally to her, so she
struggled with teaching someone to do it. However, she had always found
arpeggios difficult - so she knew a dozen ways to teach them. She encouraged me
not to be afraid of leading someone into prayer, as my struggle had led me to
acquire a great deal of knowledge about how to overcome obstacles in it. I left
class that day walking on air, experiencing a confidence, freedom and validation
that has never left me.

	After completing the practicum, I was convinced that the Lord's call on
my life was to be a teacher and mentor - a rabbinic director. To further prepare
myself for that role in an academic context, I sought out a research master's
degree in spiritual formation. At the time, those programs were still thin on the
ground, especially in Canada, so I settled on an MA in Church History at
McMaster Divinity School. I had learned that there were two approaches to
training in spiritual formation. The first was from a clinical psychotherapy
perspective, while the other was from a historical perspective. All programs had
both elements, but one tended to be the orienting posture. Tyndale's approach was
historical, and I loved it, so a history degree was next door to a spiritual formation
degree. However, I made sure to always take a spiritual formation slant on every
piece of work I did, including my thesis itself. I had heard Professor Victor
Shepherd refer to the English Puritans as “diagnosticians without peer of the
human heart” (Shepherd 2002, track 8), so I wanted to explore their perspective
on a spiritual formation topic. I soon found it in Thomas Brooks's Precious
Remedies Against Satan's Devices (Brooks 1968); my topic would be the English

35



Puritan theology and practice of spiritual warfare. While my supervisor, Dr. Gord
Heath, was an enthusiastic supporter of my work, some of the other faculty were
not so sure. Later, in my oral defense, one of them asked me in disbelief, “Do you
believe Satan is active in this way in the world?” After 15 years of fighting
temptation, I simply answered, “Yes.” He was startled into silence.

	With my MA coursework done and the thesis underway, my wife and I
felt ready to return to minister in Brazil. Only this time, we would do it right.
First, we switched mission agencies. On our first term, we worked with the same
mission as Karen's parents, but there were two points of incompatibility with the
Brazilian office. First, they didn't understand why I was a tentmaking missionary
when I had a permanent visa to Brazil. While the mission did use tentmaking, it
was mostly to gain access to creative access nations (i.e., countries that don't
issue missionary visas but do allow other kinds of expatriate workers). Second,
they were transitioning from being a field to a base, so they had shifted their
strategic focus to church-planting ministry in the Amazon and overseas. As a
result, they had few missionaries in theological education (which was my
interest), so I would be a team of one - if they even accepted me to return. As a
result, we connected with some good friends from our old missionary small group

- Terry and Simone Lockyer - who were working in theological education, and
asked if their mission (Latin Link) would be willing to accept us. They eagerly
welcomed us aboard and connected us with Latin America Mission (LAM), their
sending partner in Canada.

36



	One small but vital event occurred as part of joining LAM. As is typical
during placement of long-term missionaries, they had us do a psychological
battery. It was discovered that I had low energy, and for the first time I was
diagnosed with depression. I had never suspected that my low motivation at times
was anything more than a lack of character, but the more I learned about
depression the more I realized that the diagnosis fit. While I did not go on an
antidepressant, I did work out with Karen a set of mood and behavioural red flags
that would help to identify when I needed to pay particular attention to self-care.
This didn't always work, as will become clear.

	A second change we made during this mission term was that we would
actively seek support. The limited financial support we had the last time meant
that we had little prayer and emotional support as well. Our church had wished us
well, but never followed up with us to see how we were doing, and we likewise
didn't feel the need to keep them up-to-date on our activities. This time, we would
try to get half of our livelihood from support and the rest from my tentmaking
work. This would also allow me to spend more time in teaching ministry, as
opposed to simply teaching on evenings and weekends - or, as I liked to call it, in
the corners. We never did quite reach that 50/50 goal (I was no more enamoured
of deputation than I was the first time around), but there was enough support to
achieve my goal of only working half-time.

	Re-trained, re-aligned, and re-provisioned, we were ready to return to
Brazil in 2008. We initially returned to Karen's parents' ministry in Belo
Horizonte because I needed some time to get my Portuguese up to a level where I




could teach. I had worked in Portuguese on our short-term posting, but teaching
requires a higher level of language mastery. I could have worked through
translation, but that is awkward, a logistical challenge, and never quite comes out
right. I believe that even with bad grammar and a poor vocabulary, it is better to
teach yourself than to work through a translator. This was especially hard for me,
though, as I knew how poorly I was expressing myself. My words, a reliable tool
for so long in ensuring that my audience had just the right impression of me, had
been taken away, and I was smarting. However, it was like the spiritual discipline
of silence, where we set aside the words we so often use for projecting the image
we think will get us the affirmation or respect we crave. It did me good.

	I had a chance to teach at a satellite campus that a seminary had planted in
our neighborhood. I taught Church History to an eager set of a dozen or so young
students who were preparing for pastoral work in the church. We had a great time
together, and we all laughed as I stumbled my way through. Karen helped a lot,
sitting in the front row and helping me as I would search for a word. Sometimes
the students themselves - many of whom had studied some English - would join
in the game of guessing what Tom was trying to say. I'm not sure what they
learned, but it was a great time of encouragement and equipping for me.

	After that first year, we were put in contact, through Latin Link, with a
seminary in Curitiba in the south of Brazil. Our friends Terry and Simone had
moved there to work at another seminary at the other end of town, so we were
eager to work close to them. Terry even joined me for the interview with the
director of Fidelis Bible College, a wonderful man named Arthur Duck. He had

38



done his PhD at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School under Paul Hiebert, so he
spoke English fluently. However, I only discovered this later, as he only spoke
Portuguese during the interview and adopted his most stoic visage (and as a
Russian Mennonite, it was a good one). He explained that the school had taken on
a foreign missionary teacher before and it hadn't worked out well. As a result,
when we offered for me to work at little to no cost, he insisted on paying the
going rate for his teachers. That way, he explained, they could afford to replace
me if I didn't work out and would not be tempted to keep me on just because I
was cheap. With a gulp, I returned to Belo to pack up our things and drive down
to Curitiba.

	During the process of moving to Curitiba, we got some interesting news.
At the age of 40, Karen was expecting! We had been trying for years so we had
largely given up on that dream, as it didn't seem to be God's plan for us. But just
when we were least expecting it, God sent us a very welcome surprise.
Unfortunately, as with many pregnant mothers at that age, Karen had some health
complications. Her blood pressure rose dangerously as the pregnancy progressed,
and after some worrying early tests she was confined to bed rest. Even worse, the
transfer of our insurance from one state to another meant that any medical costs
were not covered. Worried about what might happen if there were further
difficulties, we decided to return to Canada for the actual delivery.

	Liam was delivered three weeks early by emergency C-section on May 3,
2010, at Joseph Brant Hospital in Burlington, Ontario, when an ultrasound
showed that the umbilical cord had become wrapped around his throat. Despite

39



some initial challenges learning to breastfeed, he was perfectly healthy and happy.
Unfortunately, Karen was not. The normally lengthy recovery from a C-section
was complicated by her high blood pressure, so despite her willingness to help
there wasn't much she could physically do beyond feeding him. I have an
overdeveloped sense of duty, so I grimly took on the many new responsibilities,
terrified I would do something wrong and break the baby. Within a week, on the
morning of our first outing as a family, I had a breakdown, curled up on the hall
floor, as I was crippled by the thought of everything that had to happen to get the
whole travelling roadshow out the door and to the restaurant. It was a disturbing
new manifestation of my depression, and while I soon rallied, it would happen
again in the future.

	We returned to Brazil when Liam was 5 weeks old and I got settled into
my new roles as a father and instructor at Fidelis. It was a challenge to prepare
entirely new courses in Portuguese, but I enjoyed it and the students were great. I
was especially pleased by their warm welcome, as it was a Russian Mennonite
school and I was anything but. I even feared that my former military service (and
my lack of shame over it) would be frowned upon, but I had no reason to be
concerned. Arthur was a very supportive boss, and he was delighted to have a
‘designated non-Mennonite' on the faculty. He also paid me the best compliment
I received during my entire time in Brazil. When I asked him one day if there still
was a legitimate place in Brazil for foreign missionaries, he replied, “There's
always a place, if they're humble like you.”




Sojourner

	But I was sinking. While I was growing in proficiency, my energy levels
were waning. Karen's health got better, but her continued high blood pressure and
the twin constraints of breastfeeding and limited Brazilian pharmacology meant
that her medicine left her in a fog most of the time. We later learned that she also
suffered from sleep apnea, where her breath would stop dozens of times every
hour as she slept. This meant she never got any real rest, even if she spent the
right amount of time asleep - which she didn't anyway as a nursing mom of a
child who didn't sleep through the night until he was 2. The need to keep up my
software work for at least 20 hours a week left me breathless on a billable hour
treadmill, unable to take time off for holidays or sick days, as there would be a
direct and immediate impact on our income (entrepreneurs and hourly workers
everywhere know whereof I speak).

	The most visible sign of my low energy levels was nearly quitting my
MA. I had finished the course work before leaving for Brazil, so I was finishing
my research while overseas. However, when the time came to start writing, I was
unable to find any extra reserves to tackle the writing. I began to consider
discarding my thesis - after all, I was already engaged in the ministry I wanted
without an MA. Fortunately, both Karen and Arthur saw through my
rationalizations and encouraged me to persevere.

	More telling than my reluctance to finish my thesis was my mental retreat
into survival mode. I performed all the necessary duties for life - household
chores, care for Liam's physical needs, software work, teaching - but was not

41



living. I finally realized how bad the situation had become when I hit one of the
depressive red flags I had established with Karen. I normally loved to teach, but I
reached a point where I derived no pleasure from it. When I found myself wishing
that the next semester would bring a reduced course load, or better yet no teaching
at all, I knew I was in trouble. After all, what was the point of being in Brazil if I
was doing little or no teaching. After some hard conversations as a couple (neither
of us wanted to give up), I tearfully submitted my resignation to Arthur and
prepared to return to Canada.

	We landed in Toronto a few weeks before Christmas 2012. I managed to
get a job back at the software company where I worked before we left for Brazil,
so our short-term financial needs were met. Soon, Karen was put on better
medicine for her blood pressure and she started using a special machine to help
her breathe at night. Liam was also sleeping through the night consistently, which
helped significantly. It was a very long, very slow recovery, but each month was
slightly better than the month before. By the summer, we felt well enough to go
see a therapist at MHI (my old spiritual direction mentor, Duncan) for further
suggestions on how to recover from our burnout. We reported that we were
starting to feel the clouds lift, but he cautioned us not to presume on our recovery.
He was right. I felt up to running a small group at our church in the fall, but it
became a grind and I did not lead the planned sequel in the winter. My cup of
burnout was slowly draining, but it was still too full.

	By the fall of 2014, however, I was well enough to start thinking about the
future. We turned to God and asked Him what He had for us next. Returning to

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missions in Brazil (or some other location overseas) didn't seem to be the next
step, as evidenced by our ambivalence and a lack of inner impulse some call a
witness of the Spirit. So we started looking for ministry opportunities in Canada. I
remained firmly convinced of my calling to teaching and mentoring ministry, so I
considered three types of opportunities: the academic route (teaching at a Bible
College or the like), the para-church route (a discipleship ministry like Navigators
or a spiritual formation organization like Renovare), or the church route (a pastor
of small groups, Christian education, or discipleship). One significant shift was
that I no longer felt the explicit call to be bivocational. I was tired of splitting my
focus between secular work and church work (although I remained firmly
convinced that both were Kingdom work). I wanted to focus on one thing and
throw myself fully into it, and I was less strongly attached to my software work.

	After searching for four months, I found a solid ministry lead. I learned
from a friend of mine who was a pastor in the Evangelical Missionary Church of
Canada that their denominational school, Emmanuel Bible College in Kitchener,
was looking for someone to run Expedition, their gap-year discipleship and
missions program. Unfortunately, it was a part-time role so I would have to
resume the divided life I was trying to leave, and I was initially skeptical about
how truly formational an academic program could be. When I went to the
interview, I was pleasantly surprised; the program was very free-formed and not
locked to a classroom at all. I was selected and I started, in May of 2015, to
prepare for the Fall 2015 session.

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	The students were a joy. They gelled well, after the usual breaking-in
period, and were a “pleasing aroma of Christ” (2 Corinthians 2:15) on the YWAM
team they worked with in Jamaica. Uniquely in the program's history, the entire
team decided to stay for the regular academic winter semester as part of the
Expedition Plus program. It was a great success, but I felt that I had little to do
with it. I just lined up some good training and experiences for them; the team did
all the real work.

	However, the good times did not last. I was hoping to run Expedition
twice a year, in the summer and the fall. However, the recruitment team and I
were unsuccessful in assembling a team for the summer, so I sadly had to cancel
it. When it became clear in the spring that there wasn't enough enrollment to run a
Fall Expedition either, I decided to resign in May 2016. I left, first of all, because
I didn't want to sit on my hands for a year, all the while drawing a salary from a
school that was already short of money. But I also reviewed how the program
went and I realized that I only had 40 contact hours of training, teaching, or
mentoring in the entire year. I knew that the role was an administrative position
but spending less than 5% of my time in my areas of gifting was simply not
enough.

	Instead of resuming full-time work in software, I decided to keep to part-
time in software to keep a window open for ministry. I didn't find another
ministry position, so at the end of June I decided to help out at our church,
Tapestry, as an associate pastor of spiritual formation and mission. When I left
EBC, it seemed providential that I could help with the pastoral work at Tapestry

44



at no cost to them, while at the same time continuing to build my ministry resume
to prepare for the day when that next ministry opportunity opened up.

	Another career positioning move I made was to enroll in the Doctor of
Ministry program in Spiritual Formation at Tyndale Seminary. I knew that
whatever my next position would be, it would have a strong teaching and
mentoring emphasis and be focused in the area I loved so much: spiritual
formation. Therefore, a practical doctorate in that field seemed like another great
way to wait on the Lord without merely waiting around. My part-time work hours
helped make time for my studies, and it was incredibly vivifying to be part of a
learning community once again.

	Even more enlivening was the partial fast I took on. I had felt for years
that I needed to lose weight and improve my health, but I never had the energy to
take up the challenging tasks of dieting or exercising. I had developed an
unhealthy use of food to self-medicate, so I was eating too much of the wrong
stuff, especially at the worst time of day - late at night. However, on September
10th of 2016 I had the sudden impulse to see how little I could eat without
becoming truly hungry. Much to my surprise, I found that I could get by on much
less while still remaining healthy. Following the model of the Desert Fathers, my
fast was not an absolute fast, but rather an exercise in stopping just short of
satiation. I was eating slightly less than I wanted, both in terms of quantity and
quality. In actual fact, the quality was quite high from a nutritional point of view;
it was just that I would avoid the epicurean extras I craved, like frying, sauces, or
breading. The first day went well, so I continued the second, and then a third.

45



Soon it was a week and then a month. I never felt deprived during this partial fast,
and only very rarely did I need to engage my willpower to maintain it. So not only
was it divinely initiated, it was divinely sustained. I felt as though I was being
carried along on a current of asceticism to which I merely needed to surrender.

	After about six weeks, I discovered that, for the first time in years, I had
an abundance of energy and motivation to do things. Before the fast, after I would
put my son to bed, I would force myself to do an hour of schoolwork before
exhaustedly plopping myself in front of the television or a novel I had read many
times before. This sort of low-quality leisure was never re-creative, and so I was
stuck in a negative feedback loop of mild depression that acted like a chronic,
emotional low-grade fever. Now, I found myself easily able to work for two hours
straight, and then to have enough energy to do other kinds of rewarding reading,
like devotional classics or reading outside of my course requirements. My energy
levels had been so low for so long, that I had given up hope that they would ever
recover and would only be this way or worse as I continued to age. I resigned
myself to the fact that only in my new resurrection body would I have energy like
I had in my early thirties. I also noticed that I hadn't had a cold since I started my
fast. I usually had some cold every four to six weeks, but as weeks stretched into
months my good health held up. Even when my son would bring home a cold
from school that my wife then caught, I remained strangely immune. Then I found
that I was losing weight. By Epiphany - four months later - I had lost fifty
pounds and was looking for ways to increase my caloric intake so I could
maintain my weight.

46



	Even more important than these emotional and physical changes were the
spiritual ones. I was developing a non-idolatrous relationship with food; I no
longer ate to anesthetize the pains of life. Even better, rather than replacing one
addiction with another, I was learning to turn to God in times of stress and
loneliness. I also discovered that certain vices I had long struggled with in vain
had lost their power and were now easy to avoid. Furthermore, virtues that I had
long struggled to adopt were coming easy. Most significantly, I was living from a
sense of abundance, rather than a feeling of scarcity which had long dominated
my life and expressed itself in a defensive, entitled and ungenerous spirit.

	My fast ended on Good Friday 2017 with a bout of binge eating that took
me completely by surprise. Since that time, I have experienced cycles of fasting
and binge eating. I was shocked at the power of the compulsion to overeat; it had
never felt this strong before my fast first began. However, I soon realized that I
had never invited my body to the table of my spiritual formation, and now that it
had a seat it was expressing its own fallenness. As disturbing as it was, I was
encouraged by this development as it meant the body's previously hidden
woundedness was now brought to the surface to be healed. When I first went to
seminary, the right and left sides of my brain were brought into greater harmony
as I grew more connected to my emotional side. This horizontal integration was
now being matched by what Siegel calls a vertical integration of my united mind
with my body (Siegel 2010, 72). I was learning to listen to it and what it revealed
about my spirit.

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	At the start of 2017, I noticed another new dynamic. I was teaching a
small group on spiritual formation and had started a regimen of visiting all the
families in my church (following Richard Baxter's example). I found that when I
spoke, the Holy Spirit would speak through me, to great effect. This was not an
unfamiliar experience for me, but what had been a once-a-quarter phenomenon
was happening multiple times in a meeting - at every meeting. It was as though
the fruit of the Spirit I was experiencing was now being joined by gifts of the
Spirit. Hungering for more, I started reading on deeper life experiences, revival
and healing. If streams of living water were being pouring out, I wanted to turn
my face up and open my mouth wide.

	It's not clear whether this sense of abundance and spiritual power were the
result of the fast I had been given or some other factor. Causality is not only
difficult to establish in the realm of the spirit, the search for it can be dangerous,
as it tempts you to attribute the effect to something you have done, thereby
reducing the fruit of the Spirit to the outcome of some technique or other. In my
case, two other influences were in play, concurrent with my fast, that might
explain some or most of the outcomes I was enjoying. One of the assignments for
a doctoral course on spiritual disciplines was to practice fixed-hour prayer, which
I dutifully started at Advent and continued until the end of January. At first, I was
concerned that I was merely saying my prayers, as most of the time I felt nothing
as I read the office out loud. I started to introduce pauses for meditating on the
meaning of the words, so I could really get into it and make the prayers my own -
as evidenced by a stirring in my abdomen! I was making my feelings the measure

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of the efficacy of the discipline - a classic mistake. The problem was revealed to
me when I listened to a series of lectures on spiritual formation by John Coe (Coe
2010). There I learned that in the dark night of the soul God often withdraws the
consolations one experiences from spiritual disciplines in order to refine us and
highlight our tendency to attribute spiritual causality to our own efforts. That was
exactly what had been happening, so I started taking comfort in the fact that I felt
nothing most of the time when I prayed the office, and even continued with the
practice after the assignment was over.

	The other influence came from reading Henri Nouwen's Life of the
Beloved (Nouwen 2002) as part of the Renovare Book Club. The idea that I was
God's beloved child - a familiar theme from my earliest days as a Christian -
struck home with new force, and I settled into a feeling of great peace. This idea
resonated with a secondary theme from Coe's lectures: that even the trials and
disappointments of life could be viewed as an invitation from the Holy Spirit to
examine some unexplored corner of your psyche. The discontent itself becomes a
kind of spiritual discipline that you can enter into in order to identify some hidden
idolatry or lie embedded deep in yourself. My first practical experience of this
occurred at a retreat in September 2017, when I became irritated with the poorly
led worship. When became aware of my irritation, instead of feeling guilty for it
(my usual practice in such a moments of clarity), I opened myself to it. I thanked
the Holy Spirit for the awareness and asked Him what He wanted to reveal about
my inmost being in that moment. As unpleasant as the process is, it is rich and
life-giving, so even jarring circumstances can become grist for the spiritual mill.

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So even if you lose, you win. The sense of invulnerability that comes from this
conclusion is hard to overstate and explains the most extravagant promises of joy
and protection from harm found in Scripture.

	From this position of safety, I was able to start to step away from my
careerism. As my story thus far has illustrated, I have felt called by God to a
ministry of teaching. I believe this to be a genuine call, attested to by the fruit
generated in the lives of my students and myself when I teach. However, I have
been impatient in the working out of this call, longing for certain teaching
positions. I would sometimes apply all my human effort to make it happen, in my
way and in my time. This achievement of a good end through human fortitude
echoes Abraham's attempt in Genesis 16 to realize God's promise of a descendant
by having a child with Hagar. These Ishmaels rarely succeeded, and the few times
they did the ministry ended in failure. But now that my value wasn't being
dictated by how successful a teacher I was, I no longer hungered for the
opportunities. Dallas Willard warned against maneuvering to gain access to a
platform from which to speak (Willard 2003). Instead, he urged his listeners to
work on having something to say and to leave it for God to provide a platform -
or not! I surrendered my teaching gift back to God, giving Him permission to
waste it if He so chose. I resolved to no longer actively seek out teaching
opportunities, but instead to work on my own journey and learning and wait for
invitations to teach. They were not long in coming, and I now have greater
platforms from which to speak than I ever did before.

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	This journey into burnout and the emergence from it has been my mid-
faith crisis. It's not over yet, and I often feel as though I am just beginning. But
that is the nature of the mid-faith crisis: it is a start into a new way of being with
God and in the world. Others have found it to be so as well. Moving on from my
particular case, let us examine a general model of the phenomenon.




CHAPTER 3:

MODEL OF SPIRITUAL FORMATION

	Oh, night that guided me; Oh, night more lovely than the dawn;
	Oh, night that joined Beloved with lover, lover transformed in the
	Beloved!
	— John of the Cross, “The Dark Night of the Soul”

	In 1911, British author James Gilchrist Lawson published a unique survey
of Church history. Rather than focusing on great thinkers and events, he told the
stories of the Deeper Experiences of Famous Christians Gleaned From Their
Biographies, Autobiographies and Writings (Lawson 2012). Like all historians, he
was writing from a particular position - namely seeking to find historical
precedence for a second blessing experience in the Christian life. Nevertheless, he
cast his net remarkably widely, drawing on the lives of Biblical characters from
both the Old and New Testaments, as well as Christians from diverse parts of
Christian history and all confessional backgrounds (although he did restrict
himself to those he considered Protestant). He described how these prominent
members of God's people had some sort of experience during their lives that
qualitatively changed how they experienced and followed God. In doing so, he
catalogues a remarkable diversity in that phenomenon, including its timing,
manifestations, outcomes and even the labels the person used to describe it. From
Jacob at Peniel to Paul on the Damascus road; Savonarola's vision of the heavens

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opened to Madam Guyon's humbling through an attack of small pox; John
Wesley's heart-warming experience at Aldersgate to George Whitefield's
powerful ordination; from renowned historical figures such as John Bunyan and
D.L. Moody to lesser-known diamonds in the rough like Christmas Evans and
A.J. Gordon. Had he given himself freer reign, Lawson would have discovered
similar experiences in the lives of Eastern Orthodox like Antony the Great,
Evagrius Ponticus and Gregory Palamas, and Roman Catholics like Thomas
Aquinas, Ignatius of Loyola and Teresa of Avila. All of these people had their
spiritual lives powerfully altered through experiences lasting a few moments to a
few decades, and they were never the same again. It is no surprise, then, to learn
that Dallas Willard described Lawson's work as “the one book other than the
Bible that has most influenced me” (Willard 2016, 105).

	Given how widespread was this phenomenon of a post-conversion
qualitative change in one's life with God, several models arose throughout
Christian history to describe it. The earliest was the classic three-stage model of
spiritual growth developed by Pseudo-Dionysius: purgation, or a time of
cleansing; illumination, a growing awareness of the light of God's truth; and
union with God (Holt 2005, 73). The renowned 16th century Spanish mystic John
of the Cross later expanded this model with particular focus on the phenomenon
of a mid-faith transition from the purgative stage to the later illuminative and
unitive stages, which he called the dark night of the soul (John of the Cross,
1990). The English Puritans also recognized a similar dynamic, labeling it
“spiritual desertion” (Wang 2011, 27). Working from his own spiritual

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experience, John Wesley developed the doctrine of Christian perfection (Maddox
1994, 179), which the later Holiness movement refined into the idea of entire
sanctification, which then morphed into the baptism of the Holy Spirit that
Lawson and his Pentecostal tradition cherished (Holt 2005, 140-1). While each of
these models use different language, they are all seeking to describe a similar
phenomenon: some sort of experience that occurs after conversion in which a
Christian's entire paradigm changes and God is experienced in a whole new way.
I call it the mid-faith crisis.

	I adopted the term mid-faith crisis primarily for reasons of promotional
clarity. When I would use the dark night of the soul as a label for this stage of
faith, some people misunderstood it as referring to other unpleasant events in the
Christian life. People would come to a seminar expecting it to address depression
or grief and suffering, rather than the dark night proper. When I came across a
podcast from England called “The Mid-Faith Crisis” (Davis and Page 2016), I
immediately recognized this title as a superior description for what I was trying to
teach about. The idea of a mid-life crisis was often already familiar to my
audiences, and the concept of significant questions of meaning arising in middle
adulthood was a much better fit for the phenomenon in view than the one I was
using. It wasn't a perfect fit - the experience doesn't always arise in middle
adulthood and it doesn't always manifest as a crisis. Nevertheless, it served as a
better shorthand as evidenced by the expectations of my learners being more in
line with what I was actually going to present once I adopted it.

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When Does a Mid-Faith Crisis Occur?

	When does the mid-faith crisis occur in a Christian's life? While
everyone's spiritual journey is unique, it has long been held that there are enough
common milestones that certain generalities can be perceived and usefully applied
to assist people on their journey. As mentioned above, the threefold model of
purgation, illumination and union has enjoyed popularity for much of church
history (Holt 2005, 73). Even modern evangelical authors have used it as the basis
for their models of developmental spirituality (Mulholland 1993, 81). However,
the six-stage model developed experientially by Janet Hagberg and Robert
Guelich is more granular and offers recommendations for spiritual formation at
each stage, helpful in a modern Western context (Hagberg and Guelich, 2005).
This model also has the advantage of corresponding well with the later stages of
psychologist James Fowler's empirically based model of stages of faith (Fowler
1981).

	In this model, the stages are cumulative and sequential, with the person
having a “home stage” that currently characterizes their faith (Hagberg and
Guelich 2005, 9). Progress from stage to stage proceeds according to God's
timing, so it can take much longer for some than others. This variability in the
duration of a stage from one person to the next is also impacted by certain “caged
behaviours” in that stage, which are ways in which people can become “bogged
down in an unhealthy way” (Hagberg and Guelich 2005, 9). The first three stages
follow a progression of discovery of who God is, learning to follow God, and
serving others, while the second three stages recapitulate these three dynamics in

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a much deeper way. Finally, this is not a celestial ladder, like the Dionysian
model. The higher stages are not closer to God; God is equally accessible by
people at every stage.

Stages 1-3: Seeker, Student, and Servant

	The first stage consists of the recognition of God, where the Seeker
accepts the reality of God in his or her life, prompted by a sense of awe or need.
This can occur in an instant or over a period of years or even decades. The great
need of spiritual formation at this stage is to find someone who will help the
Seeker in his or her helplessness or show the Seeker who God is and how to
approach the Holy Presence. The caged behaviour that traps people in this stage is
a sense of worthlessness and inadequacy, the conviction that this God we've
discovered surely wants nothing to do with us. Key to moving to the next stage is
making the decision to follow this God we've discovered and joining a group
where we can belong and where our questions can be answered.

	Stage two is the life of the Student, characterized by learning about God
and what it means to follow God and participating in the life of a faith
community: participating in its activities and forming relationships with its
members. This shares commonalities with both stages two and three in Fowler's
schema. These characteristics include “lawfulness and reciprocity,”
anthropomorphic images of God, (Fowler 1981, 153), an external locus of
authority (Fowler 1981, 154), tacit knowledge (Fowler 1981, 161) and symbols
that “are not separable from what they symbolize” (Fowler 1981, 163). Spiritual

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formation for Students is facilitated by providing the tools needed to live in
accordance with the community's shared path. This includes modeling behaviour,
teaching or discipling, and admonishing or correcting. There are two sorts of
caged behaviours that Students may suffer from: reductionism and attachment
problems. Reductionism traps the person in this stage by reducing following God
in all its diversity and multifaceted aspects to an approach that is simpler to
understand. For example, moralism reduces the Biblical concept of holiness -
being God-oriented or living for an audience of One - to merely behaving
morally. While holiness includes moral behaviour, that behaviour is meant to be
an outcome of God-orientation not a primary manifestation of holiness. In some
cases, moralism can be further reduced to legalism, where the broad aim of moral
behaviour is narrowed to a short list of do's and don'ts - again, motivated by a
desire for simplicity. There are two kinds of attachment problems: one of excess
and one of deficiency. Excessive attachment to the community results in
tribalism, or a strong us-against-them posture towards other communities, where
we are always right and strong while they are always wrong and weak. A
deficiency in attachment arises from an inability (or unwillingness) to commit to a
single community, instead flitting from group to group to find the right one. The
key to the next stage is coming to view oneself as a contributor to the life of the
community rather than merely a consumer of its benefits. This usually calls for
Students to recognize and accept their own gifts and passions and to be willing to
take the risks inherent in assuming a new responsibility. Fowler found that most
people in his study were in this stage (Fowler 1981, 164), and if most people in

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congregations are Students (either as part of their healthy development or stuck in
this stage) it would explain the phenomenon where much of the work in a
congregation is done by a few.

	Stage three is the productive life, full of meaningful and challenging work
for God's kingdom. The Servant feels special as she makes her unique
contributions to others, attracted to the challenges, the strengthening of faith and
the positive recognition that all come with taking on responsibility. Fowler labels
this stage Individuative-Reflective faith (Fowler 1981, 174), and finds that it is
characterized by self-certainty and the conscious development of conceptual
meanings for symbols. Formation at this stage is facilitated by helping Servants
develop their gifts and empowering them to use them wisely. Leaders should
model the use of their own gifts and resist the temptation to be threatened by the
service of Servants they are coaching. Caged behaviours include an excess of zeal
for the causes they are passionate about, and performance orientation that roots
their identity in their service, leading to ambition, pride, wearing masks, and burn-
out.

Stages 4-6: Sojourner

Every evangelical church I have been a part of has either had no model of
stages of faith development post-conversion, or a model paralleling these initial
three stages of faith. This impression is borne out by the popularity of such
models as those put forth in Rick Warren's bestselling Purpose Driven Church
(Warren 1995), Willow Creek's Move (Hawkins and Parkinson 2011) based on

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the results of their REVEAL survey, and the Navigators' “Beginning with Christ /
Growing in Christ / Going On with Christ” model (Navigators 2019). As a result,
stage four looks more like losing one's faith, rather than the next step in the
journey. The key to moving into it is some sort of faith crisis, with the
accompanying loss of certainty and the feeling of being abandoned by God. The
Sojourner must also be willing to let go of success and enter into the mess of the
next season. This stage is characterized by uncertainty, questioning and a desire
for greater authenticity in our relationship with God. In Fowler's system, this
stage is the transition from Individuative-Reflective faith to Conjunctive faith
(Fowler 1981, 184). This involves the integration of much of what was suppressed
in the prior stage into the self and one's worldview through “the sacrament of
defeat” (Fowler 1981, 198). This stage is the mid-faith crisis that I am
investigating. While this is a deeply personal journey, the community can still
uphold the spiritual formation of the Sojourner through the interventions
described later in this chapter. Caged behaviours in this stage include becoming
stuck in a never-ending cycle of questioning and self-examination, trying to
retreat to an earlier stage, withdrawal from the community of faith, or even
walking away from God completely. The key to moving to the next stage is
surmounting the inner obstacle Hagberg and Guelich call “The Wall” (Hagberg
and Guelich 2005, 114). The exact shape of the Wall varies from person to
person, due to differing needs for inner healing (see the next section), but it
involves breaking through the barriers we have built between ourselves and God.

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	If stage four echoes the dynamics of stage one - a re-discovery of God -
then stage five is a new life of discipleship, in which we explore what it means to
follow the One we now realize God to truly be. This is Fowler's fully-fledged
Conjunctive faith, which is characterized by a second naivete - an openness to
paradox and mystery rather than the firm and clear boundaries established during
the Individuative-Reflective faith stage (Fowler 1981, 197-8). The great strength
of this stage comes in “the rise of the ironic imagination - a capacity to see and be
in one's [own] or one's group's most powerful meanings, while simultaneously
recognizing that they are relative, partial and inevitably distorting apprehensions
of transcendent reality” (Fowler 1981, 198). Leaders can encourage formation in
this stage by allowing subgroups to be free to develop this stage within
themselves, without requiring the entire congregation to go there. Due to the deep
inner healing that occurred in stage four, people can no longer be truly caged in
stage five and six - although their freedom born of a rich sense of God's
acceptance can lead to radical behaviours that others perceive as caged.

	Stage six is a change in degree rather than kind, with the person now re-
entering the life of service, only now that service springs from the fountains of
abundant life within them overflowing into the lives of others. This service may
appear neglectful of self and others may think we are wasting our lives, but it is
the free expression of our deepest Kingdom desires. Fowler describes this as
Universalizing faith (Fowler 1981, 199), which is heedless of self, scandalously
extending love across boundaries to the marginalized and the enemy, and
embodying “a kind of relevant irrelevance” (Fowler 1981, 203).

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Limitations and Extensions to the Model

	One weakness in Hagberg and Guelich's model is its linearity. While stage
four's journey into darkness does seem a common phenomenon, what isn't clear
is whether this stage and its successors are a one-time incident. John Coe suggests
that after passing through an initial dark night, one ‘graduates' to an ongoing
series of dark nights, which he portrays as a continual cycle of consolation and
desolation (Coe 2010). In this cycle, the Christ-follower is progressively purged
deeper and deeper, with more and more hidden areas of life coming under the
spotlight of divine love. While this may be what Hagberg and Guelich mean by
stages five and six, their descriptions appear to be more uniformly positive,
without any hint of darkness persisting past stage four.

	Fowler's model suffers from its own shortcomings. It began with
“hypothesized stages,” which he asserts were then empirically refined through his
research to the point of being “indisputably normative” (Fowler 1981, 199). This
is a bold claim, and the model has generated a great deal of disputation from both
theological (Botton 1990) and psychological (Coyle 2011) circles. Particularly
problematic in this context, however, are his study of stages of faith as a general
human phenomenon rather than Christian faith development specifically, the
exclusive focus in the final stage on social justice and reform rather than other
streams of spirituality, and the way his prior commitments to the works of Jean
Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg narrowed his view to linear, cognitive

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development rather than emotional growth and changes to the experience of
prayer.

	Another point at which the Critical Journey model could be enhanced is at
stages 5 and 6. These are the shortest chapters in the book, and this brevity may
be attributed to the small population that dwells in these stages. Fowler similarly
struggled to describe these higher stages and shifts noticeably from speaking
empirically from subjects of his study to speaking anecdotally about famous
religious figures of recent history. Working anecdotally as they did, Hagberg and
Guelich presumably had an even smaller data set to work from, with a
corresponding paucity of patterns of spiritual formation ministry to people at this
point in their spiritual lives. To fill in some of the blanks for these later stages,
one can turn to the resources of the contemplative tradition, as can be found in
Coombs and Nemeck's The Spiritual Journey (Coombs and Nemeck 1987).

Table 1. A comparison of the various models of developmental spirituality
[ Please contact repository@tyndale.ca for Table 1 details. ]

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	Working within the Roman Catholic tradition, Coombs and Nemeck
firmly locate their Thresholds of Adult Spiritual Genesis model within the
Pseudo-Dionysian threefold framework of purgation - illumination - union, as
enhanced by Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
(Coombs and Nemeck 1987, 14-15). Despite this bias, the model is useful for
filling in the higher stages of the Critical Journey as it focuses almost entirely on
stages four to six. Their first stage is the “immersion in creation,” which runs
from birth to midlife (Coombs and Nemeck 1987, 46). During this stage, one's
relationship with God becomes more intimate and prayer becomes more personal,
conversational and effective. However, this upward trend caps in midlife and one
enters the stage of “emergence through creation,” which is characterized by a
growing detachment - “a need to die to self and to leave all self-interests behind”
(Coombs and Nemeck 1987, 47). This emergence may take years or even
decades, and the three critical thresholds that follow are simply intensifications of
this emergence. Personal conversion is a distinct moment of time, “a unique
instant of breakthrough and definitive stabilization in the process of emergence”
in which we realize for the rest of our lives “that we are possessed by Christ and
that we wholeheartedly desire to surrender ourselves to him in love, hope and
faith” (Coombs and Nemeck 1987, 48). This is followed by spiritual espousal,
which is an insatiable yearning for complete union with God, and then spiritual
marriage, where “the soul experiences the most intimate communion with God

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that is possible this side of the resurrection,” usually occurring shortly before
death (Coombs and Nemeck 1987, 48).

	The Thresholds of Adult Spiritual Genesis model is also specifically
interested in the evolution of prayer in the lives of Christians as they move
through these stages (Coombs and Nemeck 1987, 49-50). In the stage of
immersion, prayer begins as an obligation, a duty one should fulfill. This gives
way to a growing pleasure and exuberance in prayer, a delight which draws the
Christian back to prayer again and again. In the threshold of emergence, however,
this gives way to aridity, where the harder we try the less we feel about God or
anyone. This is the beginning of contemplative prayer; this is the mid-faith crisis.
Many abandon prayer at this point, as it can persist for years or decades.
Paradoxically, only then are they drawn back to prayer by a burning hunger for
prayer and solitude (Jeremiah 20:9). The aridity did its work of burning the
narcissism out of the Christian's prayer life. They feel the same pressure to pray
as they did at the start, only the external “should” is replaced with an internal
“must.”

	All three models - the Critical Journey, Stages of Faith and the Thresholds
of Adult Spiritual Genesis - recognize the phenomenon of faith transition that
occurs in midlife, an often unpleasant invitation away from the faith of one's
successful young adulthood into a richer experience of God and a greater
identification with the world. But why are such stringent measures necessary? If
God is a God of love and desires the best for us, what ailment afflicts us that calls
for such strong medicine?

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Why Is a Mid-Faith Crisis Needed?

	The world is a frightening place for young children. Coe (Coe 2010,
Lecture 4) notes that even for those growing up at a time of peace, in a home
where all their needs are lovingly provided for, the world is large and loud and
they are small and powerless. For those who grow up in chaos - whether due to
war or abusive parents - this is even more true. Due to our innate sinful nature,
the universal human response to this sense of vulnerability is fear, and this fear, in
turn, creates a compulsion to hide. We unknowingly imitate the response of our
first ancestor, who after eating the forbidden fruit realized he was naked (i.e.,
vulnerable) and so hid (Genesis 3:8-10). Most children don't hide literally but
metaphorically, behind a painstakingly crafted and maintained persona that aims
to shield them from the bumps and bruises of life. This persona grows alongside
the child's core identity as they develop. As a defensive measure, it may serve a
useful purpose, allowing the child to survive (literally or figuratively) to
adulthood. Furthermore, not all hiding from hurt is part of the development of the
false self. However, even where this constructed persona had pragmatic value in
childhood, it generates significant problems later in life. Thomas Merton dubbed
this persona the “false self” (Merton 1961, 23), and it has been popularized by
such recent spiritual formation luminaries as Basil Pennington (2000), David
Benner (2004), Richard Rohr (2013) and Robert Mulholland (2016).

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The Nature of the False Self

The false self consists of two layers (Shattuck 2013, Lecture 1). The outer
layer is the propaganda layer, turned outwards towards the world. It is the
disguise we adopt because we are afraid, the mask we use to get what we want
and to avoid what we don't want. Merton calls this the hollow man:

	There is no substance under the things with which my false self is
	clothed. I wind experiences around myself and cover myself with
	pleasures and glory, like bandages, in order to make myself
	perceptible to myself and the world, as if I only become visible
	when something visible covered my surface. I am hollow. And
	when my bandages are gone, there will be nothing left of me but
	my own nakedness, emptiness, and hollowness to tell me that I am
	my own mistake. (Merton 1961, 36)

This outward-oriented layer deception is matched by an inward-oriented layer.
These are deeply held beliefs about oneself that are not true, and they are the
source of the fear that props up the outer layer. These lies are based on labels
acquired in childhood, either taking on those labels or reacting strongly against
them - but in both cases entangled in a death-grip with them. This forms the
identity upon which one's worldview, beliefs and behaviours are based.

	Acting, as it does, as the lens through which we look out upon the world,
the false self is fiendishly difficult to perceive in ourselves (although often it is
sadly easy for others to detect in us). Nevertheless, there are some clues by which
we can detect the false self. First are those points in life where we are defensive
and oversensitive, where we take offense easily (Benner 2004, 73-74). Taking
ourselves too seriously is a sign of the false self. Those things that most bother us
in others - our pet peeves - are also a manifestation of the false self. Another is

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our compulsions - those things we feel we must do in order to be happy or safe.
The false self also betrays itself in the tools we reach for to resolve the problems
life throws our way. These can include anger, compliance, perfectionism, data
gathering and analysis, self-soothing or conflict avoidance (Barton 2012, 50-51).
Finally, the false self can prompt certain “image management” techniques
(Shattuck 2013, Lecture 1), such as rehearsals (practicing our social interactions
ahead of time) or taking inventory (checking the social temperature of the room
so we can adjust our chameleon colours accordingly).

	True interpersonal communication is significantly compromised by the
false self. Imagine two persons wanting to communicate. The speaker is not
speaking from her real self. Instead, all communication is passed through the filter
of the false self, where it is massaged and customized in a way that is calculated
to create the desired impact in the listener. Thus, she isn't actually saying what
she means. Likewise, the listener is not listening from his real self. Instead, all
communication is again passed through the false self's filter, where it is parsed
and analyzed for threats and opportunities and normed by the false self's
prevailing narratives. Or perhaps the listener isn't even listening at all and is
simply using the interval to plan what he's going to say next. Thus, the listener
isn't hearing what the speaker said; he is hearing what her false thinks he needs to
hear, further modified to what his own false self thinks she said. With a society of
a false selves constantly interacting in this way, it is remarkable that any
communication happens at all.

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	The false self can reap pragmatic rewards - in fact, some people have
developed a false self that interacts with the false selves of those around them in
ways that generate a great deal of adulation, prestige and material possessions.
Nevertheless, the false self always levees a cost greater than any benefit it can
gain (Shattuck 2013, Lecture 3). First and foremost, it deadens spiritual life
because God does not relate to the false self. Not that God refuses to. He simply
can't because it is not real; the Great Person can only relate personally to another
person, not a construct. Remember God's response to Adam's hiding: “Where are
you?” (Genesis 3:9). God knew where Adam was located; He was asking why
Adam had withdrawn himself from their fellowship. Kirwan notes that, “It is the
real self which Christ loves and accepts” (Kirwan 1984, 184). Furthermore, the
false self requires an immense amount of energy, time and creativity to sustain the
difference between who we really are and who we're portraying to the world (and
even to ourselves). In addition, we created our false self to win love and approval,
but the tragic irony is that we can't receive love because of it.

	Anytime a person is praising us, thanking us, appreciating good
	things about us, we can't receive that love because we know it is
	ill-gotten gain. Suddenly, we get honest, “If they really knew who I
	am, they wouldn't be saying that.” So we're cut off from the very
	thing we created the false self to secure. (Shattuck 2013, Lecture 3)

Finally, because the false self can't receive love, it spawns an unending,
compulsive quest to numb the pain of the disconnect between who we are and
who we are portraying - giving rise to all sorts of addictions (some of which are
more socially acceptable than others).

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Turning from the False Self to the True Self

	But how can one set the false self aside? It does not automatically fall
away when a person has a genuine experience of God and begins on the journey
of faith. In fact, the false self tries to contain the experience (and its divine
Author) and enlist the newfound religion as a new resource for its never-ending
quest for protection and pleasure. Instead, it goes underground. Mulholland
observes that:

	Our religious false self may begin with a genuine experience with
	God. But then, like Peter on the mount of transfiguration (Mt.
	17:1-4), we often seek to contain our experience within a box of
	our own making. We attempt to integrate our experience with God
	into the structures of our life in ways that are minimally disruptive
	to our status quo. The “God” within our box, however, becomes a
	construct, an idol, that enables us to maintain control of what we
	call “God” as well as continue to be in control of our existence. To
	put it succinctly, whenever we attempt to have God in our life on
	our terms, we are a religious false self. (Mulholland 2016, 49)

John of the Cross noticed this tendency in the 16th century when he described how
each of the seven deadly sins adopt religious camouflage and smuggle themselves
into the new believer's spiritual life (John of the Cross 1990, 37-60). Mulholland
asserts that this religious form of the false self bears all the hallmarks of the false
self, only now in a religious guise. As the false self is based on fear, so is the
religious false self. First, there is the fear that the real God will show up and
destroy the box that we placed Him in, so the religious false self reinforces the
box with creeds, doctrinal statements and liturgies (Mulholland 2016, 50). It also
fears “that others might discover its religiosity is a facade,” so it works
frenetically to stave off any possible accusation of hypocrisy (Mulholland 2016,

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50). The religious false self also manifests itself as anger against any who might
challenge our idol-box, as our identity is wrapped up in it (see Jonah 4:1-4 for an
example) (Mulholland 2016, 51). Manipulation is another hallmark of the
religious false self, as it is “always seeking to leverage our religious world and all
those in it in ways most advantageous to its security, its prestige and, especially,
our religious agenda” (Mulholland 2016, 54-55). There is a kind of spiritual
indulgence, where the religious false self is always hungering for a greater high in
worship and devotional activities (Mulholland 2016, 59). Finally, there is
“distinction-making,” where the religious false self seeks to elevate itself by using
denigrating labels (like “fundamentalist,” “charismatic,” and “liberal”) to push
others down (Mulholland 2016, 60) and showy spiritual practices to win adulation
(Mulholland 2016, 57). Echoing the almost-Christian sermons of the Puritans and
early Evangelicals, Mulholland states, “Our religious false self may be rigorous in
religiosity, devoted in discipleship and sacrificial in service - without being in
loving union with God” (Mulholland 2016, 47). So just becoming a Christian does
not dispel the false self, and in fact may actually exacerbate it as it discovers a
whole new arena of life to exercise its old tricks.

	How, then, is this obstacle to be cleared away? The natural reaction is to
seek to identify the false self and destroy it. But this is an assertion of wilfulness
(May 1982, 6) and simply results in the establishment of a more subtle false self.
C.S. Lewis illustrates this dynamic in his Narnia novel The Voyage of the Dawn
Treader (Lewis 1952b), when a greedy boy named Eustace is turned into a dragon
by a magical bracelet that he stole. Aslan the Lion (the Christ figure in Narnia)

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brings him to a pool to be cured, but he must strip off his dragon-skin before he
can enter the water. Like a snake, he sheds his skin, only to discover after each
attempt that there is another dragon-skin beneath it.

	“Then the lion said, ‘You will have to let me undress you.' I was
	afraid of his claws, I can tell you, but I was pretty nearly desperate
	now. So I just lay flat down on my back to let him do it.”
		“The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had
	gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off,
	it hurt worse than anything I've ever felt. The only thing that made
	me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off.
	You know—if you've ever picked the scab of a sore place. It hurts,
	but it is such fun to see it coming away."
		“Well, he peeled the beastly stuff right off—just as I thought
	I'd done it myself the other three times, only they hadn't hurt—and
	there it was lying on the grass: only ever so much thicker, and
	darker, and more knobbly looking than the others had been. And
	there was I as smooth and soft as a peeled switch and smaller than
	I had been. Then he caught hold of me—I didn't like that much for
	I was very tender underneath now that I'd no skin on—and threw
	me into the water. It smarted like anything but only for a moment.
	After that it became perfectly delicious.” (Lewis 1952b, 118)

The false self cannot be defeated by our own efforts. It is not only impossible, it is
spiritually dangerous, as the effort will result in despair and depression when it
fails or - if apparently successful - pride and self-satisfaction. The second
outcome is by far the worst.

	Instead, one must acknowledge the reality of who one is - the real self -
and accept that this fallen, selfish, fearful person is nonetheless a beloved child of
God (Nouwen 2002, 30). With that acceptance, one receives the gift of the true
self from God, participating in the unfolding of this gift by learning to know
Christ experientially:

	The true self is who, in reality, you are and who you are becoming.
	It is not something you need to construct through a process of self-

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	improvement or deconstruct by means of psychological
	analysis.. .We do not find our true self by seeking it; rather we find
	it by seeking God. In finding God, we find our truest and deepest
	self. (Benner 2004, 92)

This acknowledgement and acceptance - this finding God - is not a human
endeavour. We cannot choose to undertake it in our time and with our own effort.
The false self is too ingrained within us for us to simply pull ourselves up by our
bootstraps and set it aside. We cannot break out of it from the inside. Instead, we
must be rescued by Someone outside ourselves. When the time is right, God must
break in with an invitation to come to know Him and ourselves more deeply. This
does not mean that we play no role in the process. After all, we must accept this
invitation, surrender to this vision of ourselves and our Belovedness, and muster
the courage to step out from behind the defensive mask we have constructed. But
even these steps must be Spirit-empowered if they are not to become just another
expression of the false self. This should come as no surprise to Christ followers,
whose very spiritual lives started with a divine rescue. Furthermore, our spiritual
lives can only continue with daily grace from God; it is an ongoing dance where
God leads every step and we follow. The Apostle Paul warned against any
temptation to believe otherwise when he admonished the Galatians with the
rhetorical question, “After beginning by means of the Spirit, are you now trying to
finish by means of the flesh?” (Galatians 3:2).

	Returning to the previous discussion of developmental spirituality, the
false self is Hagberg and Guelich's Wall that must be surmounted in the stage
four. But it is not we who surmount it, and the more we try using the toolbox we

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have assembled to tackle problems in life, the higher the Wall gets. Instead, the
Wall must be weakened and then broken from the other side. We participate in
clearing away the bricks and debris, but we do not determine when and how it
happens. So the mid-faith crisis is the Divinely initiated process by which God
breaks the false self down, exposing the real self to God's loving gaze and
nurturing the true self (Rohr 2011, 50). How, then, does this process arise and
proceed?

What Does a Mid-Faith Crisis Look Like?

	While Scripture does not use the term mid-faith crisis or anything like it,
some examples of this process can be found in both the Old and New Testaments.
As mentioned before, Jacob's literal wrestling match with the Angel of the Lord
at Peniel recounted in Genesis 32:22-32 left him a different person, as was
symbolically indicated by his change in name from Jacob (“the deceiver”) to
Israel (“he struggles with God”). Job - already a righteous man at the start of the
book that bears his name - likewise undergoes a personal transformation through
a time of divinely-appointed darkness (see Job 19:8, 30:17 and 26) worsened by
God's silence (Job 30:20). Walter Brueggemann assigns the Psalms to three
seasons of life: psalms of confident orientation, jarring disorientation, and
surprising reorientation (Brueggemann 2002, 12). Elijah's paradoxical depression
after his great victory on Mount Carmel (1 Kings 19:1-9a) is familiar to pastors
who are sliding into stage four even as the success of stage three is all around
them. This depression and the divine rehabilitation that follows (1 Kings 19:9b-

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18) are another manifestation of the mid-faith crisis. Simon Peter's betrayal of
Jesus (John 18:15-18, 25-27) and subsequent reinstatement (John 21:1-22)
resulted in a powerful change to his faith which, when completed by the coming
of the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:1-4), resulted in a ministry characterized by power
(Acts 2:14-41, 3:1-10, 4:13), without the violence (John 18:10) and bombast
(Matthew 26:33, 35) he was prone to before. Finally, Saul's entire religious
paradigm was turned on its head through his own encounter with the resurrected
Jesus on the road to Damascus (Acts 9:1-19), which also precipitated a change in
his name to Paul. While each of these experiences vary widely in their details,
their unifying factor is a life-altering, qualitative change in faith from one form to

The Dark Night of the Senses

	John Coe provides an excellent description of the symptomology of the
mid-faith crisis, although he uses the vocabulary of John of the Cross's dark night
of the soul. The first experience is the dark night of the senses, which unfolds as
part of God's work to mature the Christian (Coe 2010, Lecture 3). At the start of
the spiritual life, God wants to build into the Christian the habits that will build
and maintain spiritual health throughout their lifetime. These habits constitute the
classic spiritual disciplines, such as reading Scripture, prayer, fellowship,
worship, and so forth. Because the new Christian doesn't yet have experience
with the long-term benefits of these exercises, nor in most cases the self-discipline
to practice them regularly, God provides an incentive: spiritual delights. Every

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page of Scripture explodes with divine messages that seem directed to the new
Christian personally, fellowship is sweet, worship is powerfully moving, and
prayer not only yields powerful results but has the same effortless intimacy as a
conversation with your best friend. What's more, vices, addictions and character
flaws that once seemed intractable sometimes lose their power seemingly
overnight. The new Christian's spiritual life seems to be all light and love and
power and ease. Coe labels these incentives “the bottle” (Coe 2010, Lecture 3), in
keeping with the Biblical metaphor for the nourishment that young Christians
require (1 Corinthians 3:2 and Hebrews 5:12), as well as John of the Cross's own
metaphor:

	As soon as the soul is regenerated by its new warmth and fervor
	for the service of God.. .He makes it to find spiritual milk, sweet
	and delectable, in all the things of God, without any labour of its
	own, and also great pleasure in spiritual exercises, for here God is
	giving to it the breast of His tender love, even as to a tender child.
	(John of the Cross 1990, 38)

The bottle is exciting, energizing and heady - but temporary.

	However necessary it may be for a young Christian, ultimately God does
not want them on the bottle. The bottle cannot do the hard, transforming work of
putting off the old person and taking on the new (Ephesians 4:22-24). As already
noted above, the false self can be exacerbated by starting to follow Jesus, and the
bottle is part of the reason why. The false self enjoys the delights of the bottle,
and so it uses its tools and techniques to try to drink ever more deeply. John of the
Cross notes a spiritual form of gluttony that can arise at this stage, where the
beginner desires more and more spiritual “sweets” and is constantly hungering for

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a bigger and bigger spiritual high (John of the Cross 1990, 54). This then leads to
spiritual greed (John of the Cross 1990, 44-45), where the beginner goes from one
form of a spiritual practice to another to seek that high - the next book, the better
sermon, the more anointed worship leader, the bigger Spirit-filled conference.
Another reason God doesn't want Christians on the bottle is to mature their love.
God seeks a genuine relationship with us, based on our love for who He is rather
than a desire for the benefits He supplies. Bernard of Clairvaux called this the
transition from loving God for one's own sake to loving God for His own sake,
from the love of a servant to the love of a child (Bernard of Clairvaux 2008, 61).
It is the love of a weaned child with its mother (Psalm 131:2) - a child who
climbs onto his mother's lap not for what he will receive but purely for the delight
of her presence.

	Therefore, at the point in a Christian's life when God deems it the right
time, he starts to take the bottle away. This is dark night of the senses. John of the
Cross uses the illustration of a mother weaning her child to explain this dark
night:

	But, as the child grows bigger, the mother gradually ceases
	caressing it, and, hiding her tender love, puts bitter aloes upon her
	sweet breast, sets down the child from her arms and makes it walk
	upon its feet, so that it may lose the habits of a child and betake
	itself to more important and substantial occupations. (John of the
	Cross 1990, 38)

Martin Laird describes this process using the image of a gardener who waters a
young plant abundantly but then stops so that the plant can grow its roots deep to
find water from a “more consistent if less abundant source,” thereby strengthening

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the plant “against disease and drought” (Laird 2011, 97). As God withdraws the
spiritual pleasures, the Christian experiences aridity in the spiritual activities that
used to be exciting and rich. Coe describes three signs of this dynamic (Coe 2010,
Lecture 3). First, your mind wanders during the activities and so they feel
fruitless. Then, you start to shy away from the activities because you're tired of
feeling guilty for the poor outcomes. Finally, all this worries you, leading you to
cry out to God, “I don't know what's gone wrong - my mind is all over the place
and although I want to do these things, I find myself neglecting them. Help! I
want You!” All three components are present in a true dark night of the senses. It
is the third piece - the anxiety about the situation - that differentiates it from the
mere backsliding that the dark night is so often confused with.

	At the same time, avers Coe, the Holy Spirit brings the Christian's
attention to the hidden sin in the person's life (Coe 2010, Lecture 3). Just as 90%
of an iceberg is located below the water line, so we are blind to many of the things
in our lives that bring spiritual (and occasionally physical) death to ourselves and
those around us. For example, we are mostly unaware of the machinations and
distorted narratives of the false self. However, during the dark night of the senses,
the Holy Spirit starts to push up on the iceberg, bringing things that used to
operate unseen in our lives into the light. This explains why one of the marks of
spiritual maturity is, ironically, a growing sense of one's own sinfulness (Porter,
Sandage, Wand and Hill 2019, 15-16). It's not that we are becoming more sinful
over time, it's that we are seeing more and more sin that we were blind to before.

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So Paul was not adopting a false humility when he declared himself the worst of
all sinners (1 Timothy 1:15). Rather, he was demonstrating his spiritual maturity.

	The dark night of the soul is therefore an experience of both aridity and
conviction. It is no wonder that it is mistaken for a dead-end on the road of faith,
rather than the way forward into a new kind of life in Christ. However, it is not
called a dark night because it is unpleasant (although it almost always is). The
“dark” in “dark night of the soul” refers not to the unpleasantness of the
experience, but rather to how we are unable to see the work God is doing during
this stage of faith. This is clearer in John of the Cross's native Spanish, where the
oscura in la noche oscura del alma has the primary sense of hidden - it is the
same root as the English word obscure, meaning uncertain or concealed. The Holy
Spirit is doing serious heart work during this time, and like a surgical patient, the
Christian needs to be placed under anesthesia in order to prevent her from
interfering with the process. The night is therefore dark, working beneath our
level of awareness and beyond the reach of our control. Furthermore, the aridity
and conviction are not only sadly necessary for the work itself, they are also a
grace as they shield from our view the glory of the true self emerging within. It is
a grace because our character is not yet able to bear the weight of this glory, for
we would be tempted to take pride in the work and claim it as our own - thereby
hardening the false self into an irremovable mask.

	Coe identifies several temptations that accompany the dark night of the
senses (Coe 2010, Lecture 3). First is causal thinking. When the bottle is taken
away and the aridity and conviction settle in, a natural response is to assume that

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the problem lies with us, so we try harder so we can get back to where things are
working again. Sometimes that means doing what we've always done only with
greater effort; sometimes it involves seeking out new ways to experience God.
This is a manifestation of one of the caged behaviours in stage four: the
(ultimately doomed) attempt to retreat to a prior stage. Causal thinking places all
spiritual agency in our hands and ignores that God may be up to something
different. Ironically, the base assumption is correct: we are to blame for the dark
night, but the fault lies not with our technique or effort, but with our identity.

	Another temptation of the dark night of the senses is what Kierkegaard
calls becoming a “gentle Christian” (Coe 2010, Lecture 3). When the initial rush
of our spiritual lives fades away as the bottle is removed, we can mistakenly
assume that - as with so many of our other enthusiasms in life - the honeymoon
period must be over and now “real” Christian life has settled in. We adjust our
expectations to match our experience (so as to spare both God and us any
embarrassment), and we settle into the long wait for the glorification that comes at
the end of life. This calls for no small amount of circumspect hermeneutics, as the
Bible's extravagant claims for what Watchman Nee called “the normal Christian
life” (Nee 1977, 1) can cause discomfort for the gentle Christian. However, the
gentle Christian has many allies in the pews, and occasionally even in the pulpit,
so it's not so difficult a state to maintain as it may first appear. Nevertheless, the
Hound of Heaven does not give up so easily, and the Spirit-prompted anxiety
about our state and the hunger for something more keeps the question alive even
when we would rather it died.

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	A further mistake to be made in the dark night of the senses is to assume
that we are God-forsaken. We feel God has left us, and the palpable sense of His
presence that we enjoyed for so long on the bottle has been lost. This mistake is
understandable, as the very essence of the experience is that God withdraws the
sense of His presence in our lives. The truth is that God has never been more
active in our lives, but as mentioned before, the darkness of the dark night hides
the Holy Spirit's work from our eyes. This can lead to fear of being ostracized by
those in our community of faith. If they only knew the aridity and conviction we
faced (we reason), they would surely put us out like any other hypocrite.

	This fear, and the desire to claw our way back to stage three, can lead to a
special temptation for leaders undergoing the dark night of the senses. As though
trying to drown out the inner questions and turmoil, they can undertake what Coe
calls “ministries of glory” (Coe 2010, Lecture 3). The term is taken from Luther's
distinction of a spirituality of glory - a never-ending ascent into power,
excitement and the bottle - versus a spirituality of the Cross - a descent into
humility, brokenness and truth. Many leaders enter the dark night of the senses at
the height of their careers (again, consider Elijah in 1 Kings 19). As the fruitful
life of the Servant gives way to the rocky path of the Sojourner, they have more
than just their spirituality at stake; their livelihoods are on the line, as well. So
instead of embracing the uncertainty of the dark night of the soul, they instead go
all in on the bottle in their work and ministry, hoping in vain to recapture a taste
of it for themselves.

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	The dark night of the senses can manifest itself like other spiritual
problems, so it is important to distinguish it from other ailments. As mentioned
before, the dark night can look like backsliding. Both the Sojourner and the
backslider experience distraction in their spiritual exercises, leading to a
disinclination to undertake them. The key difference is that the person in a dark
night is concerned by this. The backslider is not particularly bothered by the
situation. To be sure, they would prefer that the bottle kept working, but when it
stops, they simply turn to the next source of consolation. That's all religion was
for them, and church was simply a religious service provider. But when the
person in the dark night of the soul loses the bottle, their distressed response is the
same as Peter's: “Lord, to whom shall we go?” (John 6:68). So our worry that we
might be losing our faith or that God might have turned His back on us is the very
sign that neither is the case.

	The aridity of the dark night of the soul resembles another affliction of the
soul: depression. Depression's primary symptom is not feeling sad, but rather not
feeling like doing anything at all. The aridity of the dark night does include a lack
of motivation to undertake spiritual exercises, so it can be mistaken for
depression. However, the two experiences are distinct, as spiritual maturity and
mental health are independent of one another. The lack of motivation in
depression is universal; it affects all areas of life, including our work, our hobbies,
our family, and our spiritual exercises. The indisposition of the dark night of the
soul is restricted to spiritual things; the rest of life usual proceeds unimpacted.
Nevertheless, Coe proposes an important proviso: if you persist in resisting God's

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work in the dark night, if you refuse to look at the material the Holy Spirit is
bringing to light and get angered by the frustration of the experience, reactive
depression can result (Coe 2010, Lecture 4). Therefore, the two conditions are
separate, but they may occur simultaneously in some cases.

The Dark Night of the Spirit

	As challenging as it might be, the dark night of the senses is only the first
stage of the dark night of the soul. John of the Cross calls the second part the dark
night of the spirit, as he divides the soul into an outer “sensory” shell and an inner
“spiritual” core (May 2004, 52). The dark night of the senses shows us how our
vices smuggled themselves into our Christian life, adopting a religious overcoat to
disguise themselves. The purification of the dark night of the spirit goes even
deeper. Instead of weaning us of our hidden vices, the Holy Spirit now weans us
of our cherished virtues (Coe 2010, Lecture 4). Much of what we mistake for the
fruit of the Spirit in our lives is merely the product of a good upbringing,
favorable life circumstances, inborn temperament, or our own moral self-
improvement. Therefore, God now invites us to no longer trust in our own
goodness, but rather fully embrace the truth that apart from the Vine we can do
nothing (John 15:4).

	Coe notes that while the dark night of the senses is a single experience
(however long in duration), the dark night of the spirit is a series of short nights
(Coe 2010, Lecture 4). In this stage we move back and forth between times of
great consolation, comfort and peace, and times of darkness, travail and struggle.

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With each turn in the upward spiral, we are purged ever more deeply and
illumined ever more brightly. However, John of the Cross insists that these
cyclical experiences are merely the prelude to the dark night of the spirit proper:

	The soul... is not led by His Majesty into this night of the spirit as
	soon as it goes forth from the aridities and trials of the ... night of
	the sense; rather it is wont to pass a long time, even years, after
	leaving the state of beginners, in exercising itself in that of
	proficients...It goes about the things of God with much greater
	freedom and satisfaction of the soul, and with more abundant and
	inward delight than it did at the beginning before it entered [the
	night of the sense].although.it is never without certain
	occasional necessities, aridities, darknesses and perils which are
	sometimes much more intense than those of the past, for they are
	as tokens and heralds of the coming night of the spirit, and are not
	of as long duration as will be the night which is to come. For,
	having passed through a period, or periods, or days of this night
	and tempest, the soul returns to its wonted serenity. (John of the
	Cross 1990, 91-92)

The discrepancy between Coe and John of the Cross at this point can be explained
by John's later observation that God only draws into the true dark night of the
spirit those whom He intends to bring into divine union in this life (John of the
Cross 1990, 92). This cycle of tempest and serenity is God's method for purifying
the rest (John of the Cross 1990, 92). Since John of the Cross believed that very
few Christians are destined to experience divine union on this side of heaven, Coe
is right to speak to the majority case (however his imprecision of terminology
may irritate the purist). Therefore, it is these pseudo dark nights of the spirit that
will be described going forward.

	The dark night of the spirit corresponds roughly with stage five. The
correspondence is rough, however, as the phenomenon does not fit perfectly the
picture that Hagberg and Guelich paint of stage five. They describe the stage,

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overall, as a renewed Student phase, where in a recapitulation of stage two the
Christian re-learns what it means to follow God in light of the revelations
disclosed in stage four. Such a portrayal seems entirely compatible with the
ongoing learning that occurs in the dark night of the spirit. However, Hagberg and
Guelich insist that stage five is characterized by a “deep calm or stillness” once
we emerge from the crucible of stage four (Hagberg and Guelich 2005, 140). The
apprenticeship described in the dark night of the spirit is of a more rigorous kind,
as John of the Cross notes that the periods of darkness can be even worse than the
dark night of the senses (Coe 2010, Lecture 4). Nevertheless, given the central
idea of working out a new way to follow Jesus that both models share, they can be
considered to address the same stage of faith.

	Coe avers that the sign we are entering a dark night of the spirit is when
the Holy Spirit brings up the question of whether something is missing from our
spiritual lives (Coe 2010, Lecture 4). This can take several forms. We may
become disillusioned with our own goodness or past accomplishments, no longer
drawing energy and satisfaction from them. There can be a growing sense that this
earthly life is an inadequate home for us and we start to long for something
greater. Maintaining the facade of our goodness starts to become fatiguing, and
we can feel lonely as this facade isolates our real selves from those around us. Our
ministry might be successful and a blessing to others, but it no longer satisfies our
own souls. There can be a growing recognition that our theological knowledge
and wisdom are correct, but inadequate. Finally, we come to see that our wills are
set more on ourselves than on God.

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	John of the Cross believed that the inner, spiritual part of the soul contains
three faculties: intellect, memory (which he understood as not merely an archive
of the past, but also an imagination shaped by this archive), and the will (May
2004, 54). Therefore, in the dark night of the spirit, God works in all three of
these areas (Coe 2010, Lecture 4). Our theology has helped us to understand God
and how to follow Him. In the dark night of the spirit, God brings a darkness to
the intellect where He moves us from knowing about Him to knowing Him,
personally and experientially. Similarly, our memory has served as a map to
ourselves, others and the world around us that we use every day to navigate life
more or less successfully. Now, God shows us the vanity of our memory so that
we can be fully present to what is in front of us, rather than interacting with a
projection of it thrown up before our eyes by our memory-trained imagination.
Finally, there is a dryness in the will, where once again we experience aridity in
the spiritual exercises that were so fruitful in the past.

	The primary temptation in a dark night of the spirit is to fear - fear that if
we give up our goodness, God and those around us aren't going to love us
anymore (Coe 2010, Lecture 4). Giving up our goodness doesn't mean
antinomianism; our good character honours God and is a blessing to ourselves and
others, so we don't discard that. Instead, it means to lay aside our reliance on our
goodness for our sense of well-being, as a source of our identity. When our sense
of well-being rests on our goodness, we can fall to pieces when sin momentarily
overcomes us. Then we berate ourselves for having failed - a poor counterfeit of
contrition that has more to do with our wounded pride than true humility - with

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the end result that our discouragement and remorse separate us farther from God
than our sin would have done (Smith 1985, 137). But someone who has given up
their goodness is like Brother Lawrence, who “acknowledged his sins and was not
surprised by them” (Brother Lawrence 2015, Conversations 21):

	When he failed he did nothing other than acknowledge his failure,
	telling God, “I will never do anything right if you leave me alone;
	it's up to you to stop me from falling and correct what is wrong.”
	After that he no longer worried about his failure. (Brother
	Lawrence 2015, Conversations 16)

This is what God aims to bring out ever more fully through the dark nights of the
spirit: a bones-deep conviction that apart from the Vine we can do nothing.

How Can One Participate in God's Work in a
Mid-Faith Crisis?

	Divine initiative at every point of the mid-faith crisis cannot be
emphasized enough. John of the Cross emphasizes the passive nature of the dark
night of the soul:

	In John's vision, it is during the passive nights that God's grace
	flows through the ruins of our failed attempts, softens our
	willfulness, and takes us where we could not go on our own....
	And it is during the passive nights that the real liberation takes
	place. All the rest has, at best, been nothing but preparation. (May
	2004, 86)

The temptation of causality, to grab at the wheel when God turns down what
appears to be a dead-end on the journey, must be firmly resisted. However, this
passivity does not mean inactivity - that would be to make the mistake opposite
from activism: quietism. The surrender called for in the mid-faith crisis is an
active thing, requiring all our strength at times. While we are called to lay down

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the tools of self-improvement in the mid-faith crisis, there is a place for
participation in God's work.

Get Real

	The first step is to get real with God and ourselves. Only God can bring
forth the true self in our lives, but we can acknowledge the real self underneath.
Shattuck calls this “living in the real self,” which consists of accepting the reality
of who we are right now - that we are “a mix of dignity and depravity” (Shattuck
2013, Lecture 3). The dignity includes all of God's glorious gifts to us, including
our talents, passions and temperament, while the depravity includes all the
vulnerabilities, wounds and vices that sent us scurrying for the cover of the false
self in the first place. Shattuck is careful to note that living in the real self is
neither denying the reality of sin nor dismissing it as OK, but rather it is a
“hopeful brokenness” (Shattuck 2013, Lecture 3), like the conviction of Peter
versus the despair of Judas. “It's messier than living in the false self,” notes
Shattuck, “but at least it's honest” (Shattuck 2013, Lecture 3). Teresa of Avila
calls this learning to sit among our weeds, allowing God to be our gardener (Coe
2010, Lecture 4). The temptation is to pull the weeds up, to be our own gardener,
but it must be resisted, as the dark night of the spirit shows us that even our desire
for transformation is self-centered. There is a place for the exercise of the will and
self-discipline, but it is not here. Rather than working at ridding ourselves of our
vices (at least the ones we find objectionable), we must instead work at staying

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connected to the Vine (John 15:4) trusting God to bring forth fruit in the right
time and the right way.

But what does living in the real self actually look like? It begins with what
Antony de Mello calls awareness, or an ongoing posture of patient, non-
judgemental observation:

	Think of the sad history of your efforts at self-improvement, that
	either ended in disaster or succeeded only at the cost of struggle
	and pain. Now suppose you desisted from all effort to change
	yourself, and from all self-dissatisfaction, would you then be
	doomed to go to sleep having passively accepted everything in you
	and around you? There is another way besides laborious self-
	pushing on the one hand and stagnant acceptance on the other.
	... What you attempt is not to change yourself but to observe
	yourself, to study every one of your reactions to people and things,
	without judgement or condemnation or desire to reform yourself.
	(De Mello 1991, 60-61)

Martin Laird sees this as what the ancients meant by the spiritual discipline of
vigilance or watchfulness (Matthew 26:41, 1 Peter 5:8, Proverbs 4:23):

	One type of watchfulness consists in closely scrutinizing every
	mental image or provocation. This watchfulness is not our
	superego's monitor, ever ready to shame us into conformity to an
	internalized ideal of what holiness is supposed to look like. It is
	free of all ego strategies that hold onto what we like or push away
	what we don't like. It is a grounding, vigilant receptivity. This
	witness, that which is aware of the afflictive emotion, that which is
	aware of clinging to it or fleeing from it, is itself free of the
	affliction, free of the clinging, free of the fleeing. (Laird 2006,
	100)

In short, this is an act of meta-cognition - thinking about our thinking. Become
aware of our inner dynamics, our emotional programming that tells us what will
make us happy, and our mental commentary on what is going on around us. Don't

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judge these dynamics, condemn them or hate them. Just observe and seek to
understand them, which starts to rob them of their power.

	The other half of living in the real self is to embrace our belovedness. A
growing self-awareness must be matched by a growing sense of God's great love
for that self of whom we are becoming aware. John Calvin opened his famous
Institutes of the Christian Religion with the assertion that the twin pillars of the
Christian life are knowing God and knowing ourselves (Calvin 1960, 1.1.1). But
both must proceed apace: trying to know God without knowing ourselves
produces a mere head knowledge, while trying to know ourselves without
knowing God leads to self-fixation. The best way to grow in both is to look at
God looking at us, and the first and final lesson to learn in this growth is how
deeply God loves us. All the things that we imagine disqualify us from that love
are in fact no obstacle to it (Romans 5:6-10). Nothing we can do or fail to do and
nothing that can be done to us can diminish or increase that love (Romans 8:31-
39). We do not serve a swivel-chair God, who alternates between acceptance and
disappointment depending on our performance (Smith 2009, 94). Only an abiding
conviction that God loves us now - not our potential but our actuality - can give
us the courage to step out from behind the false self. This is not the world's cheap
imitation of self-acceptance - an acritical mutual positive regard that ignores our
deep wounds and the sinful maladaptations we have adopted. This self-acceptance
is based not in self-love, but in God's love of the self; it is an act of faith, trusting
God's image of us over our self-image. Even when it feels like we are lying to

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ourselves (and perhaps especially at those times), we must affirm that we are the
Beloved of the Father, in whom Christ dwells and delights.

Linger with What Provokes You

	In addition to living in the real self, we can also participate in God's work
in the mid-faith crisis to dismantle the false self and bring forth the true self. As
we practice awareness and the discipline of watchfulness, we will notice flashes
of the false self as it is momentarily flushed out of hiding. We perceive those
lenses through which we see the world. Remember that the false self betrays itself
in moments of irritation or fear, or perhaps one of our cherished false narratives is
brought to light. It might even be an experience of conviction, where the mirror is
held up before our eyes and we are unable to look away. Whatever the case is, we
are gifted with a revelation as the Holy Spirit pushes a bit of the iceberg above the
waterline. Of course, this doesn't feel like a gift; it feels like embarrassment,
shame and disappointment in ourselves. But there is another way of looking at it.
Haase suggests viewing it as graced guilt: “instead of treating your sinfulness and
its guilt as a dead-end street, approach them as teachers who are instructing you
about yourself” (Haase 2008, 72). Brown calls this learning to “linger with what
provokes you” (Brown 2013, 81). This is one way God uses all things for the
good of his beloved children (Romans 8:28).

	Coe offers a four-step process for responding to these gifts (Coe 2010,
Lecture 5). As always, the initiative lies entirely with God: the Holy Spirit shows
us something of the iceberg in our reaction to a situation, inviting us to set aside

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some aspect of the false self and grow more fully into the true self. The first step
of the human response to this invitation is to allow ourselves to be addressed (or
even confronted) by it, to open up to it. Equally important is to resolve before
God that any response will be an expression of willingness rather than willfulness:
“God, whatever I'm going to do, I only want to do this in Your Spirit, not my way
or by my own power.” It is vital that any obedience the invitation inspires must
not arise from the false self, to be a “good little boy/girl” or “to get the monkey of
guilt off my back” (Coe 2010, Lecture 5). After this presentation and resolution,
the person asks God three questions. The first is, “To experience what You're
inviting me into, what kind of person do I need to become?” This acknowledges
that lasting spiritual formation only comes through heart transformation. Striving
to adopt new behaviours directly is a doomed endeavour. Furthermore, it is asking
God for a vision of the true self we're being invited to become. Such a vision is an
essential part of transformation (Willard 2002, 83). The follow-up question is, “In
light of the kind of person You are inviting me to become, what are You asking
me to do today?” Is this invitation a backburner issue, something that God is
putting on the table for our reflection, rumination and observation? Or is it a
front-burner issue, where now is the time to formally take up a regimen, or an
intensive period of training focused on this becoming? This discernment is
necessary as we can receive multiple invitations to life and wholeness every week
and trying to focus on all of them is too much. The key is to identify which
invitation is to be acted upon today. If we are to proceed, the final question is,
“What plan of training are You calling me to?” What activities of the mind,

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affections, body and social context will open us up to God's transforming touch in
this area of your life? What disciplines of abstinence (like fasting, solitude and
silence) or engagement (like worship, Scriptural meditation, or adoration) will
assist with this process (Willard 1988, 158)? How long should this intensive
regimen be followed, and how will it end? It is vital that these questions be true
acts of discernment, where the answers are worked out together with God.
Otherwise, the divine invitation may degenerate into just another self-
improvement project sponsored by the false self.

Huddle Up

	While much of the soul work of the mid-faith crisis is internal and
personal, this does not mean there is no place for the assistance of others. A
trusted voice can speak necessary truth into our lives, becoming the occasion of
the Holy Spirit pushing up the iceberg. An old autobiography of a saint passing
through their own mid-faith crisis may give us categories for what we are
experiencing. But most of all, other Christians can support and encourage us as
we do the hard, inner work this season demands - just as “when Moses' arms
grew tired, Aaron and Hur brought a stone for him to sit on, while they stood
beside him and held up his arms, holding them steady until the sun went down”
(Exodus 17:12).

	Two kinds of helpers are especially important during the mid-faith crisis.
The value they bring is largely due to the intentionality we bring to the
relationship. God can open anyone's mouth to assist us in this time (Numbers

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22:28), but the deliberate focus these relationships entail mean that they can be a
consistent source of help. First there are spiritual friends, our peers or those
slightly further ahead of us on the journey of faith. When passing through a dark
night, it is important to weave a circle of friends around you to get together
regularly to share the state of your souls. It is important that most or all of them
have passed through (or are passing through) the mid-faith crisis themselves, or
they are likely to misunderstand what's happening, which will significantly
impede their helpfulness. In addition to this band of brothers (or sisters), the help
of a spiritual director can be invaluable. Different than a pastoral counsellor or
therapist, a spiritual director is gifted and trained in the ministry of helping
another Christian hear God more clearly and respond to God more consistently.
Unfortunately, the name is misleading. A spiritual director is not exclusively
focused on the directee's religious life, for all of life is seen as the arena in which
the Holy Spirit is active. Neither is a director highly directive, but rather helps the
directee find the path God is laying out for him or her. As a result, directors often
have significant understanding of and experience with mid-faith crises. Working
with a spiritual director is always helpful but sometimes necessary, such as when
passing through a mid-faith crisis.

Assisting Another in a Mid-Faith Crisis

	What if we are one of those spiritual friends? How can we best encourage
and support someone passing through a mid-faith crisis? The more important step
is to de-stigmatize the experience. Passing through the crucible of a mid-faith

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crisis is already a difficult experience, with the attending aridity, conviction and
shifting understanding of who God is. It is made immeasurably worse when
internal and even external voices are prosecuting a misdiagnosis of backsliding or
even mental illness. Therefore, the greatest gift a friend can give is to resist
becoming alarmed and instead calmly explain that mid-faith crises are part of the
journey and that, as disorienting as it is, God is inviting them into something
deeper and greater. This is also a gift an entire community of faith can give by
normalizing the experience in the group's culture. Developmental spirituality can
be taught, ministry offerings can target people at various stages of development,
leaders can speak about and from their own mid-faith crises (and be selected from
those who have passed through one), the category of “those in mid-faith crisis”
could be added to collects, and songs of lament2 can be included in worship
services to give voice to those in a mid-faith crisis.

	In addition to this primary way to help those in a mid-faith crisis, there are
several other means to support them. The first is to close ranks about them. Even
where a person recognizes a mid-faith crisis for what it is, there is a tendency to
withdraw and hide from others. Like a wounded animal they step into the
shadows, driven there by embarrassment or weariness. We hear Adam's echo in
our friend's retreat: “I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid” (Genesis 3:10).
This tendency is exacerbated among those who don't know that a mid-faith crisis
__________
2 Examples of worship songs that give voice to lament include “It Is Well With
My Soul,” “Blessed Be Your Name,” “How Long, O Lord?,” “Abide With Me,”
and “Rivers of Babylon.”

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is part of the pilgrimage, or who know it but don't realize that their current
indisposition is the hallmark of one. To combat this instinct, we must close the
gap by moving closer to them. When we take pains to invite them out to
gatherings of God's people, we give the implicit message that they are still worthy
to participate. Even when they cannot face the crowds, we can spend time with
them one-on-one. The important thing is just to keep up contact, to keep their
connection with the community alive - even if it is just where two or three are
gathered in the name of Jesus (Matthew 18:20).

	The primary activity during those times of connection is encouragement,
to literally put courage into them (en-courage). The mid-faith crisis entails a great
deal of inner work, and it is easy to shy away from the job. As is the case with
putting off unpleasant but necessary dentistry, this only prolongs the discomfort
without making the eventual procedure any easier. This tendency is
understandable, however, so we must be sympathetic when they run out of
willingness to keep up the fight. Acknowledging the reality of their suffering, we
nevertheless cheer them on. Help them not to fall into despair, and dispel any idea
that the suffering in the mid-faith crisis is vain. Gently leading them back to the
harness, we don't allow them to give up on themselves.

	Patience is key for this support network. A mid-faith crisis is the work of
years, and while it is not all doom and gloom for that entire time (although in
some cases it can be), a person must be allowed to move through it at their own
pace. The word compassion comes from the Latin meaning to suffer with, for
being in the presence of someone who is suffering causes a sympathetic resonance

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between our hearts and we ourselves begin to suffer. To eliminate this discomfort
within themselves, caregivers can be tempted to offer a quick fix for the problem
or even grow impatient with the sufferer when the fix doesn't take. Instead, these
companions must steel themselves for the discomfort of sitting among the ashes
with their friend (Job 2:12-13).

Conclusion

	Does everyone pass through a mid-faith crisis? Models are composites of
a multitude of personal experiences, simplified representations of reality that are
intended to provide a reliable map to the ground. However, to insist that a model
could not be wrong is not only arrogant but also the doorway to oppression of
those whose experience does not neatly fit the model. This model of spiritual
formation is based on the observations of spiritual giants in the history of the
church, reflecting on the experience of Christians from differing cultures and
across the centuries. Classical writers like John of the Cross and modern authors
such as Fowler and Hagberg and Guelich would say that all who do not become
intractably mired in an earlier stage will sooner or later enter a mid-faith crisis.
Nevertheless, an appropriate creaturely humility demands that we not dictate to
God that the Holy Spirit must only work in certain ways. Even those who would
affirm the necessity of a post-conversion paradigm shift in our experience of God
don't agree on how it presents and proceeds. For instance, while John Wesley
stoutly insisted on the goal of Christian perfection and acknowledged that people
grow in times of suffering or when God withdraws the sense of His presence, he

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objected to the idea that spiritual growth requires these interventions (Collins
2003, 1932). Happily, the model does not need to be without exception to be
useful to spiritual formation practitioners. The mid-faith crisis has been found in
diverse cultural, theological and historical contexts as a common, non-
pathological development in the spiritual journey. So, while we must
acknowledge that each Christian will be led into their true self in a divinely
appointed manner and timetable, we can recognize that there are recurring
patterns to how this faith transition unfolds and use this awareness to smooth the
way for people.

	Thus, the mid-faith crisis is a common phase in the Christian life. God
invites us to move from the triumphalist and simple faith of our youth and young
adulthood to a deeper and more authentic experience of the eternal, abundant life
that Jesus lived and died to bring us. Ultimately, this invitation is to step out from
behind our false self and live in the real self so that God can form our true self
ever more fully. God does this by weaning us of the bottle of delight in spiritual
activity and drawing us into the desert where the people of God have always been
formed. The entire process from beginning to end is under God's exclusive
control - after all, the need to control is one of the primary things to be purged
from our hearts. Nevertheless, if we choose to lean into the work, participating
with it rather than resisting it, it does proceed with greater facility. However, there
is no speeding it up as it never fully ends in this life. Instead, after the primary
mid-faith crisis, the rest of our lives are spent in a cycle of consolation and

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desolation as we are drawn up a spiral into an ever-fuller participation in the
divine nature (1 Peter 1:4).

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CHAPTER 4:

ACTION RESEARCH PROJECT

	Once it was the blessing, now it is the Lord;
	Once it was the feeling, now it is His Word.

	Once His gifts I wanted, now the Giver own;
	Once I sought for healing, now Himself alone.
	— A.B. Simpson, “Himself”

	For many years I have been teaching on the mid-faith crisis whenever I
was invited to speak on spiritual formation. Given how uncomfortable this stage
of faith is and how it is often misunderstood, raising awareness of it seemed a
precious gift I could offer any congregation. This is why my model of the mid-
faith crisis includes de-stigmatizing the phenomenon as the first thing a person
can do to help another who is in it. Following my own advice, I set out to raise
awareness of the mid-faith crisis among the circle of churches in my personal
network. More than just my single sermon, I wanted to develop an entire small
group teaching plan to dive deeply into the phenomenon to encourage those in it
and to equip those who want to serve them.

Introduction

	This section describes the nature of the problem I sought to address and
how I proposed to do so. To ensure this was done safely, I address how I was

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supervised, how I secured permission for the research from the church leadership
and the participants themselves, and how the collected data was secured.

Problem

	In my practice of spiritual formation ministry I have found developmental
spirituality, or the recognition of different stages of spiritual growth, to be a
valuable tool for the promotion of spiritual vitality. Understanding the contours of
the spiritual landscape - and the distinct challenges and activities proper to each
stage - can eliminate a great deal of uncertainty, misunderstanding, and
misdiagnosis.

	One phenomenon that especially requires explication is the mid-faith
crisis. As elaborated in chapter three, the mid-faith crisis is a phenomenon in the
life of faith when God withdraws a sense of His presence in order to purge
believers of their false self and invite them into a deeper life of intimacy. This is
an often unpleasant but common phase in the journey where God leads the soul
out of the simple answers and models of the first stages of the Christian life into
deeper waters of His mystery. It is an unsettling time that feels like a dead-end but
is actually the royal road forward into a deeper kind of life. For this reason, the
mid-faith crisis requires careful instruction, and yet it is largely unknown in
conservative Evangelical circles.

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Response

	My project developed a curriculum for a small group experience that
introduces experienced churchgoers to the mid-faith crisis. Over the course of the
brief and intensive program, the group unpacked the mid-faith crisis, including
how it presents, what God is doing in it, and what we can do if we or others are
passing through it to work with God rather than resisting. This curriculum was
presented in three conservative Evangelical congregations sequentially, to
incrementally and iteratively improve it.

Supervision, Permission and Access

	This project followed the research ethics best practices described in the
Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans
Course on Research Ethics (TCPS 2: CORE), as well as the specific guidelines of
the Tyndale Research and Ethics Board (REB). Access to the congregations was
granted by permission of the senior pastor, to whom I was accountable. All
participants opted in to the sessions. Informed consent was secured at the start of
each program from all participants, a means for reporting any ethical concerns
about the project was described, and all findings will be made available to them
(see Appendix A). All information gathered was entirely anonymous, collected in
aggregate at the level of each congregation, with no personally identifiable
information recorded.

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Context

	I have been engaged in spiritual formation ministry of one kind or another
for almost 20 years, starting with teaching small groups and later being trained as
a spiritual director. Over that time, I discovered how common the mid-faith crisis
is in church circles - especially amongst those who have been attending church
for a decade or more. Even worse is how these saints suffer in silence due to their
misunderstanding of the stage they are in, causing them to misdiagnose their
condition as backsliding, thereby adding a further burden of shame to their guilt.
As a result, whenever I am invited to speak on the topic of spiritual formation, I
always address stages of faith, with a special emphasis on the mid-faith crisis. If
there is only one thing a Christian ever learns about spiritual formation, I believe
this to be the single most important topic.

	The mid-faith crisis has also connected with my personal and ministry
contexts. I have been moving through a mid-faith crisis for many years myself, as
described in chapter two. Furthermore, when I unexpectedly became the lead
pastor of Tapestry in March of 2017, I discovered our community's distinctive is
that we largely consist of people who have passed through a mid-faith crisis.
Therefore, our mission is to reach out to those still on that phase of their journey
or emerging from it.

	As a result, I aim to raise awareness of the mid-faith crisis in faith
communities outside of my own. I have contacts with the leadership of three other
churches, and they opened their doors to my leading a small group on this topic.
North Burlington Baptist Church is a sister congregation to Tapestry in the

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CBOQ, and it serves in the same city. West Highland Baptist Church is a
Fellowship Baptist congregation located in suburban Hamilton. Bethany
Community Church is an Evangelical Missionary Church of Canada community
located in St. Catharines. These congregations are larger than our own, but of a
similar demographic make-up (i.e., largely white, upper-middle class, educated
Canadians of northern European descent). One key difference, however, is that
while all three churches have strong discipleship programs, the spiritual journey is
largely understood as a simple linear progression from seeker to student to
servant.

	I had two sets of partners on my project team. The proposed curriculum
was first reviewed by a gifted and experienced teacher of spiritual formation prior
to its initial presentation. I then enlisting the aid of several journeyman spiritual
formation practitioners I have been training over the past few years, to act as
observers and insightful commentators in the debriefs we had after each iteration
of the program.

Models and Other Resources

	In 1159, John of Salisbury wrote “Bernard of Chartres used to compare us
to dwarfs perched on the shoulders of giants. He pointed out that we see more and
farther than our predecessors, not because we have keener vision or greater
height, but because we are lifted up and borne aloft on their gigantic stature”
(MacGarry 1955, 167). This is the foundation of all scholarship, and so is the case
in this project. The curriculum's content was built on my model of spiritual

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formation, which itself relies on resources in Scripture, church history, and
modern scholarship. The approach of the research project itself came from the
literature of continuous improvement, lean education, program evaluation and
action research.

Background from Model of Spiritual Formation

	My model of spiritual formation explored the nature of the mid-faith
crisis. Its four sections became the themes for the four small group sessions: when
the mid-faith crisis occurs in the life of faith, why it is needed, what it looks like,
and how to participate in it. This model drew on several resources from the usual
sources of theology: Scripture, the history of the church, and the works of modern
writers.

	Several Biblical passages informed my pursuit of this project. The
prototypical narrative is that of Elijah's depression, silence, and experience of
God that (ironically) followed his great victory against the prophets of Baal on
Mount Carmel (1 Kings 19). As I learned more about the dynamics of the mid-
faith crisis, I noticed other examples, including Jacob wrestling with God at
Peniel (Genesis 32:22-31), Job's crisis of faith (Job 19:8, as well as 30:17, 20, and
26), Simon Peter's reinstatement (John 21:1-22), and Paul's conversion (Acts 9:1-
19). Several Psalms also allude to such crucibles of faith from which the pray-er
emerges transformed, such as Psalms 13, 77, 103, and 112. These passages mirror
the experiences of many mature believers in the churches I have worked in -
experiences that cry out for validation, encouragement and guidance.

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	Two authors from the history of Christianity are especially helpful to such
an endeavour. First is the 16th century theological poet from Spain who coined the
phrase dark night of the soul: John of the Cross. His description of the experience
is primarily found in the 8-stanza poem Dark Night in the late 1570s, and the
partial commentary he wrote several years later (covering only the first two
stanzas and the first line of the third). The second source comes from almost a
century later from the pen of Puritan pastor Thomas Goodwin. The Child of Light
Walking in Darkness (Goodwin 1861) is a published sermon on Isaiah 50:10,
which explores the condition of God's children who pass through a season
seemingly bereft of comfort and illumination. These two resources form the
historical keel that allow those passing through a mid-faith crisis to sail across or
even against the winds they face.

	I also made use of several contemporary resources to understand and
explicate the mid-faith crisis. John Coe's (Coe 2010) Introduction to Spiritual
Formation lecture series is a very helpful and practical guide to the mid-faith
crisis, delivered from the perspective of an evangelical theologian and clinical
psychologist. Gerald May (May 2004), another psychologist, delivers a similarly
useful treatise in The Dark Night of the Soul, with an even stronger emphasis on
the John of the Cross (John of the Cross 1990) source material. James Fowler's
Stages of Faith (Fowler 1981) and Hagberg and Guelich's The Critical Journey
(Hagberg and Guelich 2005) explore the mid-faith crisis within the broader
context of faith development, while Mulholland's The Deeper Journey
(Mulholland 2016), Benner's The Gift of Being Yourself (Benner 2004) and

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Rohr's Falling Upward (Rohr 2011) connect the divine work of the mid-faith
crisis with the emergence of the true self from the false self. While there are many
more resources that describe the mid-faith crisis, these are the ones I found to be
of greatest utility when explicating the nature of the mid-faith crisis and how to
participate in its work.

Other Resources

	Moving from the content of the curriculum to how it will be developed
during the project itself, I relied on four key resources. First is Emiliani's (2015)
guide to iterative and incremental improvement in the educational context, Lean
Teaching. Another helpful resource in this vein was Fitzpatrick, Sanders and
Worthen's (2017) work on program evaluation. For the approach to the action
research project itself, especially the data collection and analysis techniques, I
was guided by Sensing (2011) and Stringer (2014).

Project, Methodology, and Methods

	This section describes the approach that was adopted for the project,
including what was done (and why), where and when it was done, and how the
participants were safeguarded.

Field

	The project consisted of the presentation of a series of four 75-minute
learning experiences centred on the topic of the mid-faith crisis. The series was
presented three times in different contexts with time in between each presentation

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for reflection and alteration of the content. The first was a four-week series in the
Training & Equipping Christ-Followers (TREC) adult education program at West
Highland Baptist Church in Hamilton. The second was an all-day Saturday event
- an intentionally different format - at Bethany Community Church in St.
Catharines. The third context was a four-week series in the Deeper adult
education program at North Burlington Baptist Church. The primary participants
were the congregants who opted to attend the series. These formats were chosen
to fit into the life of each congregation as unobtrusively as possible by being
presented as just another elective in their existing Christian education ministry.
Furthermore, a four-week series format and a one-day intensive format are both
commonly used in other congregational and retreat venues, so the resulting
curriculum (see Appendix E) could be easy implemented in the future.

	There were two kinds of secondary participants. First, a panel of experts
who reviewed the base version of the course content to assess whether it is
suitable to achieve its learning objectives and to provide recommendations for
improvement. This panel consisted of expert scholars and instructors of spiritual
formation, all of whom I have studied under personally. The panel included Dr.
Evan Howard, Jillian Weber, and a third member, who unfortunately was unable
to complete his review in time for inclusion in the study. The other group of
secondary participants was the observers who took notes on the reactions of the
students to the learning experiences, conducted a brief weighted feedback session
at the end of each series, and participated with me in a debrief after each series to
identify improvements to be made to the learning experiences. Most of the

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observers - Karen Fletcher, Janetta Howson, Marilyn Ward, and Jordan Bookma
- have been trained by myself and others in the practice of spiritual formation,
while Louise Loten was also included as a discipleship expert and professional
educator. The observers all signed a non-disclosure agreement to preserve
confidentiality (see Appendix A).

Scope

	The project operated within certain boundaries to be attainable with the
resources and time available. I presented the seminars in three congregations, all
from a single theological tradition (broadly speaking) and in a constrained
geographical area. This kept the implementation manageable and the results
targeted for future use in the many other churches sharing those characteristics.

	The panel was restricted to scholars whose instruction I have personally
witnessed. There are many others who might no doubt have offered excellent
suggestions for the learning experiences, but I needed to keep the feedback to a
volume that could be implemented before the first sessions began.

	Finally, the project explored the best way to disseminate an awareness of
the dynamics of the mid-faith crisis and how to participate with God's work in
such times. As a dissemination project, it did not focus on expanding the body of
knowledge about the mid-faith crisis. Rather, it sought to discover the most
effective way to raise practical awareness of the experience among a population
that is typically ignorant of it - namely, southern Ontarians in the conservative
Evangelical tradition.

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Methodology

	I used the Curriculum Development methodology, whereby a curriculum
is created, tested and refined over several iterations (Stringer 2014, 67; Riding,
Fowell and Levy 1995). My primary guide for this iterative and incremental
approach was Emiliani's Lean Teaching (Emiliani 2015), itself based on Masaaki
Imai's Kaizen: The Key to Japan's Competitive Success (Imai 1986). This
methodology advocates a process of continuous improvement in teaching,
following the PDCA cycle of Plan-Do-Check-Act (Emiliani 2015, 33). First, the
instructor plans the learning activities that will achieve the desired learning
outcomes. Then those activities are implemented with a group of learners. Next,
the efficacy of the learning activities is measured. Finally, the instructor acts on
the collected feedback, revising deficient learning activities, or replacing them
altogether.

Methods

	Prior to implementing the curriculum with a group of participants, a panel
of experts reviewed the initial draft of the curriculum - that is, the proposed
learning activities and their intended learning outcomes. Each member of the
panel was emailed the lesson plans and handouts, and while any feedback was
encouraged, I also sent along a list of questions to guide their evaluation (see
Appendix F). I then analyzed the feedback from the members of this panel by
identifying the aspect of the curriculum to which it related (see codes in Appendix

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D) and then making revisions to the activities and their outcomes to mitigate the
risks identified. This was the project's first Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) cycle.

	During the implementation phase, data was collected in two ways. First,
there were observations of the participants' engagement with the various learning
activities, made by both myself, as the instructor/facilitator, and the team of
observers. The suggestions made by Sensing (2011, 180-190) and Stringer (2014,
113-115) regarding field notes identified the elements to be observed. The
observers kept notes on each learning activity, observing non-verbal cues and
engagement by the participants. They also recorded any ideas they might have for
improving the learning activities, but recorded them separately from the raw
observations. Due to the small number of participants in each session, the
observers watched the entire group. My field notes also included my own inner
responses to the teaching encounter.

	Second was the participants' weighted feedback on which aspects of the
learning experience were helpful and which needed improvement. This data
gathering technique followed Stringer's guidelines for focus groups (Stringer
2014, 111-2). After I left the room (so the participants could speak more freely), a
facilitator (i.e., one of the observers) reminded the group of the learning
objectives, and then asked the participants to identify the aspects of the
experience that worked well and therefore should be preserved. The facilitator
wrote these items on a whiteboard. When the suggestions stopped coming, the
facilitator then asked the group to indicate which aspects they found the most
helpful by coming to the front and drawing one or more stars next to their

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favourites. Each participant received n-2 stars, where n was the number of items
on the list. This resulted in a weighted list of those parts of the sessions that were
most impactful. The process was then repeated for the aspects of the experience
that were the least impactful, or most in need of improvement (see Appendix C
for this feedback). The participants didn't need to come up with suggestions for
how to improve those aspects (although such suggestions were welcome) - they
just needed to identify the areas in need of attention. This data collection method
had a formational secondary benefit: by reflecting on the experience in order to
provide the feedback, the learning was further cemented in the minds of the
participants.

	The collected data was then analyzed by myself and the observers together
in a debriefing and brainstorming session that was held after each series of
presentations was complete, which at times included the development of new or
revised learning activities where the group felt such changes were warranted. This
data analysis followed a three-step process as the observers and I worked through
the four sessions, activity by activity. First, each team member shared their
observations about the learners' engagement with the learning activity. Second,
each team member noted their interpretation of the effectiveness of the activity
and its basis on the observed behaviours. Finally, the group brainstormed ways in
which the activity could be improved, or what more effective activity should
replace it. Later, I assigned codes to the various observations (again, see
Appendix D). These walkthroughs represented a complete PDCA cycle, which

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was repeated three times after the content was presented in the three
congregational venues sequentially.

Table 2. Phases and timetable for action research

June		- Finalized arrangements with three congregations, Expert Panel and
observers (all were already contacted in April)

July-August	- Developed initial draft of the curriculum

September 21	- Project approved by REB and Supervisor

September 21	- Sent curriculum to Expert Panel for feedback

September 22	- Trained observers

September 23,	- Presented curriculum at West Highland Baptist Church (4 weekly
30; October 14,   sessions)
21

September 25	- Curriculum feedback received from the Expert Panel
and October 1

October 21	- Debriefed and revised curriculum

October 27	- Presented curriculum at Bethany Community Church (1 Saturday
                  workshop)

October 27	- Debriefed and revised curriculum

November 4, 11,	- Presented curriculum at North Burlington Baptist Church (4 weekly
18, 25            sessions)

November 25	- Debriefed and revised curriculum

January		- Finalized project report

Ethics in Ministry-Based Research

	At the outset of the project, I identified several possible benefits that the
primary participants in the project may enjoy. First and foremost was a greater
understanding of and appreciation for the mid-faith crisis in the life of faith.
Furthermore, they could gain some practical insight into how to cooperate with
this work of the Holy Spirit in their own lives, and how to support others as they
pass through such seasons. As with any communal faith activity, they could
experience the creation or deepening of connections with other believers through
mutual self-revelation. Note, however, that these benefits are all potential
benefits, as much of the impact of a small group experience depends on two

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factors outside of the facilitator's control: the action of the Holy Spirit and the
inner disposition and attitude of the participant. Nevertheless, insofar as it is up to
me, I endeavoured to craft and facilitate an experience where such benefits were
within easy reach of the participant, and I lifted up the sessions in prayer to invite
the Holy Spirit to work in power and to circumvent any obstacles present in the
lives of the participants.

	Two future benefits were also anticipated. The first was the creation of a
tested curriculum that could be used to introduce other groups to the mid-faith
crisis. The second was the training of the observers for their own ministry as
spiritual formation practitioners. By seeing behind the scenes, they could learn
one way to approach the development and delivery of a small group experience.

	My project also ran certain risks. Personal information that a participant
disclosed during discussion exercises may be spread more broadly by other
participants, either inadvertently or maliciously. To mitigate this risk, the first
session began with the establishment of group norms, including those of
confidentiality. Another risk emerged from the nature of the material itself. The
mid-faith crisis can be a painful and perplexing experience, especially for those
who do not understand its role in the journey of faith. As mentioned above, this is
one of the reasons for the curriculum. However, presenting, discussing and
encouraging reflection upon the mid-faith crisis may be a disturbing experience in
the short term as inner doors long closed are opened. This risk was mitigated in
several ways. First, the material was presented with sensitivity and discretion.
Next, I lingered after each session to allow those with private questions to

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approach me. As a spiritual director with both formal training (through Tyndale
Seminary's academic course and ten-month direction practicum) and experience, I
was able to diffuse several concerns and distressing misapprehensions. Finally, I
alerted the pastoral leadership of the congregations that a closer-than-usual
pastoral presence may be required for the participants during and after the
sessions.

	As a visiting teacher in each of these contexts, I secured permission to
teach the material from the lead pastor of each community. Since there was no
existing relationship with the participants, the only dual-role ethical consideration
is that of teacher/facilitator and researcher. Regardless of instructional approach,
any teacher unavoidably wields a certain authority. However, as there was no
prior authority over the students, there was little pressure to participate.
Furthermore, the participants needed to opt in to each of the sessions, as they were
all offered as part of Christian education programs where attendance was optional.
A brief description of the session contents was promoted to the congregations in
the usual way that such electives are announced (see Appendix B).

	The participants' expectations of the experience were identified and
managed through one of the first learning activities, which entailed making
explicit and discussing these very expectations. Participants were asked to sign a
consent form that described the goal and methods of the research project and how
all data would be collected anonymously and in aggregate, and no personally
identifiable information would be collected at any point (see Appendix A).

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The research proposal was reviewed by the Tyndale Research Ethics
Board and approved on September 21, 2018.

Findings, Interpretation and Outcomes

	As I hoped and expected, I learned a great deal over the course of the
research project, both during the sessions and in reflection afterwards. This
section describes the data that I collected, what I learned from that data (and the
changes I made to the curriculum as a result), and the outcomes from what was
learned.

Findings

	Four passes of data were collected over the course of the project. First, the
Expert Panel emailed me their feedback on the lesson plans and handouts. Dr.
Howard appreciated how well the content fit the learning objectives, and how
each session built well upon the session before to present a full picture of the mid-
faith crisis experience (Howard, September 25, 2018, e-mail message to author).
He also had some suggestions for improvement. First, he expressed concern that
there might be too much material in sessions 2 and 3 to cover in 75 minutes (for
the actual content of the sessions, see Appendix E). He also observed an over-
reliance on the learning activities of lecture and discussion. He recommended
seasoning this mix with some practical experiences (such as the index card
exercises in session 3). In the same vein, Ms. Weber encouraged greater use of
drawing pictures as a learning activity (Weber, October 1, 2018, e-mail message

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to author). For instance, in session 1 she suggested that the participants could
draw a map of their own journey and where they are in it, while in session 2 she
suggested doing a collage of magazine cutout pictures to build their false self. She
also identified the risk (already identified) that the participants entering these deep
waters might be opened up, and therefore might require longer term
accompaniment with a spiritual director.

	The second pass of data collection was from the sessions at West Highland
Baptist Church in Hamilton, Ontario, including my own notes, the observers'
notes, and the feedback from the participants' feedback exercise at the end. The
average attendance was 18 people for the four classes on September 23 and 30
and October 14 and 21. The participants appeared to be above 40 years old and
six were men while the other twelve were women. As the Expert Panel noted, it
was observed that there was a great deal of content to be covered in four 75-
minute sessions, and it might be better suited to longer or additional sessions to
allow more time to work with the content. The handouts were also found to be
quite crowded, without room for participants' notes. In the process of explaining
the content or answering a question, I spontaneously used an illustration or drew a
diagram that was not part of the handout. Since they were often helpful, I was
encouraged to include them in future versions (see the participant feedback in
Appendix C). All three groups of participants commented that my knowledge of
the field was both broad and deep, and I was able to marshal that knowledge in
way that was helpful to the audience. No matter how far afield the questions went,
it was observed that I had content at my fingertips that was informative and

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helpful. They also found that I was adept at sharing personal stories - enough
vulnerability to be authentic but without over-sharing. Some criticisms were also
made of my speaking style, such as my use of technical vocabulary that
occasionally left the audience scrambling to understand and my tendency to fade
away at the end of a sentence.

	As related to specific content, the team made several observations. In
session 1 they noted that the positive spin I put on stage 4 of the journey of faith
(i.e., the mid-faith crisis) was unexpected, passionate and impactful (again, see
Appendix E for the details of the curriculum). In session 2, the reflection
questions that were meant to be private introspection turned into table discussion.
The story I used to illustrate the formation of the false self in childhood was also
found to be dated and a bit impersonal and artificial. On the other hand, the
Eustace story in session 3 was very well received. Finally, in session 4, the Get
Real section was a bit awkward, leading me to simply read the content without
much embellishment or ornamentation. Furthermore, it was not always clear that
the process of preparing a regimen was to be a God-led process and not just a self-
improvement project - an important point after emphasizing how the mid-faith
crisis weans us of our over-estimation of our personal agency.

	I noticed in the first debriefing session that the different observers brought
very different kinds of observations. This appeared to be the result of the diversity
in their backgrounds, especially theological tradition, career, and prior ministry
experience. Where these three were similar, the observations were similar; where
they diverged, the observations varied. It wasn't a matter of conflicting

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observations being made, but rather different aspects of the experience were
observed.

	The next data collected was at the one-day seminar at Bethany
Community Church in St. Catharines, Ontario on October 27. Only two observers
were able to attend, and most of their observations were the changes that were
implemented from the first presentation of the material. However, a few items of
significance were noted. First, we were surprised at how quickly the group of 16
gelled, especially considering they were drawn from such a large congregation
(Bethany is approximately twice the size of West Highland) and therefore most
had not known each other prior to the session. Nevertheless, they shared quite
vulnerably almost from the start. Interestingly, this same dynamic was perceived
at West Highland and would appear again at North Burlington Baptist. Another
observation was that I moved quite quickly through the fourth session at the end
of the day, completing it in 45 minutes rather than the planned 75. I was quite
tired by that point in the day and eager to be finished. Finally, we observed that,
unlike the other two groups, there were 4 people who were younger than 40. This
group was also more weighted to female participants, with only 4 of the 16
participants being men.

	The final pass of data collection was from North Burlington Baptist
Church in Burlington, Ontario. There, six participants (all females over 40) met
on November 4, 11, 18 and 25. Two observations came to the fore with this group
that were also echoed in the earlier groups. First, the free-form discussion in
session 2 in all three cases led to conversation about personality. That is, in

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discussing the false self, there was much speculation on how the false self differs
based on personality, and how some dynamics might be an expression of false self
in one person and merely the expression of personality in another. The other
common observation was that all three groups suggested some kind of follow-up
in their feedback, whether an ongoing group meeting monthly or a seminar 6 or
12 months later. In all cases there was a recognition that these four sessions
merely started a conversation that many of the participants wanted to keep going.

Interpretations

	The observations from the Expert Panel and the first sessions at West
Highland were combined to generate a set of alterations to the lesson plans. This
is because the Expert Panel feedback was postponed due to an unexpected delay
in project approval (which came on September 21) while at the same time the
sessions at West Highland had a hard start date on September 23 (instead of
October) due to the broader needs of their TREC program. This meant that there
was insufficient time to send the curriculum to the Expert Panel, get their
feedback, and effect changes to the curriculum based on that feedback before the
first session began - as was the original plan.

	The interpretations were mostly worked out in the team debrief that
occurred after the last session at West Highland. One that was implemented
immediately, however, was a shift in the classroom after session 1. The initial
classroom was found to be too small for our numbers (which were larger than
expected), so we changed to a much larger room for the remaining sessions. The

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new room also had the benefits of having a clock I could see (which helped me
adjust my pace) and a microphone (which helped with my occasional muttering).
After the sessions, several improvements were developed by the team. I added a
few of the most helpful illustrations and diagrams to my lecture notes to ensure
they would be included in future presentations. This also helped break up the
lecture with some content that, while still unidirectional, was a shift in learning
style. I also added more white space to the handouts, to create space for the
participants to write their own notes. Another way developed to break up the
lectures was to reduce the amount of material delivered in that mode, but to
expand the Q & A time. It was noted that I am a competent lecturer, but I really
shine when answering questions. They found that I spoke with more energy, I am
skilled at making off-topic questioners feel understood but redirected the inquiry
into an area more relevant to the topic at hand, and I personally felt that the times
when the Holy Spirit spoke through me during the sessions was while I was
giving these answers. Therefore, we concluded that more time should be given
over to open question periods. We debated the value of creating a supportive
PowerPoint presentation for the content, but ultimately decided against it as the
small group sizes would be depersonalized somewhat by the introduction of a
screen to be gathered around. Other ways to get me out from behind the podium
were suggested, however. One final move away from lecture was the inclusion of
two music videos in sessions 3 and 4.

	I also made specific changes to the content for each session (again, see
Appendix E for the lesson plans). In session 1, I changed the labels for each

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session from abstract descriptions to the clearer seeker, student, servant, and
sojourner titles. I personalized the language, replacing the first-person plural we
with the second-person singular you. I also added further reading suggestions to
all the sessions, based on the content in that session, instead of a single list at the
end of the last session. Finally, I included an outline of the rest of the sessions at
the end of the first session to inform the participants about the overall learning
plan. In session 2, I removed some lengthy quotes from the handout (although I
did still read them out), as well as other extraneous details across the entire
session to tighten it up. I then added more detailed instructions for the reflection
exercises. I also added further Biblical examples to illustrate the principles - an
important nuance for more conservative Evangelicals to get on board. This was
especially the case at the start of the session 3 handout, where I added five
examples of the mid-faith crisis from Scripture. Like for the previous session, I
did a great deal of tightening up of the content and included the reflection exercise
instructions in the handout itself. The final session remained largely the same, but
I did re-write some of the Get Real section to improve the flow, and I removed
some unnecessary detail from the Assisting Another section.

	After the Bethany presentation, the team developed three primary
interpretations from the data. The first was that the material was so intense - for
the instructor and the participants - that it did not lend itself well to a one-day
seminar. Alternatives for a more sustainable intensive presentation might include
splitting it over two Saturdays or offering it in a weekend retreat format to allow
for time of silent reflection and rest between the sessions. The second

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interpretation related to the quick gelling of all three groups of participants. Since
attendance of the sessions was optional, and the session content promoted to the
entire congregation ahead of time, these groups were largely self-selecting. The
content is certainly not of interest to everyone; many in the congregation were
either not at this stage in their journey or were but already had some level of
understanding of it and how to proceed through it. However, those who attended
the sessions came eager to learn and make sense of this confusing phenomenon.
This pre-qualification resulted in groups that were small in proportion to the
congregation's size, but very intentional as evidenced by their boldness to share
private and often painful stories with others who were as intentional as they.
Finally, the presence of some younger participants was possibly due to the fact
that, while the mid-faith crisis largely occurs in mid-life, Heuertz notes that
people are experiencing their “‘middle passage'... earlier and more frequently
than in past generations” (Heuertz 2017, 63). Therefore, while this curriculum
primarily appealed to those in their 40s and later, it was still appealing enough to
younger adults for them to attend.

	In light of the data collected during the second iteration, very few changes
were made to the curriculum. Sessions 1 and 4 remained the same, and sessions 2
and 3 only had minor wording changes to make the phrasing less awkward. In
short, the second iteration confirmed that the changes made after the first iteration
were sound.

	The iteration at North Burlington Baptist brought up several suggestions
for the final version of the curriculum. First, since questions about personality

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arose each time the false self was addressed, it might be useful to include some
teaching on the Enneagram, either in session 2 or in an additional session (perhaps
between sessions 3 and 4). Since the Enneagram is more focused on mid-life
issues and movement towards the true self (Heuertz 2017, 16), it seems the most
suitable personality instrument for this purpose. Some time could be made in
session 2 for this new material, as some redundancy was identified in the
description of the false self, and the second reflection exercise was skipped with
this group and they did not seem to have suffered for it. Since that exercise asks
the participant to reflect on the impact their false self has had on them, it
presumes a self-awareness that might not yet exist as the person may have only
become aware of their false self in that session. Second, since there was a
common desire for follow-up, it would be helpful to plan this into the curriculum
from the start by arranging some form of suitable accompaniment with the
congregation's leadership ahead of time, then having the person who coordinated
that announce it at the end of the final session. Finally, the language of “dark
night of the soul” should be replaced with the more generic “mid-faith crisis.” The
term led some people to expect a talk on depression or instruction on how to
handle suffering or grief. While no one reported this, I also wondered if the
Roman Catholic origins of the label might not create needless concern in future
participants. Therefore, I updated the curriculum to use “the mid-faith crisis”
everywhere except in session 3, where the differentiation between the dark night
of the senses and the dark night of the spirit is a helpful distinction.

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Outcomes

	The primary outcome of my project was a proven curriculum for the mid-
faith crisis to a particular demographic - in this case, white, middle to upper-
middle class, southern Ontarian Evangelicals (see Appendix E). Refined by the
feedback provided by myself, the Expert Panel, the observers and three sets of
primary participants, a set of lessons plans that are suitable to this target audience
has been developed. While further refinements are possible and no doubt
necessary the further the audience differs demographically from the tested
congregations, I would not hesitate to offer this curriculum in other Evangelical
contexts in the future.

	While the feedback demonstrates that learning objectives were achieved,
without the administration of a post-test, primary data does not exist to support
this claim. I considered including such an evaluation, but I decided against it as
such instruments are unheard of in congregational Christian education circles. I
wanted the experience to feel like any other learning experience in the
participants' context, so I sacrificed some data collection for the sake of the
ministry atmosphere. The goal was that the students understand the mid-faith
crisis and its role in the spiritual life, appreciate that role and develop hope for
themselves and others undergoing the experience, and know how to co-operate
with the movement of the Holy Spirit in the mid-faith crisis in their own lives and
the lives of others. The overwhelmingly positive feedback in the post-course
feedback session, as well as anecdotal comments made to me and the observers,

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indicates this but does not prove it. The students frequently remarked on how
helpful they found the material and how surprised they were that they'd never
heard the topic taught before, despite decades of faithful church participation. In
all cases there remains a great deal more to learn, but the topic has been
introduced and many of them have the resources to continue their exploration
with the help of their community of faith. Therefore, in the future I would validate
these outcomes by administering a simple questionnaire three months after the
last session with Likert scale questions, asking the participants to evaluate to what
degree (if at all) they found the planned outcomes manifested in their lives.

	Conducting the teaching under the auspices of an action research project
did not appear to have much impact on the participants as learners. I attempted to
make the data collection as unobtrusive as possible. I conducted the teaching
within the framework of an existing Christian education ministry. The observers
were seated to the sides or even behind the participants so as not to be in their line
of sight. In fact, apart from the consent form orientation at the start and the
feedback focus group at the end, it was conducted like any other seminar or
Sunday school class. And the participants appeared to respond in the ways that I
find learners typically do in these situations. They were not especially reserved,
nor did they attempt to make it easy for me by refraining from asking difficult
questions. They appeared to have been caught up in the experience and many
shared tearfully about their own mid-faith crises, despite being in a group with
people from their congregation that they didn't know especially well.

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	I was also hoping that the observers would grow in their own ministry of
spiritual formation, having witnessed how a spiritual formation seminar was put
together, delivered, and iteratively refined. All the observers said they benefited
from the experience - two remarking that they were still learning things about the
mid-faith crisis even after hearing it for the third time! However, only two of the
observers feel called and gifted for a ministry of teaching and equipping. The
others were thankful for the experience but have no desire to lead their own
spiritual formation group in the future. Nevertheless, there are many forms of
spiritual formation ministry, many of which do not involve getting in front of a
group of people to teach. So I still hope.

	Finally, I learned a few things about myself, my gifts and my ministry
approach. This was not an explicit goal at the outset of the project (see the
identified benefits in the Ethics section above); it was one that emerged naturally
as I recorded my inner experiences as part of the data collection. First, I had a bit
of an existential crisis as I was teaching the first sessions at West Highland. I
wondered if you can even teach on the mid-faith crisis, or if it can only be
experienced. Would teaching on it only making things worse by giving the
illusion of control through understanding? As Anthony de Mello warns, was I just
giving formulas?

	In the things that really matter, life, love, reality, God, no one can
	teach you a thing. All they can do is give you formulas. And as
	soon as you have a formula, you have reality filtered through the
	mind of someone else. If you take those formulas you will be
	imprisoned. You will wither and when you come to die you will
	not have known what it means to see for yourself. (De Mello 1991,
	68)

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Fortunately, further reading - this time from Scott Peck - came to my rescue.
Peck agrees that life contains much ineffable mystery but insists that teaching
such as that found in the curriculum “will facilitate their journey in three ways: it
will help them to take advantage of grace along the way; it will give them a surer
sense of direction; and it will provide encouragement” (Peck 1978, 296). Second,
my rabbinic style of spiritual direction came to the fore while I was teaching.
During my training as a spiritual director, my personal style of direction was
described as rabbinic - that is, doing instruction through asking open-ended
questions. As mentioned above, I learned that I should give as much time over to
questions and answers, as I not only was at my best as a teacher but I often found
the Holy Spirit would spontaneously give me a word or illustration to
communicate a point. These incidents left a powerful impression on both myself
and the learners. These words of knowledge became quite routine and I will
therefore continue to build lots of Q&A time into future lesson plans to create
space for such expressions of grace to occur.

Conclusions and Implications

	This project developed the curriculum for a small group experience that
introduces conservative Evangelical churchgoers to the spiritual phenomenon of
the mid-faith crisis. This endeavour emerged from my own spiritual journey,
needs that frequently arise in my ministry of spiritual direction, and the charism of
my faith community. It addressed a shortcoming in the spiritual theology - or
what the Puritans called practical divinity - in modern Evangelical circles:

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developmental spirituality. Following Emilinai's PDCA cycle, the four 75-minute
sessions were vetted by a panel of experts and then presented in three different
Evangelical church contexts, with refinement between each presentation, with the
help of a team of observers.

	The outcome of the project is a proven presentation of the mid-faith crisis,
suitable to Evangelical audiences in suburban southern Ontario. This is a ministry
resource that myself or other spiritual direction practitioners could use as a
starting point for other contexts - the seed for further continuous improvement
cycles. Some interesting further modifications could be made to increase the
effectiveness of the material. For instance, material could be added on how the
false self intersects with personality - namely through teaching the Enneagram.
The format of the content delivery might be made both more and less intense by
offering it in a retreat format, with spiritual exercises and times of rest between
the sessions. Planned pastoral follow-up might also be scheduled after the
sessions are complete, ether individually with a spiritual director or as a group in
one or more anniversary sessions to review the material and answer questions
arising from when the content had a chance to steep in real life.

	The implementation of an iterative and incremental methodology itself
bore fruit as well. I learned that it was a powerful ministry improvement
technique, yielding many insightful and implementable suggestions in only a
single iteration. While multiple iterations are helpful, this project shows that many
iterations are not necessarily required for significant improvement. I would also
heartily recommend the inclusion of the Expert Panel at the start of the process, as

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their perspective was very different from the observers on the scene. A debrief
after each session, rather than one at the end of the set of four sessions, would also
keep the recollections and insights fresher. Finally, a plurality of observers with
different backgrounds and lenses is very valuable and should be carefully
considered when recruiting such helpers.

	Overall, all the stakeholders were pleased with how the project went. I
look forward to adopting this approach in further small-group spiritual formation
experiences. Since this is the direction my ministry is taking - moving out of
congregational ministry to retreats and guest teaching - I anticipate deriving much
benefit from what I've learned here.

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CHAPTER 5:

CONCLUSION

	In the Holiness classic Hinds Feet on High Places (Hurnard 2010), the
Great Shepherd invites the protagonist Much-Afraid to journey with him to the
High Places. When that pilgrimage takes an unexpected turn and leads her
downwards - and into the desert no less - she understandably balks at this
“apparent contradiction to the promise” (Hurnard 2010, Location 906). The
Shepherd patiently explains that

	an endless succession of my people have come this way. They
	came to learn the secret of royalty, and now you are here, Much-
	Afraid. You, too, are in the line of succession. It is a great
	privilege, and if you will, you also may learn the lesson of the
	furnace and of the great darkness just as surely as did those before
	you. Those who come down to the furnace go on their way
	afterwards as royal men and women, princes and princesses of the
	Royal Line. (Hurnard 2010, Location 944)

This project explored that royal road that Much-Afraid and countless others have
walked. In chapter 2 I told the story of my own journey on the royal road, and the
“lessons of the furnace and of the great darkness” that I learned. In chapter three, I
developed a model of the royal road experience with the assistance of Scripture,
Christian history and modern psychological research. Finally, chapter 4 recounted

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my attempt to disseminate awareness of the royal road through a small-group
experience developed for my own tradition, conservative Evangelicals.

Outcomes

	These three chapters echo the threefold structure of the Doctor of Ministry
program in Spiritual Formation at Tyndale Seminary (Tyndale 2015, 25). It
begins in the first year with the first-person perspective of spiritual formation:
“God and me” (Tyndale 2015, 25). This aspect focuses on the student's own
spiritual growth, where he or she is the subject being studied. In my case, there
were three primary outcomes in the year. As I worked with a spiritual director, my
long-standing acedia and prayerlessness were scrutinized with love and spiritual
muscles that had long been seized up began to loosen and begin to slowly move
once more. This forward motion began to accelerate under the regular application
over an extended period of the practices of fixed hour prayer and fasting. Finally,
it all came together in the composition of my spiritual autobiography. While I was
initially somewhat skeptical of the value of the exercise, the perspective I gained
by reflecting on my spiritual journey revealed some dynamics I had been blind to.
Chief among these were chronic habits of sin, such as making Ishmaels with my
own resources when I became impatient with God opening doors to fulfill what I
believed was my calling. But I also became aware of the awakening that was
occurring in my life during that first year in the program, and how it was an
unveiling of the fruit of divine work that had been going on in secret for years.

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	In the second year of the program, the perspective shifts to the third
person: “God and humans” (Tyndale 2015, 25) in general. This aspect focuses on
the academic discipline of Christian spirituality, where the student becomes a
researcher and theorist. I took this opportunity to systematically explore some of
the ideas about spiritual formation that I had long wanted to work through, and
then synthesize them into an integrated model. In particular, I wanted to develop
an understanding of the faith paradigm shift, which so often happens in mid-life,
that leads to a qualitatively different kind of spiritual life. The various labels of
illumination, dark night of the soul, Christian perfection, entire sanctification,
higher/deeper life, and baptism of the Holy Spirit or second blessing all seemed to
describe this experience from different theological and historical vantage points. I
identified when this experience seems to happen (using the categories of
developmental spirituality), why such strong medicine is necessary (relying on the
concepts of the false and true self), how the experience presents and proceeds
(guided by John Coe's understanding of the dark night of the soul) and the ways
in which people can cooperate with this divine work, whether in their own lives or
others'. Through the development of this model, I built a solid foundation from
which to understand my own experiences and more deeply participate with the
Holy Spirit's activity in my life, as well as a full toolbox for my ministry to
encourage and equip other believers also passing through a mid-faith crisis.

	The program concludes in its third year with a second-person perspective:
“God and you” (Tyndale 2015, 25). This aspect focuses on the ministry of
spiritual formation, where the student becomes a reflective practitioner. I took my

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model of spiritual formation on the road, developing a small group experience
introducing the participants to the concept of the mid-faith crisis. After vetting the
curriculum with a panel of experts, I then presented it to three different white
middle-class congregations. With the help of trained observers and debriefing
exercises with each group, I improved the curriculum and learned more about
myself as a spiritual formation practitioner and how the Holy Spirit has gifted me
to build up His church. In particular, I confirmed my rabbinic style of spiritual
direction, and trained my nascent spiritual gift of knowledge.

Future Implications

	A great deal of work remains to be done in raising awareness of the mid-
faith crisis in conservative Evangelical circles. As mentioned above, the
curriculum I created here could be further improved and even expanded. Further
research on the phenomenology of the experience is also warranted. How
widespread is the experience in conservative Evangelical congregations? What is
its demographic distribution by age, gender, and socioeconomic level? Do those
passing through it remain in those faith communities, or do they leave - and do
those who leave eventually return? Are there certain elements of the mid-faith
crisis experience that are accentuated or diminished in this tradition? Are certain
interventions more helpful than others? These discoveries would assist with the
task of disseminating life-giving instruction on this critical stage of faith.

	In addition to these research implications, personal implications arise from
this portfolio. I started the Doctor of Ministry with a plan to earn a professional

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credential that would buy me credibility when applying for the sort of jobs I felt
were the next step in my calling to teach on spiritual formation, such as a pastor
of spiritual formation in a congregation or professor of spiritual formation at a
Bible college or seminary. However, things have changed. I have repented of
making any more Ishmaels, of realizing God's calling by forcing a door open in
my time and my way. Instead, I'll take my approach from Dallas Willard's career
advice to his fellow faculty:

	I decided I would do nothing trying to secure myself or gain
	advancement. I am very much a literalist in terms of the Bible. The
	Bible says promotion does not come from the East or the West, it
	comes from the Lord. So OK, I don't have to do anything about
	promotion... I'll tell you why I have approached things in this
	way. When I was at Baylor University as a young man, as a very
	green young man, I was watching other green young men trying to
	find a place to preach. And the Lord said something very simple to
	me: “Never try to find a place to speak, try to have something to
	say.” (Willard 2003)

Willard was not advocating a passive approach to career. Here and elsewhere he
urged Christian scholars to write and teach carefully, rigorously and prayerfully.
But it was in this arena - in the scholarly work - that Willard encouraged striving,
not in self-promotion or fishing for professional opportunities.

	So my new rules of engagement are as follows: I cease from all striving to
“find a place to speak,” instead accepting only unsolicited invitations to practice
my teaching gift. These invitations may vary in scale from a brief question during
coffee time after Sunday service to a full-blown job offer. But the key is that I am
no longer working to generate opportunities to teach. Between invitations, my
effort is now focused on trying to “have something to say.” This preparation

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consists of three related activities. First and foremost, I seek to maintain my own
spiritual vitality. Without this, it would be dangerous for myself and others to
undertake any teaching ministry. Second, on the professional development side, I
keep abreast of what others are doing in spiritual formation by reading widely in
the field (guided by friends' suggestions and the book reviews section of The
Journal of Spiritual Formation and Soul Care). Finally, I post to my blog twice a
month as a way to work out my thinking between formal teaching engagements.
While it is publicly accessible, I take no note of the visitor count and I turned off
all reporting - it merely serves an outlet to force me to structure my ideas for
presentation to others. These three practices are rewarding in and of themselves,
and they help me to have something to say when an opportunity to teach does
arise. In the words of one of my old seminary professors, they help me wait on the
Lord without waiting around.

	I have already seen this approach effortlessly generate opportunities as
unexpected as they are fruitful, and I look forward to a richer ministry (and life) in
the decades to come. In short, the Doctor of Ministry ruined my career plans - in
the very best way possible.

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APPENDICES

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APPENDIX A: CONSENT FORMS

Expert Panel Member Consent Form

Name:____________________________________

• I understand that I will be participating in an action research project titled
The Mid-Faith Crisis Project as a content matter and instructional expert.
In this role, I will review the proposed lesson plans and give suggestions
for how it might better achieve the stated learning objectives.
• I understand that I will not receive any remuneration for this feedback.
• I give permission for my name to be included in the project in the list of
expert panel members.
• I give permission for my feedback to be presented in the project report, in
summary form and without specific attribution to myself (i.e.,
anonymously).
• I understand that my participation in this research project is voluntary, that
I am not waiving any legal rights, and that I may withdraw consent at any
time without penalty.
• I am aware that I may direct any future questions to the Principal
Investigator Tom Sweeney, either via cell phone (905-630-3390), email
(pastor@tapestrychurch.ca) or simply in person. I am also aware that I am
welcome to contact Tom's research supervisor, Dr. Mark Chapman,
Associate Professor of Research Methods, Tyndale Seminary, via email
(mchapman@tyndale.ca) or office phone (416-226-6620, Ext. 2208).
• I understand that this project has been reviewed and approved by the
Research Ethics Board at Tyndale Seminary and that I may direct any
questions or concerns about the ethical nature of this study to the Chair of
that Board at reb@tyndale.ca.

I have read the above statements and freely consent to participate in this project:

YES ___ NO ___

Signature: ___________________ Date:

Observer Consent Form

Name:______________________________
• I understand that I will be participating in an action research project titled
The Mid-Faith Crisis Project as an observer. In this role, I will observe up
to twelve 75-minute teaching sessions and participate in debriefing
sessions to improve the quality of the curriculum.
• I understand that I will not receive any remuneration for this work.

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• I give permission for my name to be included in the project in the list of
observers.
• I give permission for my observations and suggestions to be presented in
the project report, in summary form and without specific attribution to
myself (i.e., anonymously).
• I understand that my participation in this research project is voluntary, that
I am not waiving any legal rights, and that I may withdraw consent at any
time without penalty.
• I am aware that I may direct any future questions to the Principal
Investigator Tom Sweeney, either via cell phone (905-630-3390), email
(pastor@tapestrychurch.ca) or simply in person. I am also aware that I am
welcome to contact Tom's research supervisor, Dr. Mark Chapman,
Associate Professor of Research Methods, Tyndale Seminary, via email
(mchapman@tyndale.ca) or office phone (416-226-6620, Ext. 2208).
• I understand that this project has been reviewed and approved by the
Research Ethics Board at Tyndale Seminary and that I may direct any
questions or concerns about the ethical nature of this study to the Chair of
that Board at reb@tyndale.ca.

I have read the above statements and freely consent to participate in this project:
YES ___ NO ___

Signature: _____________________________________

Date: ____________

Observer Non-Disclosure Agreement

I understand that during the course of my role as an observer I may learn private
information about the research participants. I will keep this information in the
strictest confidence and not disclose it to anyone, and to return all observation
notes to the Researcher at the end of each session. However, I have no obligation
to treat as confidential any personal notes I recorded on the content being
presented.

Name:_______________________

Signature:_________________________

Date:________________________

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Learner Information Cover Letter

	Dear brother or sister in Christ,

	Welcome to the Group for the Perplexed! This is a four-part class about a
common (and commonly misunderstood) period in the life of mature believers
where God grows us deeply that one theologian called the Dark Night of the Soul.
Before we dive in, however, it is important that you understand that the
presentation of this material is also part of my action research project for the
Doctor of Ministry in Spiritual Formation program at Tyndale Seminary in
Toronto. This means that I and my team of observers will be making notes about
how well each of the learning activities went, as well as asking for your feedback
at the end of the last session. This information will be used to improve the course.
No individual information about anyone will be recorded, and you are free to opt
out of the data collection for the research project while remaining a full
participant in the class.

	Turn over this sheet to review the consent form so you understand the
project in greater detail and the (minimal) affect it has on you as a learner. If you
have any questions, either now or in the future, do not hesitate to ask me in
person, by phone or email. Thanks for your attention, and I look forward to
embarking on this journey with you!

	Regards,

	Tom Sweeney
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Learner Consent Form

Name: _______________________________
• I understand that I will be participating in an action research project titled
  The Mid-Faith Crisis Project as a learner. In this role, I will attend four 75-
  minute teaching sessions.
• I understand that observers will be present in the sessions and that they
  will take notes about the participants' engagement with the material. I
  understand that these observations will be noted in general, without any
  notes made about specific individuals or any participants' names recorded.
• I understand that the proposed study will generate the following benefits:
	o A greater understanding of and appreciation for the dark night of
	the soul in the life of faith
	o Practical insight into how to cooperate with this work of the Holy
	Spirit in my own life, and how to support others as they pass
	through such seasons.
	o A tested curriculum about the dark night that can be used in the
	future.
	o The observers will learn how a small group experience is
	developed and implemented.
• I understand that the proposed study bears the following risks:
	o Other participants may not respect the rules of confidentiality
	regarding personal information I disclose in discussions.
	o I may be upset by details brought up from my own life during the
	reflection exercises.
• The final session will conclude with an optional feedback exercise. I give
  permission for any feedback I offer to be presented in the project report,
  combined with that of other learners present and without specific
  attribution to myself (i.e., anonymously).
• I understand that the project report will be available to me through my
  pastor.
• I understand that my participation in this research project is voluntary, that
  I am not waiving any legal rights, and that I may withdraw consent at any
  time without penalty.
• I am aware that I may direct any future questions to the Principal
  Investigator Tom Sweeney, either via cell phone (905-630-3390), email
  (pastor@tapestrychurch.ca) or simply in person. I am also aware that I am
  welcome to contact Tom's research supervisor, Dr. Mark Chapman,
  Associate Professor of Research Methods, Tyndale Seminary, via email
  (mchapman@tyndale.ca) or office phone (416-226-6620, Ext. 2208).
• I understand that this project has been reviewed and approved by the
  Research Ethics Board at Tyndale Seminary and that I may direct any
  questions or concerns about the ethical nature of this study to the Chair of
  that Board at reb@tyndale.ca.

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I have read the above statements and freely consent to participate in this project:
YES ___ NO ___
Signature: _________________________________
Date:__________________

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APPENDIX B: PROMOTIONAL COPY

	The following text was used to promote the small group series in each of
the congregations where it was presented:

	A Group for the Perplexed

	Do you ever find yourself thinking:

• Is this all there is to the Christian life? It's OK, but I thought there would
  be more.

• Why doesn't God seem as real to me as He used to? I wish I could go back
  to how things were.

• After all that's happened, I'm beginning to wonder if I even know who
  God really is anymore.

• I have so many doubts that it feels like I'm losing my faith. The strain of
  maintaining the facade that all is well is starting to get to me. I don't want
  to let anyone down, but I don't know how much longer I can keep it up.

  If you've had some (or all!) of these thoughts, then you're not alone.

Throughout the history of the Christianity, pastors, mystics, theologians and
laypeople alike have undergone this experience as well. Given the name “the dark
night of the soul” in the 16th century, this is not a regrettable detour in the life of
faith, but the royal road to maturity that God takes His people on.

	In this small group, you will learn:

  • What the dark night of the soul is, when it happens and how to identify it

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  • To understand and appreciate why God uses the dark night to mature His
    people

  • How to cooperate with the work of the Holy Spirit in your own dark night

  • How to appropriately support those around you passing through a dark
    night

	Tom Sweeney is the pastor of Tapestry Church in Burlington, and a
student in the Doctor of Ministry in Spiritual Formation program at Tyndale
Seminary in Toronto. The development and delivery of this small group is part of
his final research project.

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APPENDIX C: PARTICIPANT FEEDBACK

After the fourth session, a weighted list of feedback was elicited from each group
on what they liked and what could be improved. Here are the results:

West Highland Baptist Church, October 21,
2018

Liked

Transparency - honesty and balance (3)
Personal examples (2)____________________
Responsive to questions and comments (2)
Notes were linear and followed (1)_______
Relaxed style (1)
Topic - we need this (1)_________________
Eye contact (1)__________________________
Diagrams - visual and got me thinking (1)
Answers - knowledgeable (1)______________
Only 4 weeks rather than 8 (1)

Improvement

Clear definition of the dark night (5)
Use our questions to build content (2)
Hard to hear questions (1)_____________
Room temperature (1)___________________
Know you audience - spiritual journey
(1)____________________________________
Terminology / vocab (1)________________
Personality types (1)__________________
Poll the audience (1)


Bethany Community Church, October 27, 2018

Liked

Examples helpful (8)______________________
Music videos helpful (8)__________________
Emotional / spiritual growth diagram helpful
(7)
Time went fast (6)________________________
1 day preferred over multiple (6)_________
Helpful to normalize the stages (5)_______
Teacher personable (5)____________________
Teacher clear/concise (5)_________________
The 4 sections worked (5)_________________
Teacher non-judgemental (4)_______________
Good flow (3)_____________________________
Good terminology - understandable (3)
Helped with clarity/awareness discerning in
others (3)________________________________
Interest maintained in next section (2)___
Teacher repeated questions (2)____________
This size group or smaller (2)

Improvement

More space in handouts for notes (4)
Last section confusing / rushed (3)____
Allow participants to introduce
themselves to one another (3)
	• Note: Some disagreed with this
Allow more sharing time (2)

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North Burlington Baptist Church, November 25,
2018

Liked

Personal examples (4)
Visual graphics (4)
Experience (4)
Good listener (4)
Dark night was demystified (3)
After church service, instead of at night (2)
Enthusiasm (1)
Concise handouts (1)
Difference between depression and dark
night (1)

Improvement

Confused about meaning/purpose of
lesson 2 (4)
Would like a follow-up (2)
8 weeks to give time to sink in (2)
Go slower, give more time to
understand and flesh out content (2)
Lesson 2 - how could a coping
mechanism be sinful (1)

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APPENDIX D: CODES

All data was tagged with the following codes as part of the interpretation process:

	• Iteration - The cycle in which the data was collected. This indicates when
and where the data was collected, as well as the version of the curriculum
that was being commented upon.
		o I0 = Expert Panel feedback
		o I1 = West Highland Baptist Church
		o I2 = Bethany Community Church
		o I3 = North Burlington Baptist Church

	• Processing - Whether the data is a raw observation (merely a record of
	  what occurred) or an interpretation (often with some suggestion for
	  changes for the future).
		o OBS = Observation
		o INT = Interpretation

	• Domain - The area the data relates to:
		o CONT = The content that was taught
		o ACT = The learning activity
		o PRES = The presentation of the content, including the teacher's
		  speaking ability
		o ENV = The physical learning environment
		o FORM = The format (i.e., time of day and week or the session
		  duration)
		o INT = The teacher's internal experience of the preparation or
		  delivery

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APPENDIX E: THE CURRICULUM AFTER THE FINAL ITERATION

Learning Objectives

The learning outcomes intended for these series of lessons include:
	•  Cognitive: To understand what the dark night of the soul is, when it
	   happens and how to identify it
	•  Affective: To appreciate why God uses the dark night to mature His
           people
	•  Behavioural: Practical insight into how to cooperate with this work of the
           Holy Spirit in one's own life, and how to support others as they pass
           through such seasons

Lesson Plans

Session I: When the Mid-Faith Comes
Activity 1: Welcome, Orientation and Consent Forms (15 min)
   • Welcome the students, explain how the sessions are part of a research
     project and what that means, then walk them through the consent forms
Activity 2: Sharing of personal history and expectations (15 min)
   • Ask each student what drew them to the class description and what they
     hope to learn in the class. Students can pass if they would like.
   • If there are more than 8 students, divide into groups of 4-5 and then have
     each group summarize the common themes to the others
Activity 3: Stage I (10 min)
  •  Illustration: stages 1-3, “Up and to the right”
  •  Lecture introducing the first stage of the spiritual life (see handout) - 5
     min
  •  Discussion of stage 1 (5 min) - comments, personal experience and
     questions
Activity 4: Stage II (10 min)
  •  Lecture introducing the second stage of the spiritual life (see handout) - 5
     min
  •  Discussion of stage 2 (5 min) - comments, personal experience and
     questions
Activity 5: Stage III (10 min)
  •  Lecture introducing the third stage of the spiritual life (see handout) - 5
     min
  •  Discussion of stage 3 (5 min) - comments, personal experience and
     questions
Activity 6: Stage IV (10 min)
  •  Expand illustration: stage 4 is “down and to the right”

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  •  Lecture introducing the fourth stage of the spiritual life (see handout) - 5
     min
  •  Lead-in to the next session: The fourth stage happens because of the false
     self - 5 min

Session II: Why the Mid-Faith Crisis Comes
Activity 1: Lecture introducing the false self (20 min)
	• Origin (see handout)
		o Illustration: Little Timmy
			■	Timmy's team lost on the playground yesterday, and he
				overhears the jocks blaming him and arguing with one
				another so he doesn't end up on their team today (so their
				false self can remain intact)
			■	He doesn't have the ego-strength and sense of self to
				explore what he's feeling with God, so he seeks a way to
				hide; alienation is a nightmare, especially for young
				children and teens
			■	When recess comes, Timmy is feeling sick to his stomach
				out of fear. He offers to clean the blackboard over recess.
				The teacher response, “What a nice thing to do!” But it's
				not nice; it's a fearful, neurotic, sinful thing for Timmy to
				do.
			■	Soon he figures out that staying away from sports, staying
				under the radar, distracting others from his insecurities and
				weaknesses by excelling in school (and later at work), by
				being funny - all of that really works.
			■	And so he unintentionally starts to build a false self, a
				persona that everyone, even he, thinks is him.

		o Genesis 3:8-10: Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the
		  Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day,
		  and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But
		  the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?” He answered, “I
		  heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I
		  hid.”
	• Definition (see handout)
		o Illustration: The real self circle within an outer circle (false self),
		  and the true self as a separate circle
	• Clues (see handout)

Activity 2: Reflection and Discussion (15 min)
	• On the index card provided, reflect on where you recognize the false self
	  in your own attitudes and behaviour. Resist the temptation to identify the
	  false self in others; this deflection is a self-defense mechanism your false
	  self commonly deploys.
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	• These will remain private, but if you would like to share, or ask a
	  question, please go ahead.
Activity 3: Lecture on the impact of the false self (15 min)
	•  See handout
	•  Illustration: 2 false selves interacting, massaging what they say and
	   filtering what they hear
Activity 4: Lecture on the religious false self (20 min)
	• See handout

Session III: What the Mid-Faith Crisis Looks Like
Activity 1: Discussion (15 min)
	•  Where have you noticed the false self in your life this week?
	•  Are there any questions arising from last week?
Activity 2: Eustice's Story (10 min)
	•  Do not to respond to the false self by trying to identify and kill it; that will
	   just unveil a subtler false self behind it. Instead, you need the help of
	   Another.
	•  Read the story of how Eustice becomes a boy again from The Voyage of
	   the Dawn Treader
Activity 3: Lecture on the Dark Night of the Senses (15 min)
	•  See handout
	•  Illustrations
		o The charts of emotional intensity (consolation) and spiritual
		  maturity over time; the effort to try to get back to the peak
		o The iceberg of sin getting pushed up
	•  Music Video: The Rain Keeps Falling by Andrew Peterson
Activity 4: Reflection and Discussion (10 min)
	•  On the index card provided, describe the dynamics of the dark night of the
	   senses you have experienced
	•  You can share from your reflection or raise a question
Activity 5: Lecture on the Dark Night(s) of the Spirit (15 min)
	•  See handout
	•  Illustration: the cycles, (which is actually a spiral, although it doesn't
	  always feel that way)
Activity 6: Discussion (10 min)
	•  On the index card provided, describe the dynamics of the dark night of the
	   spirit you have experienced
	•  You can share from your reflection or raise a question

Session IV: How to Cooperate with the Mid
Activity 1: Get Real (10 min)
	•  See handout - 5 min
	•  Music Video: Be Kind to Yourself by Andrew Peterson

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	• Discussion, sharing and questions - 5 min
Activity 2: Linger with what Provokes You (20 min)
	•  See handout - 10 min
	•  My example of a regimen (fatherhood) - 5 min
	•  Discussion, sharing and questions - 5 min
Activity 3: Huddle Up (10 min)
	•  See handout - 5 min
	•  Discussion, sharing and questions - 5 min
Activity 4: Assisting Another and Exploring Further (20 min)
	•  See handout - 5 min
	•  Discussion (esp. brainstorming how we can assist others), sharing and
           questions - 10 min
	•  To Explore More (handout) - 5 min

Activity 5: Debrief (15 min)
Group feedback on what was good in the sessions and what could be improved

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APPENDIX F: QUESTIONS FOR THE EXPERT PANEL

The following questions were asked of each member of the panel, derived from 
Emiliani's course evaluation questions (Emiliani 2015, 111):
	• What waste, unevenness, or unreasonableness could be eliminated from
	  the learning activities or their constituent parts?
		o Waste: Activities that do not directly contribute to the learning
		  objectives (21)
		o Unevenness: Activities where the demands placed on the learners
		  fluctuate significantly (23)
		o Unreasonableness: Activities that overburden the learners (23)
	• How could the flow within and between the learning activities be
	  improved?
	• How could the learning activities better engage different learning styles?
	• What risks are the learning activities incurring, and how could they be
	  avoided or mitigated?
	How else could the learning activities be improved to better achieve the
	intended learning outcomes?

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