Janet Hagberg

My mind goes to this idea of stages of faith or stages of discipleship, which has been really impactful for my own journey over the last few years.

There's a book that we've looked at as a staff called The Critical Journey by Janet Hagberg.

And in it, she talks about...

Basically, the overarching fact that your relationship with God is not going to look the same as you mature and as you keep growing.

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So the last thing I will point out, and this is a bit of a challenging truth, and this is a quote from Janet Hagberg and Robert Gulick in their book, The Critical Journey.

They say that according to stage theory, we can understand all the stages through which we have been and we can grasp intellectually the one immediately ahead of us, but we cannot fully comprehend the day-to-day existence of people whose home stage is two stages farther along on the journey.

We can read the words that describe these people, but living with them, working with them, or being in a meeting with them leaves us perplexed and perhaps frustrated.

So I do have a whole chapter on stages of faith in the new book, Leading a Transforming Community.

There's also The Critical Journey by Janet Hagberg, and both of those could be extremely helpful, or just reading the book of Exodus, the story of the Exodus, to see what you can see about what the journey is actually like.

And over on Patreon, we will be also offering... a handout that gives a bit of an exercise for helping us to sit with ourselves and others when we know that this is the stage of the journey that we are in.

And call us back to that phrase that the children of Israel journeyed in stages at the Lord's command.

So in this podcast, I will be, uh, referring to the classic stages of faith that we understand in Orthodox Christianity.

We will be relying sometimes on Janet Hagberg and Robert Gulick, their book, The Critical Journey.

James Fowler, who wrote the classic work, Stages of Faith: A Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning.

And I'm gonna layer it all in with a biblical place to reflect, and that is in the Exodus journey because I think all of these can be laid somewhere within the Exodus journey, which is a biblical story of the stages of faith.