Formation -- Final (for now)

Perhaps I've jumped too far ahead with these comments on "formation"...

Maybe now is the time for a step back. Maybe I've assumed that the word "formation" meant something to those who have heard me use it. Maybe I've assumed the definition people ascribed to the word was similar to my own. Maybe those were faulty assumptions.

For now, here's my take on the word. "Formation" in a congregational context is what happens when Christians engage the content of the faith within the context of a worshipping community.

To do so means that we come to learn something of what it means to be a follower of Jesus -- not just in theory but in ways that are demonstrable in the various arenas of our lives.

Formation is not simply a "head trip" -- the accumulation of bits of trivia or factoids to impress ourselves and one another with all that we have learned. Neither is it solely about right action -- doing/not doing things that we believe "good Christians" should do/not do (which sometimes resembles padding our spiritual resumes). I believe that, for Anglicans, what it means to be a Christian is more "caught than taught".

I'm wondering if formation commences with the cultivation of an attitude of patient persistence -- of keeping at this Christian life as a way of deepening our awareness of the wholeness (salvation) God wills for all creation. I wonder if our quest for some sort of measurable result from alleged formation activities is actually counterproductive to the cultivation of patient persistence.

In an essay entitled Performing the Faith, Stanley Hauerwas notes that "Patient listening and attentiveness are skills that are exercised, honed, and refined in Christian community. Moreover; within the life of the church this type of respectful, attentive listening is aquired primarily in liturgy...Patience is learning what it means to serve, to attend time. For knowing how to wait means having a sense of time, appreciating what it means to live with something over time." (Performing the Faith, page 100)

In the Rite I Eucharistic Prayer, after the consecration of the elements, the celebrant prays on behalf of the congregation, "And here we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, our selves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice unto thee..." (cf. Romans 12-12). Perhaps this is the place where formation really begins -- the awareness that we are God's already and that God is at work within us individually and through the community of faith corporately to form us more fully into the Body of Christ.