I also hear the opposite. People complain, for example, that their group lacks an atmosphere of trust or cannot seem to stay on any kind of agenda or has a member who dominates the time. Whether coming from the positive or negative— the joys or the problems—these ingredients are important for all spiritual formation groups to understand and develop.

Healthy Growth. From my experience, I have learned that one or more of these dimensions has been lacking in every single group of which I have been a member. I have been in groups that were highly task oriented and successful at accomplishing goals but lacked relational harmony. Other groups had harmony in relationships but had trouble keeping Christ at the center. You, too, can probably point to experiences in your spiritual life and past or present groups which reflect strength in one area and weakness in another.

Let me encourage you to use the above list, turning the statements into questions: "Am I/we dependent upon Christ? Am I/ we seeking renewal continually?" and so on. If you think of other dimensions that are important, add them. Use them in your small group. Most of all, I encourage you to keep striving and inspiring each other to "be all that you can be" as disciples of Jesus Christ.
— James Bryan Smith

GOING DEEPER

Review of A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life by William Law.
In 1728 William Law penned one of the truly great devotional books of all time . . . and one that is especially needed in our time. Such diverse leaders as John Wesley, Samuel Johnson, and John Henry Newman have expressed their indebtedness to Law and his book. Three things make this book stand out.

First, more profoundly than most, Law understood the place of "intention" in the spiritual life. He forces us to search our hearts to see if we have "the intention to please God in all (our) actions" (p. 56). Are we intending—that is, are we making specific, measurable, personal plans—to stop sinning? If not, then we are intending to sin. So runs the logic of Law, and it is a logic with a sting in it. He rightly understands that intention intently pursued will produce "holy habits" and, in time, transformed persons. He writes, "Christianity supposes, intends, desires, and aims at nothing else but the raising (of) fallen man to a divine life, to such habits of holiness, such degrees of devotion as may fit him to enter amongst the holy inhabitants of the Kingdom of Heaven" (p. 208).

Second, Law presses us again and again to bring this eternal kind of life into our daily experience. "Thus it is in all the virtues and holy tempers of Christianity; they are not ours unless they be the virtues and tempers of our ordinary life" (p. 52). "Devotion," says Law, "is a life given or devoted to God" (p. 47).

Third, for an eighteenth-century writing, Law is amazingly contemporary in his use of story and illustration. In this book we meet a vast array of people: Flavia and Miranda, Eugenius and Cognatus, Mundanus and Classicus, and many more. Law is a good story teller for each time as we are engaged with the character, we find ourselves. This edition by Paulist Press is the best one on the market today. Its more than five hundred pages contain a superb introduction and a second work by Law entitled The Spirit of Love which is an excellent essay on the spiritual life in its own right. A Serious Call is not a quick read. I have been slowly working through it since last May and will probably continue with it until Christmas. The good news is that if you will stay with this book, it will do more for your spiritual development than twenty contemporary "devotional" books.
— Richard J. Foster