Faith Formation in a Secular Age : Volume 1 (Ministry in a Secular Age): Responding to the Church's Obsession with Youthfulness

So to be justified is to share in the body of Jesus by finding your person in his person. Personhood is more than a natural biological organism. Personhood (hypostasis) is a spiritual reality that is the very reflection of the image of God’s own trinitarian being. But while human personhood is more than can be reduced to the natural, it nevertheles

This reality that is Christ comes upon Paul as an experience. To be “in Christ” is to be upended by an experience.

Faith becomes an idea, and our job is to fortify the concept enough so that it is chosen as valuable. Faith formation becomes a battle to win a place for the concept of God and the idea of church participation in the lives of the young so they’ll keep the pickets of faith in their fence.

his being is now in Christ’s being, as Christ is in him, because Paul has died with Christ, and through death Jesus has brought him into a new reality made through the ministerial action of the persons of the triune God (again, Gal. 2:20).6

You have to trust that your willingness to be in one space over the other will be beneficial and meaningful.

The hippie was the direct descendant of the eccentric bohemian of the nineteenth century, writ large.

Ginsberg was actually after a new spirituality, seeking a mysticism without a personal God. This was a spirituality bound in never growing up but forever remaining youthful.

So to be “in Christ” is not to enter God’s essence but to have your being called into God’s action.

In this rut we’ve erroneously interpreted our issues through Secular 2, believing that the real issue of faith formation is the loss, or revealed impotence, of the (institutional) church. Caught in Secular 2, we believe we have to confront MTD, Nones, and other descriptions of our faith-formation struggles, because if we don’t, our children will no