STAGES OF FAITH

James W. Fowler

• Fowler’s work is not focused on a particular religious tradition

• For Fowler, faith is a universal quality of human life

• “Faith” is a dynamic, changing evolving process, a way of being

• Fowler’s “stages” are “still shots” in a complex, dynamic process

• Fowler’s stages are not meant to be an evaluative scale. There are individuals at each stage who are persons of serenity, courage and genuine faith

PRIMAL FAITH

• Infancy: bonding and attachment, relationship, trust, baby’s memories of maternal and paternal presence

• These early experiences shape the images of God that take more or less conscious form by the fourth or fifth year of life

STAGE 1: INTUITIVE – PROJECTIVE FAITH

• Age 2 – 7: language development, communication, interpretation of the world

• Perception, feelings, and imaginative fantasy make up the child’s principal ways of knowing and transforming their experiences

• Stories, symbols and examples help give the world unity and sense

• The symbols, stories and shared life of a religious tradition give a child an expanded horizon of meanings

STAGE 2: MYTHIC – LITERAL FAITH

• Concrete operational thinking: stable categories of space, time and causality make the child’s constructions of experience much less dependent on feeling and fantasy

• Ability to recognize others’ perspectives: recognize right, wrong, goodness, evil

• Faith becomes a matter of reliance on the stories, rules and implicit values of the family’s community of meanings

• Narrative & story become important• Faith involves valuing the stories, practices

and beliefs of one’s faith community & tradition

STAGE 3: SYNTHETIC – CONVENTIONAL FAITH

• Typically begins to emerge in early adolescence• Formal operational thinking: ideal possibilities,

hypothetical considerations• Synthetic: pulling disparate elements of one’s life

into an integrated unity• Conventional: Values, beliefs derived from a

group of significant others• Strong, deeply held beliefs, yet largely

unexamined, no critical self-reflection• Strong sense of identity through face-to-face

membership with those with shared beliefs

STAGE 4: INDIVIDUATIVE – REFLECTIVE FAITH

• Persons objectify, examine, make critical choices about the defining elements of their identity and faith

• More explicit commitment and accountability• Emergence of “self,” no longer defined by the

composite of one’s roles or meanings to others• Bringing beliefs and lived experience into unity• This transition may typically occur in early

adulthood, but for others it comes, if at all, later

STAGE 5: CONJUNCTIVE FAITH

• Midlife or beyond; ‘coincidence of opposites’ – emergent awareness of the need to face and hold together polar tensions in one’s life: life/death, old/young

• Acknowledges paradox of different perspectives on truth as being intrinsic to that truth

• Genuine openness to the truths of other traditions and faith communities

• We try to “shape our dance in relation to God’s movements”

• Realization that God shows forth the divine purpose for all persons and nations

STAGE 6: UNIVERSALIZING FAITH

• Few individuals reach this stage• A sense of being in but not of the world• A decentration from self: circle of those who

count expands – all of humankind• Valuing and valuation are centered in the

Creator: the individual participates in the valuing of the Creator and values other beings, and being, from the standpoint of the Creator

• Examples: Mother Teresa, Ghandhi, Martin Luther King, Dietrick Bonhoeffer

STAGES OF FAITH DEVELOPMENT: John

Westerhoff III

• EXPERIENCED FAITH: (preschool, early childhood) Interactions with other ‘faithing selves’; experiencing God’s love through others

• AFFILIATIVE FAITH: Belonging to a faith community, identifying with its ‘story’, participating in its activities

• SEARCHING FAITH (adolescence, early adulthood): Doubt, critical judgment, inquiry into meanings of the “story”, experimentation, testing one’s tradition by learning about others, a need for commitment

• OWNED FAITH: “Conversion” – sudden or gradual, desire to witness to faith in both word and deed, conscious part of a person’s identity, desire to reach full potential as intended by God, sense of lifelong faith journey