Radical Growth

This coming Sunday my new book "Radical Growth" will be available at CRBC.

As a pastor I’ve struggled to find a concise and effective way of explaining the process of spiritual growth.  How does one know when he or she is spiritually mature?  What does maturity look like?  How does a person graduate into the fullness in Christ the Bible describes?  The problem, I’ve come to realize, is that spiritual growth is not a stagnant process at all.  There is no well-defined beginning, middle and ending to the procedure of Christian maturity.   It is a process that happens more organically than organizationally.  It doesn’t occur as the result of a well-organized structured program.   It is more metamorphosis than methodology.  

I have found that spiritual growth occurs in much the same way a child grows into adulthood.  There are signs along the way that growth is happening, but the process itself is dynamic and gradual.  There are spurts of growth that occur as the result of circumstances or seasons that can’t be defined or neatly understood and in the same way there are regressions and setbacks that make one wonder if growth will ever occur at all.

            

The most common language the Bible uses to describe the Christian life is biological language.  I believe there is a significant reason for this.  I believe the Bible is teaching us that just as our physical growth is dynamic and organic, our spiritual growth has the same characteristic.  That is the purpose of this book.  It applies biblical language to describe this maturing process and discusses the basic beliefs, disciplines and virtues of the Christian life that are essential to that process.

It describes the five specific terms and biblical metaphors scripture uses in this kind of growth process.  The terms are “seed”, “soil”, “root”, “vine” and “fruit”.  These biological metaphors describe the life cycle that occurs naturally in physical nature and how they apply to our spiritual growth, and therefore are helpful in understanding how we are to grow in Christ. 

            
The process is what I call “radical growth” because the term "radical" means "rooted".  I believe this is the most effective way to describe this dynamic growth process. It is the kind of growth that occurs as a result of the believers rootedness in the doctrines, disciplines and virtues of the faith.  But it describes not so much a discipleship method as it does the biblical principles related to our natural spiritual growth.   My purpose in this book is not to give simply the literal applications to the meanings of these words, but to draw our attention to the larger categories they each describe.   This book can be used as a path to personal discipleship or as one on one or group Bible Study.  Each chapter utilizes specific scripture references and each section of the book comes with a list of discussion questions.  

The book will be available online and at amazon.com soon but if you would like an advance copy email me at info@councilroad.org and I will be glad to send you a copy.