1. crises & spiritual struggles examples of ongoing struggles: hiding things in me gossip purity...
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Crises & Spiritual Struggles
Examples of Ongoing Struggles: “hiding things in me” “gossip” “purity” “Non-Christian friends;” “bad peers;” “hanging out with the wrong people” “Parents divorce and my dad fights to see me” “Pornography” “Addictions, getting attached to sin” “Not reading the Bible” “Sin - drinking” “Watching too much T.V.;” “non-Christian T.V. shows”
Crises & Spiritual Struggles
Examples of Crises: “Parents about to divorce (mom and step dad), difficulties with brother, struggle with self-mutilation, struggle with anorexia, slipping grades, 3 ended relationships, many intense family conflicts and more.” “Becoming depressed”“Divorce of parents” “Loss of a couple friends”
Furnishing the Soul
• Hard wired to connect report• Spiritualization of attachment
Furnishing the Soul: Seminar Agenda
• Relational Spirituality: 5 Big Ideas• Overview of the STI• Furnishing the Soul workbook and soul
projects
Relational Spirituality: 5 Big Ideas
• Big Idea #1: Hard Wired to Connect • Big Idea #2: Unthought Knowns: We
Know More Than We Can Say • Big Idea #3: Gut-Level Memories as
Relational Filters• Big Idea #4: Tipping Points in Spiritual
Transformation• Big Idea #5: Furnishing the Soul for
Spiritual Transformation
Big Idea #1:Hard Wired to Connect
• Christian framework
• Created in the image of God (Gen 1:26)
• God as Trinity is relational in His very essence
• Goal of spiritual transformation: Love God and love your neighbor (Matt 22:37-39)
• Love is about the way we relate, which stems from our hearts (Matt 12:34-35)
• We are designed or hard wired by God to connect relationally through love, and to grow in this capacity throughout our lives
Big Idea #1:Hard Wired to Connect
Attachment relationships & the brain
x genes =
Big Idea #1:Hard Wired to Connect
• Foundling homes in 1930s & 1940s and “failure to thrive”
• Ten percent mortality rate in best hospitals
• All experienced loss: protest, despair, detachment
• Early attachment experiences (or lack thereof) are imprinted into the brain structures maturing during a brain growth spurt in the first 2 years of life
Big Idea #1:Hard Wired to Connect
• Infant research: infants naturally and automatically seek “attunement”
• God hard wired us such that we want to be known by others and God
• Also hard wired to connect to meaning
• “If you try to keep your life for yourself, you will lose it. But if you give up your life for me, you will find true life” (Matt 16:25-26)
Big Idea #1:Hard Wired to Connect
• The “deep magic” in Narnia
• Jesus is talking about the “deep magic”--the underlying structure or order--that determines what makes human life meaningful
• Meaning is found in giving our life away to God and others in sacrificial love
• Meaning find its end in relationship, and finds its beginning in attachment relationships
Big Idea #1:Hard Wired to Connect
Attachment relationships & the brain
--->
Attachment relationships are the transmitters of spiritual meaning, values, and morality
“Spiritualization of Attachment”
Big Idea #1:Hard Wired to Connect
• Tuesdays with Morrie
• The fundamental way we grow and change is through relationships
• Hard wired to connect means that we cannot directly change our own soul by ourselves. We are profoundly dependent on God and others to help us transform into the likeness of Christ
Big Idea #1:Hard Wired to Connect
• John 15:1-5: Attached to the vine; relationally connected to Christ and the Church
• I Peter 4:8-10; Eph 4:15-16; 1 Cor 12:27
• In sum: our souls naturally desire, or are hard wired for relational connections, and it is through these connections with God and others that we are spiritually transformed to increase our capacity to love
Big Idea #2Unthought Knowns: We Know More Than We
Can Say • The statue that didn’t look right
Big Idea #2Unthought Knowns: We Know More Than We
Can Say • Two distinct systems for processing
information/ways of knowing
Head Knowledge(Explicit Left Brain)
Gut Level Knowledge(Implicit Right Brain)
LinearLogicalLanguage- BasedExplicit
Memory
NonlinearHolisticNonverbalImplicit memoryEmotion
PrimaryCategorical
Big Idea #2Unthought Knowns: We Know More Than We
Can Say • Good Will Hunting
Big Idea #2
Unthought Knowns: We Know More Than We Can Say
• Emotions--shape both our internal experiences and our experiences with God and other people. They give us a sense of what is meaningful
• Emotion Defined--Emotion is the process of automatically and non-consciously evaluating the meaning of our experiences, particularly within the context of our relationships
• Emotions--Starting point for engaging our hearts with God and others b/c they reveal our deepest values; meaning we automatically assign to events
Big Idea #2
Unthought Knowns: We Know More Than We Can Say
• Gut level processing online at birth, fully developed by 15 months…
• Infant-mother research: Dr. Seuss study
• Infant mother mutual gazing
• Infants have deep gut level knowledge or relationships in a nonverbal system of knowing (implicit relational knowledge )
Big Idea #2Unthought Knowns: We Know More Than We
Can Say • Gut level knowing continues throughout life
• Gut level knowing, not head knowledge, drives how we relate to others because it is processed automatically, and is not under the direct control of knowledge in the explicit system (speed dating)
• Head knowledge is important but must be integrated with gut level knowledge to affect our ability to love God and others
Big Idea #2Unthought Knowns: We Know More Than We
Can Say • Gut level knowledge of relationships
operates in same way with God as with human
• Gut level knowledge of God is influenced by experiences with significant caregivers
• Open to transformation by continued relational experiences with God and others
Big Idea #2Unthought Knowns: We Know More Than We
Can Say • In sum: there are 2 distinct ways of knowing,
head knowledge and “gut level” knowledge, and it is our gut level knowledge that drives the quality of our relationships with God and others. We know much more than we can say when it comes to relationships, and it is these “unthought knowns” at the core of our soul that must be transformed to grow in our capacity to love
Big Idea #3
Gut-Level Memories as Relational Filters
What do you remember about yesterday?
Do you always know when you are remembering something?
Big Idea #3
Gut-Level Memories as Attachment Filters • Memory Defined: Memory is the way past events affect future functioning.
• Experiences cause certain patterns of neurons to fire together ---> increases probability of similar pattern firing again in future thereby affecting future functioning.
• Example: Grass pathways
Two Types of Memory
Intellectual Memory
Online at 18 mos.
Verbal memory of facts (semantic)
Memory of yourself in time (autobiographical)
Sense of recollection
Conscious attn required for encoding
Two Types of Memory
Intellectual Memory
Online at 18 mos.
Verbal memory of facts (semantic)
Memory of yourself in time (autobiographical)
Sense of recollection
Conscious attn required for encoding
Gut level Memory
Online at birth; continues throughout life
Emotions
Behavioral responses
Perceptions
Bodily sensations
No sense of recollectionConscious attn not required for encodingAttachment filters
Big Idea #3Gut-Level Memories as Attachment Filters
• Gut level memory--We remember how important people in our lives feel about us not in words, but in our bodies, emotions and in images--in gut level knowledge
• Repeated experiences in important relationships are etched or encoded in gut level memory as nonverbal knowledge of self in relation to others
Big Idea #3Gut-Level Memories as Attachment Filters
• Gut level memories of emotionally significant others become “attachment filters” that shape how we feel about ourselves, God and others, and how we determine the meaning of events.
Big Idea #3Gut-Level Memories as Attachment Filters
Attachment FiltersSecure
Dismissing
Preoccupied
Repeated ExperiencesEmotional states & nonverbal signals accurately read/responded to
Emotional states & nonverbal signals ignored
Emotional states & nonverbal signals inconsistently responded/to instrusiveness
Attachment
Filters
Attachment
Filters
Others’Responses
Others’ResponsesRelational
Strategy Relational
Strategy
Big Idea #3Gut-Level Memories as Attachment Filters
Gut levelmeaning(emotion)
Gut levelmeaning(emotion)
RelationalStrategyRelationalStrategy
Experiences in the world
Gut levelmeaning(emotion)
Gut levelmeaning(emotion) Reinforcement of
Gut level meaningsReinforcement ofGut level meanings
(Early) relational experiences(Early) relational experiences(Early) relational experiences(Early) relational experiencesSoul StructureSoul Structure
Imagine God thinking about you. What do you assume God feels when you come to mind?
Big Idea #4Tipping Points in Spiritual Transformation
• Attachment filters are stubborn• Engrained pathways in the brain• We bring old adaptations to new
situations and relational experiences with God and others because this is the only way we know how, at a gut level, to connect with others
• Attachment filters are self-reinforcing
Big Idea #4Tipping Points in Spiritual Transformation
• Think of a time of significant spiritual growth in your life…
• Spiritual transformation does not occur in a predictable, orderly, or proportional manner
• Tipping points--minor shifts in our perspective, gut level beliefs, or experiences in relationships can suddenly lead to exponential changes in our relational filters
Big Idea #4Tipping Points in Spiritual Transformation
• Scientific discovery process (Poincare)
Big Idea #5Furnishing the Soul
for Spiritual Transformation
• Comedy improv
• All of life is a spiritual improv--structured spontaneity
• Relational connections shape (structure) attachment filters (spontaneity) in living out our spiritual improv
Big Idea #5Furnishing the Soul
for Spiritual Transformation
• Scientific discovery process
• Andrew Wiles journey through a “dark unexplored mansion”
• Breakthroughs (tipping points) come to those who have furnished the mind with expertise
• Spiritual breakthroughs (tipping points) come to those who have furnished the soul with relational connections
Big Idea #5Furnishing the Soul
for Spiritual Transformation
• Storying Unthought Knowns: Bottom Up Integration– Connecting or translating our experiences into
words through narratives and journaling
• Imaging Head Knowledge: Top down
Integration – Connecting, or “back-translating” head knowledge
about God and spiritual transformation to our own experience and to the lives of mentors
Big Idea #5Furnishing the Soul
for Spiritual Transformation
• Spiritual disciplines (forms of relational connection with God) are the way we furnish our soul to prepare us for spiritual tipping points
• Spiritual disciplines are designed in many ways to integrate two ways of knowing
Attachment Filters
Attachment Filters
ImagesStoriesImagesStories Understand
meaning Understand
meaning
Storying Unthought Knowns:Bottom Up Integration
Gut levelmeaning(emotion)
Gut levelmeaning(emotion)
TranslationTranslation
Experiences in the world
Gut levelmeaning(emotion)
Gut levelmeaning(emotion) Carried forwardCarried forward
Early relational experiencesEarly relational experiencesEarly relational experiencesEarly relational experiencesSoul StructureSoul Structure
ImagesStoriesImagesStories
Implicitfelt
meaning
Implicitfelt
meaningCarried forwardCarried forward
TranslationTranslationUnderstand
meaningUnderstand
meaning
Relational
Filters
Relational
Filters
Experiences in the world
Gut levelmeaning(emotion)
Gut levelmeaning(emotion)
Early relational experiencesEarly relational experiencesEarly relational experiencesEarly relational experiences
Storying Unthought Knowns:Bottom Up Integration
Storying Unthought Knowns:Bottom Up Integration
Soul StructureSoul Structure
Relationship w/ God & others Relationship w/ God & others
Overview of STI
Five domains of spiritual transformation based on “relational spirituality” model (5 big ideas)– Spiritual Meaning & Vitality– Spiritual Commitment & Community– Secure Spiritual Attachment– Preoccupied Spiritual Attachment– Dismissing Spiritual Attachment
Overview of STI
19 sub-domains of spiritual transformation
Spiritual Meaning & Vitality Domain
Prayer Type Frequency Prayer Type Impact Spiritual Practices Frequency Spiritual Practices Impact Desolation/Consolation Transformational Suffering Spiritual Perspective Spiritual Meaning Spiritual Openness Awareness of God
Spiritual Commitment &Community Domain
Spiritual Service Faith Centrality Spiritual Community Other-Centered Love
Secure Spiritual Attachment Domain
Secure God Attachment Forgiveness w/ God and Others Realistic Acceptance
Preoccupied Spiritual Attachment Domain
Preoccupied God Attachment Disappointment with God Instability with God
Dismissing Spiritual Attachment Domain
Dismissing God Attachment
Demographic/Open-EndedQuestions
Age/gender Religious affiliation Class rank How long a Christian Primary influence in becoming a Christian Parents’ marital status Parents’ spiritual status Dating relationship status Type of school Crisis in past year Describe rel w/ God & changes over past 3 months Impact of youth ministry on spiritual growth
High School STI Results
Dialogue and Feedback
Dialogue and Feedback
Youth ministry impact questions 1. Outreach events 2. Camps 3. Short-term missions trips 4. Sunday school worship 5. Sunday school teaching 6. Discipleship/small groups 7. Relationship with adult mentor 8. Bible studies 9. Weekly youth ministry program 10. Student leadership opportunities 11. Service projects
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Executive Summary Report
Sample exec summary report for CCCU
Coming Soon from FS……
FS Spiritual Transformation Hub“Take your spiritual EKG” A centralized web-based warehouse for
your ST process
Coming Soon from FS……
FS Spiritual Transformation HubSTI/FS feedbackFS book Interactive video spiritual guideSoul projects Spiritual communitiesLab, classroom, library, audio journal
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