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

The cross is the shared experience that produces union between the divine and the human (see Gal. 6 and 2 Cor. 5).

When we link faith to the authenticity of youthfulness, we make youthfulness itself faith’s measure.

Campbell says, “Pauline mysticism or union with Christ does not compromise the integrity of an individual’s personhood.

Salvation is only effected by, one might say, our being in communion with God through the community of humans in communion, viz., the church’.

We experience an encounter with the being of God, finding ourselves in union with the being of Jesus when we are ministered to and led to be ministers to others (see Matt. 25:31–46). To be formed in faith is to give yourself to the story of Jesus coming to you, or someone you know, in and through a death experience.

worship. It is within this dynamic of receiving ministry and responding in grateful worship that we discover that our being is a gift to God, that we as a household are entirely a gift. But this gift, again, is not talent. The church is full not of talented people but of gifted people. We are the people who have received the gift of God’s ministry

Chasing fun and excitement (being youthful) would take us into a material spiritual state where we would be free to be our most authentic self.

But this conception follows the mass society and loses its connections to transcendence; there is no place to recognize that faith must have something to do with the encounter of divine action.

So the household of ministry is the place of story, meaning it has its center in the practice of testimony.