Fowler’s Stages of Faith Development

Pre-stage: 0

Early experiences count

‘We are loved into knowing and feeling…

as we are loved into being’

Stage 1: Unordered or Impressionistic

• Uninhibited imagination yields a chaos of powerful images

• Thinking is intuitive and haphazard• Reality is a scrapbook of random impressions• Symbols viewed magically and as what they

represent• Symbols of Christian experience, tradition and

liturgy can contribute deep and lasting images at this stage

Stage 1: Unordered or Impressionistic – Implications for workers with children and young

people• Children excluded from experiencing ritual and

sacrament alongside adult Christians because ‘they don’t yet understand’ are being cut off from a vital form of nourishment.

• Dependable, structured parenting is crucial at this stage.

Stage 2: Ordering

• Able to unify experience and trace patterns of cause and effect

• Storytelling is important

• Distinguishes ‘true’ stories but sees them from within

• Belonging matters

Stage 2: Ordering – Implications for workers

• Importance of telling the story of the Christian community to which we belong

• Valuing people as part of the faith family

Stage 3: Conforming

• Can think abstractly and see self as others see them

• Importance given to what peers and ‘significant’ others think and say

• Despite rebelliousness, essentially conformist

• Cannot stand back and view beliefs and values from others’ perspectives

• Tendency to be defensive when challenged

Stage 3: Conforming – Implications for workers

• Christian leaders and workers can be ‘significant others’!

• It is a time of going with the ‘faith-crowd’ or ‘faith-current’

• Ability to reason gives opportunity for new ways of teaching and discussion

Stage 4: Choosing

• Can take a third-person perspective in evaluating beliefs and values

• Need to know who I am for myself, not second hand

• Take charge of values and responsibility for commitments, evaluations and worldview

• Newfound autonomy and maturity

Stage 4: Choosing – Implications for workers

• Need sensitivity, allowing space to grow into new way of meaning-making

• This stage of faith can lead to an unrealistic sense of independence

• People at this stage can also tend to caricature the faith of others to justify their own stance

• Oversimplifying faith may result in denying paradoxes and tensions

Stage 5: Inclusive

• Desire to resolve tensions becomes a psychological burden

• Develop greater openness to, and mutuality with, other perspectives

• Able to keep in tension the paradoxes and polarities of faith, in order to cope with ambiguity in our meaning-system

• Recognize that truth is too complex to be viewed from one perspective alone

• Recognize other ways of knowing (e.g. intuition)• Capable of self-criticism, questioning, doubt• Recognize our inevitable interdependence

Stage 5: Inclusive – Implications for workers

• This person is willing to engage with others and possibly be changed as a result.

• This stage often results from coping with failure, crises and/or living with the consequences of earlier decisions

Stage 6: Selfless

• Essentially a relinquishing and transcending of self

• ‘Such people often go out to transform the world. And they often die in the attempt’

• Implications for workers: These people are dangerous! They might change you…

A challenge from John Westerhoff

• What our children are really asking is for us to reveal and share ourselves and our faith, not to provide dogmatic answers…

• It is in the relationship between us during our shared quest that God is revealed

From Bringing Up Children in the Christian Faith, Harper & Row, 1980