Spiritual Maturity
by Kerby Anderson

Over the years, I have collected examples of what I have called "the Lake Wobegon Effect." Garrison Keillor shares the news from this fictional town and ends with the statement that "all the children are above average."
 
There are lots of examples of this is the real world. For example, most Americans believe that the public school are doing an inadequate job of educating students, but they also believe that their local school is doing a good job.
 
When I had George Barna on my radio program the other day, I found another example. The Barna Group discovered that almost nine out of ten pastors of Protestant churches asserted that spiritual immaturity is one of the most serious problems facing the body of Christ. Yet few believed that that immaturity could be found in their church.
 
Actually the problem is worse than that. They found that "few pastors have gone so far as to give their congregants a specific, written statement of how they define spiritual maturity, how it might be measured, the strategy for facilitating such maturity, or what scriptural passages are most helpful in describing and fostering maturity."
 
Churches do collect statistics. They can tell you how many people were in the worship service, how many attended Sunday School classes, and how much was given in the offering each week. But when it comes to measuring spiritual maturity, few have any measurement for that most important characteristic.
 
If pastors and churches did provide such statistics, I would think church members would be interested. The Barna Groups says, "Americans have an almost insatiable curiosity about themselves and how they stack up against others. Yet in the spiritual realm, that same level of curiosity is much less apparent."
 
We have all probably heard the phrases like: "You get what you measure." Or, "You get what you inspect not what you expect." These are various ways of saying that providing standards and measuring progress are effective tools.
 
It's time to start setting forth what constitutes spiritual maturity and calling believers to that standard. I'm Kerby Anderson, and that's my point of view.