Stages of faith development

How does a person’s faith develop over the course of their lives? In broad categories, what distinct stages might a person move through in their development? These are the kinds of questions that Faith Development Theory tries to answer.

Jessie Cruickshank offers a three-part video series (Part 1 here) where she explains the six stages of faith development. She does a ton of work making James W. Fowler’s research coherent and applicable to disciple-making. Her video explanation is fantastic, but there’s also a cliffnotes PDF here.

The stages, in Fowler’s language, are:

Stage 0 - Undifferentiated Faith

This stage is solely biological and correlates with pre-toddler infancy.

Stage 1 - Intuitive-Projective Faith

This stage is also biological and matches with the transition into toddlerhood until the start of school age development (5-6 years old). The child is imaginative and begins to learn right/wrong but can’t conceive of God more than an outside force that affects him.

Stage 2 - Mythic-Literal Faith

This stage is biological, begins at school age and ends at the transition to abstract thinking (11-12 years old). The child is capable of hearing and telling stories, which gives them a concrete ability to conceive of other’s perspective. Characters can have personality and emotion, but they must be either good or bad, happy or sad.

Stage 3 - Synthetic-Conventional Faith

This stage is the final purely biological stage and happens as a child hits puberty and develops abstract thinking. A person becomes conscious of being seen by others, and conflict arises between what others see and what they see in themselves, “Which is the real me?”. They experiment with showing others different selves, “trying on” personalities in different groups to test if it fits. The group holds the authority to define their identity and values. Since they are “part of the system”, Stage 3 can’t recognize systems.

Cruickshank explores this stage through the lense of ritual. For a stage 3, the symbol of the bread in communion is fused with the person’s access to the meaning of the cross. The person may engage with the sacred through the ritual, but they cannot separate the meaning from the symbol. If a leader changes the ritual this can be deeply painful to the stage 3, as the change is perceived to affect both symbol and meaning. Stage 3’s require consistency in their communities and environment to know themselves and God.

Adults in Stage 3, because they cannot recognize systems, are unable to distinguish the ‘systemic’ in the term ‘systemic racism’. All that matters to them is that their group is not racist, and any insinuation that any member of their tribe might be racist is an attack on the whole (unverified).

Stage 3 Transition

Many adults never transition to Stage 4 and teenagers rarely make the transition before leaving home. This is the first stage transition that requires the will. Stage transitions from here on are often occasioned by a faith crisis and only completed when the person is willing to risk the unknown. For this reason, a person may experience many crises without making this transition.

The Stage 3 crisis may be described as a two-fold separation, emotional and cultural.

First, the person must break emotionally from their source of comfort and security. They must put enough emotional separation between themselves and their groups to question and examine the authority’s perceptions. This feels risky to the person, who can’t know beforehand if they’ll still agree with their group’s definition of their identity or values. Anyone in their group still in Stage 3 will feel the separation as a painful betrayal.

Second, the person must break culturally from their groups. This almost always involves a physical separation. The person must experience groups with differing but coherent forms and values and learn to make their own judgments.

It’s possible for a person to negotiate only one of these separations without transition to Stage 4. A person may move away from home but remain under the emotional authority of their family and friends, never challenging the status quo of what they’ve left. Likewise, one may rebel against the emotional authority of their community but land in a new community without examining their own identity and values. If another person or group holds authority over the person, they have not negotiated this transition.

Stage 4 - Individuative-Reflective Faith

With the emotional/cultural separation completed, a Stage 4 person now internally locates their authority. Their faith is no longer their parent’s or group’s faith; it is theirs. They are conscious of systems and will construct their own blueprint of the world, a worldview. They’re able to engage successfully between groups with others of similar ideology.

Where the Stage 3 person merges symbol and meaning, the Stage 4 person abandons rituals in pursuit of meaning. They may experiment with other symbols, or stop using symbols entirely. Becoming convinced the meaning of communion is union with Jesus, they may stop participating in the ritual of communion in favor of other ways they might experience union with Jesus.

While there is an openness present, a Stage 4 person will settle into preferred, formulaic ways of interaction. They may select specific spiritual disciplines to connect with God and reject others that don’t ‘work’ for them. They can be in community with others of similar ideology, but they have little capacity to engage with different systems.

Stage 4 leaders can cause disruption and pain to Stage 3 people by making what they feel are innoculous changes to ritual and form. Because they have supreme confidence in their perspective, they can receive pushback from Stage 3 with annoyance and respond combatively to other Stage 4 people with contrary systems.

Stage 4 Transition

Like the Stage 3-4 transition, the transition to Stage 5 is marked by a crisis. As the person’s life progresses, the systems they’ve built cease to work reliably. This may manifest in an inability to connect with God through their spiritual exercises, or a disillusionment with contradictions in their behavior and past. In the language of the desert fathers, this crisis is the dark night of the soul.

It’s at this stage that clarity regarding the stages themselves begin to blur. Cruickshank remarks that her faith development does not holistically march through each of these stages but has seen pieces of her identity move through these stages at different times. It is also worth noting that, while a person may have navigated to Stage 5 in a portion of their identity, shame can cause them to temporarily regress to a previous developmental stage.