Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership with Ruth Haley Barton

Ruth continues this season on stages of faith, urging churches to become communities “big enough” to hold people across the spiritual journey. This week she focuses on the deeper wilderness that leads toward union with God, likening it to Israel’s “great and terrible wilderness” where what must die does die. She describes the dark night of the senses (loss of familiar spiritual consolations) and the dark night of the spirit (God “behind the cloud,” experienced as absence yet actually overwhelming closeness), as purifications preparing for transforming union. Ruth also explores why many churches and pastors are unequipped for this stage, highlights spiritual direction as vital support, and emphasizes the journey unfolds at God’s initiative, not ours. For any of us who have experienced, or are experiencing a season in the wilderness, this one’s for you.

In this season, titled Journeying Through Stages of Faith in the Family of God, we will be exploring the stages of faith as a model for our own growth and our ability to support our communities in their growth. Looking through the lens of faith and human development, as well as biblical stories, Ruth will share four distinct stages of faith and provide listeners with support for themselves as well as thoughts on how leaders can more wisely resource individuals and communities as they navigate these different stages of the journey.

 

Mentioned in the Episode: 

Leading a Transforming Community by Ruth Haley Barton

Invitation to a Journey by Robert Mulholland

 The Critical Journey by Janet Hagberg and Robert Guelich

The Healing Path by Dan Allender

The Human Condition: Contemplation and Transformation by Fr. Thomas Keating

Stages of Faith:  The Psychology of Human Development and the Question for Meaning by James Fowler

 

 

Music:

Kingdom Come by Aaron Niequist
Anthem from Music in Solitude

 

We’re on Substack! “On the Journey with the Transforming Center” is our home for “reflection, conversation, and connection with our transforming community.”  It includes thoughtful reflections from Ruth Haley Barton and the Transforming Center team, as well as alumni and friends of the Transforming Center, occasional special video teachings and guided practices, and space to interact with our content and respond with how God is working in your life through the posts. This is also where you find all of our podcast patron content! There are free and paid tiers. We’d love for you to join us over on Substack. 

Support the podcast!  This season on Substack,we will do more work naming and describing each of the stages that we talk about, talking about what's needed during those stages, and providing a couple of key questions that you can think about as a community, as it has to do with that particular stage of faith. Become a paid member of Substack today to receive these practices and so much more!

 

The Transforming Center board and staff have been prayerfully discerning significant questions about our ministry’s future. We have been asking what faithfulness requires in this season, whether our current organizational model is sustainable, and how the work of strengthening the souls of pastors and leaders and the congregations and organizations they serve might best be carried forward. If you'd like to know more about this pivotal season for the Transforming Center please visit our website https://transformingcenter.org/a-pivotal-moment/.

 

*this post contains affiliate links

Ruth continues this season’s exploration of stages of faith in the family of God, overlaying Fowler’s developmental insights and the Exodus as a communal journey rather than an individual one. In this episode, she traces movement from pre-awareness to awakening, then to a decisive turning point or conversion where we trust ourselves to God amid fear, loss, and uncertainty, often after things worsen. Using her own job-leaving story and Paul’s waiting after conversion, she highlights the liminal space that follows. She then describes “illumination” as Israel’s God-guided “roundabout way”: a formative season of spiritual flourishing, tangible guidance, provision, instruction for community, and lessons in trust. She also names the predictable onset of ambivalence and the dark night of the senses, urging communities not to lose those in darker seasons. We conclude with an invitation to remember and mark where God has met them along the way.

 

In this season, titled Journeying Through Stages of Faith in the Family of God, we will be exploring the stages of faith as a model for our own growth and our ability to support our communities in their growth. Looking through the lens of faith and human development, as well as biblical stories, Ruth will share four distinct stages of faith and provide listeners with support for themselves as well as thoughts on how leaders can more wisely resource individuals and communities as they navigate these different stages of the journey.

 

Mentioned in the Episode: 

Leading a Transforming Community by Ruth Haley Barton

Invitation to a Journey by Robert Mulholland

The Human Condition: Contemplation and Transformation by Fr. Thomas Keating

Stages of Faith:  The Psychology of Human Development and the Question for Meaning by James Fowler

The Critical Journey by Janet Hagberg and Robert Guelich

Music:

Kingdom Come by Aaron Niequist
Prayer for Healing from Music in Solitude

 

We’re on Substack! “On the Journey with the Transforming Center” is our home for “reflection, conversation, and connection with our transforming community.”  It includes thoughtful reflections from Ruth Haley Barton and the Transforming Center team, as well as alumni and friends of the Transforming Center, occasional special video teachings and guided practices, and space to interact with our content and respond with how God is working in your life through the posts. This is also where you find all of our podcast patron content! There are free and paid tiers. We’d love for you to join us over on Substack. 

Support the podcast!  This season on Substack,we will do more work naming and describing each of the stages that we talk about, talking about what's needed during those stages, and providing a couple of key questions that you can think about as a community, as it has to do with that particular stage of faith. Become a paid member of Substack today to receive these practices and so much more!

 

The Transforming Center board and staff have been prayerfully discerning significant questions about our ministry’s future. We have been asking what faithfulness requires in this season, whether our current organizational model is sustainable, and how the work of strengthening the souls of pastors and leaders and the congregations and organizations they serve might best be carried forward. If you'd like to know more about this pivotal season for the Transforming Center please visit our website https://transformingcenter.org/a-pivotal-moment/.

 

*this post contains affiliate links

Welcome to season 30! In this season, titled Journeying Through Stages of Faith in the Family of God, we will be exploring the stages of faith as a model for our own growth and our ability to support our communities in their growth. Looking through the lens of faith and human development, as well as biblical stories, Ruth will share four distinct stages of faith and provide listeners with support for themselves as well as thoughts on how leaders can more wisely resource individuals and communities as they navigate these different stages of the journey.

 

Ruth opens this season by introducing stages of faith. Drawing from her book Leading a Transforming Community and her own experience of “hitting a wall,” she argues that many churches fail to recognize or support the stage someone is in, which can leave people feeling “bad” or forced to leave to find what they need. She frames the spiritual journey as an increasing capacity for surrender rather than belief alone, names key models (Orthodox/classic stages, The Critical Journey, Fowler, and Exodus), and explains the classic movements of awakening, purgation, illumination, and union (including dark nights) as cyclical and often triggered by crisis or suffering. Using Exodus, she explores pre-awareness and awakening and invites listeners to notice where they may be waking up. We conclude with a prayer to “trust in the slow work of God.”

 

Mentioned in the Episode: 

Leading a Transforming Community by Ruth Haley Barton

Invitation to a Journey by Robert Mulholland

The Human Condition: Contemplation and Transformation by Fr. Thomas Keating

Stages of Faith:  The Psychology of Human Development and the Question for Meaning by James Fowler

The Critical Journey by Janet Hagberg and Robert Guelich

Music:

Kingdom Come by Aaron Niequist
Tender Moment from Music in Solitude

 

We’re on Substack! “On the Journey with the Transforming Center” is our home for “reflection, conversation, and connection with our transforming community.”  It includes thoughtful reflections from Ruth Haley Barton and the Transforming Center team, as well as alumni and friends of the Transforming Center, occasional special video teachings and guided practices, and space to interact with our content and respond with how God is working in your life through the posts. This is also where you find all of our podcast patron content! There are free and paid tiers. We’d love for you to join us over on Substack. 

Support the podcast!  This season on Substack,we will do more work naming and describing each of the stages that we talk about, talking about what's needed during those stages, and providing a couple of key questions that you can think about as a community, as it has to do with that particular stage of faith. Become a paid member of Substack today to receive these practices and so much more!

 

The Transforming Center board and staff have been prayerfully discerning significant questions about our ministry’s future. We have been asking what faithfulness requires in this season, whether our current organizational model is sustainable, and how the work of strengthening the souls of pastors and leaders and the congregations and organizations they serve might best be carried forward. If you'd like to know more about this pivotal season for the Transforming Center please visit our website https://transformingcenter.org/a-pivotal-moment/.

 

*this post contains affiliate links

In this episode, Ruth closes our podcast season on “becoming human,” reflecting on an incarnational spirituality that is lived in the God-ordained reality of our bodies rather than bifurcated from them. She invites listeners to notice what they now know, what questions have surfaced, and how suffering and honest inquiry shape theology and spiritual leadership, calling leaders to stay present to bodily experience in themselves and those they shepherd. Ruth closes with four practices—paying attention to the body, caring for it, praying with it, and biospiritual focusing—and concludes by once again reading Brian Wren’s “Good Is the Flesh” as an embodied blessing.

 

Season 29 is titled Becoming Human: With God in Our Bodies. Our goals this season are to confront the dualism between life in the body and life in the spirit, to hear stories of people who experienced their bodies as a place of encounter with God, and to explore the connection between the integration of life in our bodies and our spiritual lives with our leadership. We will be having deep, spiritual conversations with friends of the Transforming Center about their very human experiences in their bodies and how they’ve experienced God in and throughout these experiences. We will explore God in concrete bodily realities like gender, sexuality, race, ability, aging, illness, and death, to name a few.

Mentioned in the Episode: 

Tarry Awhile: Wisdom from Black Spirituality for People of Faith by Dr. Selina Stone

Our Bodies Our Faith by Barbara Brown Taylor (Christian Century, Jan 27 2009)

Who Decides What My Body Means? by Brian Bantum (Christian Century, March 29, 2017)

This Here Flesh by Cole Arthur Riley

Good is the Flesh by Brian Wren

 

Music:

Kingdom Come by Aaron Niequist
Innocence from Music in Solitude

Springs of Living Water from Music in Solitude

 

We’re on Substack! “On the Journey with the Transforming Center” is our home for “reflection, conversation, and connection with our transforming community.”  It includes thoughtful reflections from Ruth Haley Barton and the Transforming Center team, as well as alumni and friends of the Transforming Center, occasional special video teachings and guided practices, and space to interact with our content and respond with how God is working in your life through the posts. This is also where you find all of our podcast patron content! There are free and paid tiers. We’d love for you to join us over on Substack. 

Support the podcast! This season patrons will receive special bonus conversations with each of our guests. Become a paid member of Substack today to receive these practices and so much more!

 

The Transforming Center exists to create space for God to strengthen leaders and transform communities. You are invited to join our next Transforming Community:® A Two-year Spiritual Formation Experience for Leaders.  Delivered in nine quarterly retreats, this practice-based learning opportunity is grounded in the conviction that the best thing you bring to leadership is your own transforming self!

 

*this post contains affiliate links

This week, Ruth is joined by retired pastor and spiritual director Bill Shereos for a conversation about aging and diminishment as God-ordained realities. Prompted by the deaths of close friends and family, Bill reflects on accepting physical limitation, resisting a cultural bias that sidelines older people, and learning dependence as a spiritual practice. They discuss transitions as “running with the baton,” the importance of grieving (especially for leaders who officiate funerals), and how accompanying parents in death awakens daily awareness of mortality and the possibility of “giving away” one’s death. Bill names a shift toward smaller spaces, simplicity, and contemplative prayer, while Ruth reframes medical care and strengthening the body as ways to glorify God. 

On Substack this week, Ruth and Bill talk about ageism and ways churches and communities can begin to heal it.

 

Season 29 is titled Becoming Human: With God in Our Bodies. Our goals this season are to confront the dualism between life in the body and life in the spirit, to hear stories of people who experienced their bodies as a place of encounter with God, and to explore the connection between the integration of life in our bodies and our spiritual lives with our leadership. We will be having deep, spiritual conversations with friends of the Transforming Center about their very human experiences in their bodies and how they’ve experienced God in and throughout these experiences. We will explore God in concrete bodily realities like gender, sexuality, race, ability, aging, illness, and death, to name a few.

Mentioned in the Episode: 

Insane for the Light, by Ron Rolheiser

Aging Faithfully: The Holy Invitation of Growing Older, by Alice Fryling

Psychology says the reason older people stop caring isn’t apathy- it’s actually the highest form of self-awareness

 A Confession and Reconciliation for Our Aging Bodies  by Reverend Leanne Clausen-Demonte

 

Music:

Kingdom Come by Aaron Niequist
Yesterday Today Forever from Music in Solitude

 

We’re on Substack! “On the Journey with the Transforming Center” is our home for “reflection, conversation, and connection with our transforming community.”  It includes thoughtful reflections from Ruth Haley Barton and the Transforming Center team, as well as alumni and friends of the Transforming Center, occasional special video teachings and guided practices, and space to interact with our content and respond with how God is working in your life through the posts. This is also where you find all of our podcast patron content! There are free and paid tiers. We’d love for you to join us over on Substack. 

Support the podcast! This season patrons will receive special bonus conversations with each of our guests. Become a paid member of Substack today to receive these practices and so much more!

 

The Transforming Center exists to create space for God to strengthen leaders and transform communities. You are invited to join our next Transforming Community:® A Two-year Spiritual Formation Experience for Leaders.  Delivered in nine quarterly retreats, this practice-based learning opportunity is grounded in the conviction that the best thing you bring to leadership is your own transforming self!

 

*this post contains affiliate links