This experience-centred course introduces students to practices and perspectives for growing in attentiveness to God’s presence in order to be continually formed into Christlikeness by the Holy Spirit. The course helps cultivate spiritual habits that can sustain students in their ministries within and beyond local congregations. Both individual and communal spiritual formation will be explored.

During the course, students will be offered guided experiences of classical spiritual practices, augmented by lectures and by personal and biblical-theological reflection.

Students will be introduced to the topic of spiritual formation, to spiritual writers outside the students’ own Christian traditions, and to a variety of ways of praying in common and in solitude. Students will also become aware of their own spiritual experiences by reflecting on their present attentiveness to God and by considering the unique features of who they are. Lectures and group discussions (face-to-face and/or in written forums) will give attention both to spiritual practices (e.g., solitude, silence, lectio divina, examen, prayers of thanking and asking, spiritual direction, journaling, fasting) and to theological considerations (e.g., God’s presence, appropriating practices from other Christian traditions, the relationship of prayer and action, the interaction between prayer and personality, prayer as listening, paying attention to one’s own person, the importance of desire, individual and communal formation, spiritual formation of ministering persons).