Over a year ago, I set out to propose a seminar for the Experiencing Life With God conference that would happen in May of 2018 on the campus of Westmont College. The conference was organized in honor of the 30th and 25th anniversaries of Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline and Dallas Willard’s Spirit of the Disciplines. The hope of the conference was to bring together the people and ideas that will inform the future of the spiritual formation movement.
Gary Moon of the Dallas Willard Center at Westmont was the lead organizer of the conference. We have become friends through my connection to Dallas’ life and legacy at the University of Southern California. Gary and I were talking about the upcoming conference at a point where speakers had already been confirmed and contracted. I lamented the fact that there were no InterVarsity leaders on the conference speaker lineup. I pointed Gary to Anna Lee-Winans, our newly minted Director of Discipleship, but it became clear that it was too late to invite someone from InterVarsity’s “top brass” to be a main speaker.
Gary heard my laments and invited me to submit a proposal for a seminar at the conference in what would become a conference track on engaging in secular contexts. The proposal would find its final form in a collaborative study and co-presentation that David Williams and I entitled “Rites (and Wrongs) of Passage: The Formation of Emerging Adults in Secular Colleges and Universities.”
For me, collaboration changed everything. If I had set out on my own, without David, the experience would have been more fraught and less fruitful. What we forged instead was a collaboration that has deeply formed me and is opening up a future of deep study.
During this collaborative process David and I would get to engage Anna Lee-Winans and hear what the Lord has placed on her heart for this next stage in InterVarsity’s stewarding of discipleship in our movement. David would also find out that he had been accepted to Oxford to continue his studies on the secular university. And, I would find myself in conversations with Greg Jao that would lead to my new role as InterVarsity’s first Director of University Partnerships.
All of this has led to a sense that God is multiplying and blessing our efforts to ask good and hard questions about the emerging adults and universities we desire to see transformed.
We invite you to take a look at our presentation and join us in exploring these questions. It may have taken (way) more work for David and I to combine our interests and research, but we believe that the outcome and the process were infinitely richer as a result of the effort. We also know that you, our colleagues, have much to add. So please, add your comments on Google Slides, or email me at joe.thackwell@intervarsity.org.
It will be hard to exhaust our thoughts about the intersections of emerging adulthood, spiritual formation and the secular university!
Photo by Ian Schneider on Unsplash
