At a recent Wednesday evening discussion I presented a model of healthy spirituality. My goal was to help us grapple with the association between personal faith and life in a faithful covenant community.

Rather than catalog short-comings in theological understanding, or challenge people on moral or political issues of the day, I prefer to hold up spiritual health. I have found over the years that most people are capable of working out the details of their personal faith from their own experience provided they are spiritually healthy.

My model is based on two basic aspects of spirituality. The first (represented by the horizontal axis) is a polarity between the personal and communal. Biblical faith always calls an individual to respond to God in the context of a community. Genuine faith is always expressed in relationship with others.

From the Covenant-making ceremony at Mt. Sinai under the leadership of Moses, to the renewing of the Covenant at Mt. Calvary in the crucifixion of Jesus, faith connects us to others in relationships of mutual support. Personal faith is all about the creating of community. Without covenant community faith does not involve the covenant-making God of Abraham. God is presented in Scripture as a mediator of personal relations.

The second part of the model (the vertical axis) involves a polarity between the physical and the imaginative. The Lord created humanity with physical constraints. Stub your toe. Enough said.

Bodies must be fed and watered. Bodies cannot be in two places at once; they move through space one step at a time. Too much cold, they freeze. To much heat, they dry up.

But we are not merely physical. The Lord endowed humanity with minds that have no limits. We can imagine fantasy worlds where the laws of physics do not apply. We can imagine overcoming circumstances and conditions that, in the real world, would stop us dead in our tracks. We can construct possible futures, deny present realities, forget the past, or hang on to it in a death-grip of resentment. All this, the work of the imagination.

Put these two polarities together and they result in a model of healthy spirituality having four quadrants.

• The imaginative/personal is the quadrant of Prayer. The Lord speaks to us in our dreams.
• The imaginative/communal is the quadrant of Worship. Symbols and ritual are imaginative constructs people share and interact with together.
• The physical/personal is the quadrant of Spiritual Gift. An individual contributes meaningful work out of the blessing of talent and ability unique to the individual.
• The physical/communal is the quadrant of Industry. An individual contributes meaningful work, but only when joined with others does the work take on world-changing significance.

Healthy spirituality involves the personal and communal; it involves the physical and the imaginative. And here is the point: I cannot be spiritually healthy if my community is not. I nurture my personal faith so that I can be available to my covenant community to keep it spiritual healthy. This in turn results in my spiritual health.

One does not exist without the other. Never has. Never will. The physical and the imaginative, the personal and the communal are a spiritual unity. This is what makes discussion of the future of our covenant community so important. This is what makes all the talk of budgets, and finances, and mortgages and program costs spiritual.

If we (the covenant community) are not healthy spiritually, then I (the individual) cannot be. And neither can you.