At JourneyMates, we affirm the historic Christian Faith as it has been understood and passed down for centuries. We submit to the divinely inspired and authoritative Holy Scriptures. We agree with the teaching of the church through the ages, that the best summary of Scripture’s truth is found in the ancient creeds.
A summary of our Statement of Faith can be found here.
As JourneyMates, we nurture silence and solitude. We trust God’s presence and work in our individual and corporate lives. We honor each other’s unique experiences with God and claim differences among us as invitations to celebrate and grow. We are willing to wait, willing to risk, and willing to trust God in the midst of all that is unfinished in our lives with Christ.
As JourneyMates, we honor our commitment to gather together, reflect individually and with each other, join each other in prayer, and pray for other JourneyMates between gatherings. Most of all, we nurture our own relationships with God.
Our time together in JourneyMates Ministries is matured and strengthened by our commitment to the practices of the Three Ways of Being and the Four Movements of the Soul.
Three Ways of Being shape our life in God as JourneyMates:
These Three Ways of Being shape our souls and they affect the Movements of the Soul that are a part of all our lives. Each one of us (if we are paying attention) notices that our lives are oriented (or disoriented) in four different directions. We move toward (or away from) our relationship with God, with our own souls, with those we are close to, and with the larger world.
In JourneyMates we call these orientations the Four Movements of theSoul. We long to become more Christ-like in who we are and what we do as we move
Lectio Divina
In JourneyMates we seek to listen to God through meditation of Scripture. For centuries, most of the people of God did not have their own copy of the Scriptures. The Word of God was listened to, sung, prayed, and memorized, rather than read. After the invention of the printing press, lay people began to acquire their own copies of the Bible. For the most part, however, God’s people over time have been informed and formed by their prayerful, attentive listening to the spoken and sung Word of God. This practice of prayerful listening is called Lectio Divina — literally, a sacred or divine reading.
Ignatian Contemplation
Ignatian Contemplation is another method of listening to the Scriptures. In Ignatian Contemplation, we employ our imagination and our senses to enter into the text before us. It is similar to Lectio and we often use this method of connecting with God’s Word in our JourneyMates gatherings. Ignatius of Loyola developed this particular practice of listening to the Scriptures over 500 years ago. It is a way of being with God, of listening for God, that works well throughout the Scriptures, but is particularly fruitful as we encounter narrative passages in the Old and New Testament.
Examen Of Conscience
Examen of Conscience is also a gift to God’s people from Ignatius of Loyola, the 16th-century monk who founded the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits). Ignatius believed that God gave him this method of reflecting on times in his life as a way of discerning God’s presence, and as a way of discerning the way God was calling him to love and serve the world. In our own lives, Examen is a most helpful practice. It slows us down to pay attention to the life we have been living. As we grow in discerning God’s presence, we begin to sense what draws us toward living a life of following Jesus and how to identify that which deadens our hearts and draws us away from God.
*JourneyMates Ministries utilize many other classic and contemporary spiritual disciplines as tools for transformation.
