Welcome to The Spiritual Formation Alliance Network

Facilitating collaboration among Christian ministry leaders worldwide who are committed to biblically defined and Holy Spirit energized spiritual formation within and through their ministries.

A Thought from C.S. Lewis

“In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you…the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name.

“Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that settled the matter. The books or music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing…For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.

“…almost all our modern philosophies have been devised to convince us that the good of man is to be found on this earth… They begin by trying to persuade you that earth can be made into heaven, thus giving a sop to your sense of exile in earth as it is… Do what they will, then, we remain conscious of a desire which no natural happiness will satisfy.”

The Weight of Glory. The MacMillian Co., 1949. Pp 4-6.