Beware of any definition of spiritual formation that is too clean and tidy.  Or one that requires you to buy some expensive membership or a workbook that promises to change your life in 5 minutes a day.  Spiritual formation is not a science, nor is it a commodity that can be bought and sold.

With that said, I want to share with you my working description of spiritual formation in the Christian tradition.  It’s a ‘working description’ because, well, this is the best way I’ve found to talk about spiritual formation so far.  Somewhere down the road, we may come up with a better way of describing it – and that’s okay.  Remember, I’m not trying to sell you anything, so I can be honest about the inherently ‘unfinished’ nature of talking about spiritual formation.

So here goes.  In a nutshell, spiritual formation is the process of becoming the people that God is calling us to be.  Pretty straightforward, right?  Now, let’s quickly unpack a few things.

• Spiritual formation is a process because it happens over time.  This part is pretty non-controversial – I think most people who approach spirituality of any sort realize that growth, formation, and transformation take place in time and over time.  But, looking at the structures of most churches, do our lives together – our worship, our Sunday School, our membership drives –really take the concept of a process seriously?  Church membership is one concept where we totally drop the ball.  Membership is a pretty strict binary concept – you’re either in or you’re out; there’s no middle ground, and there’s nowhere else to go.  Switching from one side to the other takes only a moment, and once you’ve made the switch, there’s not much room for a continuing process of change, growth, or formation.
• Spiritual formation is described as becoming because it is both our work and God’s work.  Remember back in grammar school, when you learned the difference between active and passive verbs?  With an active verb, the subject does something, but with a passive verb, something is done to the subject.  For example, consider “Tom bites the dog.” vs. “Tom was bitten by the dog.”  In each sentence, the root verb is the same (to bite), but in the first sentence, Tom (the subject) is doing the biting, but in the second sentence, the biting is being done to Tom.  Now, stick with me for a moment: the verb “to become” is kind of an odd duck – it can’t be understood as either fully active or fully passive.  Other languages would call this a “middle” verb – ‘to become’ implies acting, but it also implies being acted upon.  I think this is significant for the way we talk about spiritual formation because growth, while it requires our participation and effort, is first and foremost the work of the Holy Spirit.  Our “becoming” is a collaborative endeavor between us and God.
• Spiritual formation is about people because it is always communal and contextual, as well as holistic and habitual.  For too long, we’ve smothered spirituality “in our hearts” and have understood it as primarily a personal, interior, private matter.  It’s not.  Read your Bible – from the very beginning, God is intimately interested in forming a people for himself.  God doesn’t seem all that interested in calling individuals for the sake of individuality.  When you think of all the great stories in Scripture of men and women being called by God, there is always a people-purpose behind it.  Prophets are called to prophesy to the people of God.  Abraham was called to be the father of the people of God.  Jesus called his disciples to “go into all the world” to bring others into the people of God.  Now don’t get me wrong, here – spiritual formation can’t be wholly reduced to external relationships.  God is concerned with the entire person – heart, soul, mind and strength.  But the problem is that churches in our day and age have done a pretty good job of slicing and dicing apart our experience of personhood. Christian spiritual formation can’t be done alone, but it can’t be done by merely taking a class about it, either.
• Finally, spiritual formation is about what God is calling us to be because spiritual formation is always oriented towards God’s own purposes and done for God’s own reasons.  One thing I really hate is when people talk about that famous Bible verse found  in John 3.16 and they tell people to ‘put your own name in there’, making it read: “For God so loved Chris that he gave his only Son so that Chris would not perish but have everlasting light”.  Sure, it makes me feel good about myself and reminds me that God loves me, but it’s also flat wrong – God so loved the world that he sent his only son.  God’s love is bigger than me.  It is bigger than my family and bigger than my church.  God’s love is bigger than my denomination or theological position.  God’s love is bigger than the United States – even bigger than Christianity itself.  The reality is that God desires to draw all of creation into a place where bonds of love are stronger than fear, where justice crowds out selfishness, and where abundant life swallows up the grave.  This is the end of spiritual formation, the goal, or the telos, as philosophy might call it.  And yeah – it’s a lot bigger than making you feel more ‘centered’ or boosting your self-esteem so you don’t feel as ashamed of your bad habits.

More to come!  (Actually, if I wanted to sell a spiritual formation program, I think that would be a darn good slogan…)

In the early 1950s, a guy named Bill Bright and his wife Vonette had an idea: they wanted to reach college students with the gospel of Jesus Christ.  So, brimming with optimism, they went to the campus of UCLA and set up shop.  By 1952, they were able to hire 6 staff members.  By 1959, they had expanded to 40 college campuses and a handful of foreign countries.  Today, they’ve expanded to almost 200 countries around the world, and have around 50,000 students actively involved in their organization. 

The idea Bill and Vonette had 60 years ago eventually turned into the organization known as Campus Crusade for Christ – one of the largest, and certainly one of the most influential evangelical Christian groups in the world.  For instance, Campus Crusade was responsible for putting together the Jesus Film, a well-known evangelism tool they claim has been viewed by 6 billion people in over 1,000 local languages and dialects. 

Campus Crusade is also responsible for a little booklet called “The Four Spiritual Laws”.  Even if you haven’t read the book itself, you’re probably familiar with its content.  Basically, it lays out 4 ‘laws’ that govern our spiritual lives –

1.  God loves you and has a plan for your life
2. Humanity is sinful and is separated from God, and cannot know God’s plan.
3. Jesus Christ is God’s only provision for sin.  Only through Jesus can humanity know and experience God’s plan for us.
4. We must individually receive Jesus as Savior in order to know and experience God’s plan for our lives.

Bill Bright formulated this simple 4-step plan as a missionary tool to easily communicate the story of Christianity to as many people as possible.  And it worked – this formulation has influenced an entire generation of Christians and the way they think about their faith.  Ask any Christian today – especially a member of a non-denominational church – how somebody is ‘saved’, and you’ll probably hear some version of the 4 spiritual laws.  Or you’ll hear the shorthand answer: “Invite Jesus to come live in your heart.” 

But for most of Christian history (up until the last several generations, in fact), believers have NOT described salvation as a personal, interior state of mind.  They have not understood spiritual growth as an information download or some simple change in title of status. 

The earliest Christians preached that Jesus is the Savior of the world.  They understood his resurrection as the dawning of a new age – the end of death, disease, and decay.  And they were convinced that God had called them to live as if the kingdom of life and love was already invading our world. 

For them, the gospel message was very public, very real, very physical, and very imminent – we’re the ones who have turned it into an issue of “me” and “Jesus coming into my heart”. 

Now, I do admire Bill Bright’s knack for developing and administering a worldwide movement like Campus Crusade, and I‘m amazed at his passion for evangelism among such a hard-to-reach age-group – but his vision of the Christian life is too thin, too one-dimensional, too static.  And sadly, this shell of a gospel has crept into nearly corner of Christianity and has turned the message about the Kingdom of God into a therapeutic message about “me”.

Don’t you think God is up to something bigger than that?

What is spiritual formation?  It’s a simple question that nobody really knows how to answer.  Or maybe the problem is that we have too many answers –

• Spiritual formation is meditation and inner peace
• Spiritual formation is being in tune with the earth’s energy
• Spiritual formation is about spreading love and kindness to others
• Spiritual formation is about living within harmonious relationships
• Spiritual formation is accomplished through rhythmic disciplines of solitude and community, contemplation and service
• Spiritual formation is New Age humanism at best, a cultic ritual at worst
• Spiritual formation uses a lot of candles and chanting

Let’s be honest – we’ve heard all of these responses before, haven’t we?  And for most Christians, we have a vague sense that none of these are adequate descriptions of spiritual formation, though we’re often not sure why.  At the same time, “spiritual formation” is one of those high and holy phrases, and it sounds like something we’re supposed to be doing – so we keep talking about it, keep reading books about it and keep searching for meaningful ways to wrap our heads around it.  Still, at the end of the day, most of us don’t have any clear understanding of what spiritual formation really means.

So what is it?

Here’s my answer – at least the first part of it.  Spiritual formation is not something you do.  It’s not something you accomplish or possess, either.  In fact, spiritual formation isn’t really about you at all.

Before I go any further, I need to point out that spiritual formation is not a Christian concept; in fact, it’s not even really a religious concept, either.  Spiritual formation is what happens to us every day of our lives, whether we’re Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, atheist, or whatever.  Our everyday choices, relationships, routines and environments constantly shape who we are and who we are becoming.  In other words, spiritual formation is really a process of person-making.  It impacts every area of your life, at every moment of your life.  You can’t escape from it, and you can’t contain it to one small area of your life.  Everyone gets a spiritual formation – it comes down to a question of what kind of formation we get. 

As Christians, we believe God has a special kind of spiritual formation in mind because God wants us to be a special kind of people.  The gospel of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ calls individuals together and forms them into the People of God.  In later posts, I’ll start to describe what this process of calling and forming looks like, but for now I challenge you to consider ‘why’ – Why is God calling and forming His people?  For what purpose?  What is God up to in our world?  Why does God take an interest in what kind of people we become?