Ep 11: The Formation Conundrum (Are We Really Being Discipled in Church?)

As we explore ideas and deep discipleship, what role does the local church play in our spiritual formation?  Is it central to it, directing it, a part of it, or not related to it at all? We compare the average local church experience to other well-known formative experiences – and the conclusions we draw may be surprising.

Today’s episode relies heavily on the Formation Evaluation Worksheet.  You can find it on the Resources tab at www.soilandroots.org.

TRANSCRIPT

Episode 11: The Formation Conundrum

Welcome to the Soil and Roots podcast: digging beneath the surface to uncover the hidden ideas that shape and define us. I’m Brian Fisher.

This is Episode 11: The Formation Conundrum

Today, we’re going to start exploring what role the local church plays in our spiritual formation – our discipleship.  If we are experiencing a Great Omission, a lack of genuine disciple-making, how does the local church fit into this scenario? If the purpose of discipleship is character formation, that our hearts take on more and more of Jesus’ characteristics, is this the role of the current modern church?  Is this how the church perceives its role?

Does the institution of the church view itself as a character-forming institution? Or does it view itself as primarily instructional? Or something else?

We’ve noted that the church is often adept at guiding us into the first three stages of discipleship: Being introduced to God, learning about Him, and moving into a life of productive service.  But the modern church isn’t normally equipped or ready to guide us into the later stages of our formation: the journey inward, the journey outward, and a life of love.  If we’re going to journey together into deep discipleship, we need to perform a fair assessment of the state of the modern church.

And we have a new resource for you today.  It’s called the Formation Evaluation Worksheet and you can find it on the Resources Tab at soilandroots.org.  Yes, I know if we turn the phrase “Formation Evaluation Worksheet” into an acronym, it spells FEW.  As I’ve already mentioned, I’m not much of a marketing person.

Today’s episode is a little different in that we’re going to move through the worksheet together. So, if you’re in a car or unable to print off the visual aid, you may want to come back and listen to this when you’re able to sit down with pen and paper.  It isn’t essential, but the episode will make more sense if you can interact with the handout.

Let’s dig in.

The Five Key Elements

Back in Episode 7, we introduced the Five Key Elements of Spiritual Formation: time, habit, community, intimacy, and instruction.  These are necessary components for any formative process, whether we’re talking about educational formation, character formation, skill formation, and so on.

The most formative time in our lives is our early childhood, let’s say birth through eight years old.  Many of the ideas in our hearts, especially our Core Ideas, are shaped by our families of origin and our early life experiences.   It’s a critical period with a small group of people, and our hearts are obviously brand new at that age, so the formation is rapid and intense.

What other periods of life are highly formative?  Most people would say that a college or university experience is highly formative.  Sometimes that’s good, and sometimes it’s not.  Maybe you were in the military. That’s a highly formative environment.  Veterans often share how they went into the military as one person and came out another. That’s a great way to describe intentional formation.

The experience of falling in love and being married is highly formative – hopefully for the better!  You’ve probably heard these wonderful stories of older couples who grow to act and even look like each other! It’s a great picture of how our hearts grow to look like the heart of Jesus over time.

Lots of experiences are formative. In fact, we are always in a state of being formed, all day, every day.

And our formation will either bend us toward light or toward darkness.  A colony of cultists is a formative experience (it embodies all five elements), but it bends us towards darkness.  If you grew up in a difficult home, say with alcoholic parents, your formation may well have been difficult and damaging, even though it involved all five elements.

The key point is that positive spiritual formation must include all five elements! Time, habit, community, intimacy, and instruction. If we miss any of the elements, our formation will be stunted or incomplete.  We’ll become malformed.

Formation Comparison

Let’s compare these common formation environments:  Early childhood, college, the military, and marriage.

What are some common characteristics of these formative experiences? No surprises here, and the answers are some of the column headings on your worksheet: Intensive time, engaged in specifically designed habits, in intentionally vulnerable relationships, immersed in a community focused on a specific purpose, with repetitious and increasingly complex instruction.  Let me say that again:

Intensive time, engaged in specifically designed habits, in intentionally vulnerable relationships, immersed in a community gathered around a specific purpose, with repetitious and increasingly complex instruction. 

College

Let’s look at college.  Does college require a lot of time?  Sure. If we live on campus, we give it all of our time. If we commute, our classes, study groups, and activities still take up substantial time.   Colleges and universities intuitively know that time is crucial to molding a high school senior into a college graduate.

How about specifically designed habits?  To be successful in college, a person needs to develop certain habits. Not only academic habits like studying, reading, writing, and discussing material with other students, but also self-managing habits such as sleeping, eating, and doing the laundry. Many students develop more mature habits in relationships, including friendships, mentorships, and professional relationships in internships or part-time jobs.

Intentionally vulnerable relationships.  It’s hard to go through college as a robot.  Most of us develop great friendships, perhaps a romantic relationship or two. And if we go to a smaller university, we may form wonderful relationships with professors or teaching assistants.  And to build these relationships, we need to be appropriately vulnerable and transparent with others. That’s a key component of building trust.

Immersed with a community gathered around a specific purpose. Obviously, this is a foundational bedrock of any college or university.  The physical environment itself encourages a community that fosters personal and educational development.  We live together in dorms or apartments.  There are lots of communal study spaces and gathering spots.  We are “embedded” and “immersed” in the sense that we typically live with the community to enhance our formation.

Repetitious and increasingly complex instruction. In a proper formative environment, we hear foundational principles repeatedly, though the educational environment must also move us forward.  We press into more complex, more difficult topics and ideas so that we grow intellectually and spiritually. This progression is built into the college experience.  Junior and Senior year courses typically build on the more foundational underclassman classes. Graduate work expands on undergraduate work.

If we look at all four of these formation examples, we see a theme developing. Early childhood, college, military, and marriage, all have the Five Key Elements in common and in intense degrees.

Now you might look at a marriage and say, “Wait a minute.”  How does instruction fit into a marriage?  A husband and wife hopefully don’t sit and lecture each other about themselves or the relationship.

But a healthy marriage should be highly instructive.  You intentionally share things about each other, yourself, God, and life by listening to and observing your spouse, and by experiencing them.  If your marriage is healthy, you’ve discovered there’s no end to the depth and wonder of your spouse, and so you’re constantly learning deeper things about each other.  Instruction in a marriage doesn’t look like it does in college, but we educate each other nonetheless.

An Interactive Episode

Alright, if you have the Formation Evaluation Worksheet in front of you, let’s begin to fill it in.

On the left-hand side, I’ve listed the four formative experiences we just talked about.  I’ll talk about the fifth and sixth rows in a moment.

At the top of the sheet, you’ll see the Five Key Elements of Formation.   On the right-hand side, you’ll see two more columns: “Who directs the formation?” And “Is there a clear vision, path, and context?”  We’ll come back to those right-hand columns in a minute.

Let’s use a scale of 1 to 10 to fill in each block in the top five rows leading up to the break. There are twenty-five total blocks to fill in.

A “1” means the key element is not necessary for positive formation.  A “10” means the element is very necessary for formation.

So, for example, if you think time is moderately necessary in a marriage for the hearts of the husband and wife to be formed in a positive direction, you’ll write a 4 or a 5 in that blank.

It doesn’t matter if you have personally experienced all of these. Obviously, all of us have experienced early childhood, but you may or may not be married and you may or may not have been to college or been in the military. Doesn’t matter; just fill in the form based on what you know. These are all commonly understood experiences.

The fifth row is labeled “New Testament Church.”  Based on what you know about the Gospels, the book of Acts, and the other letters of the New Testament, how would you rate each of the Five Key Elements of Formation in relation to the early church?

You can go back to Episode 7 if you want a little perspective. We talked about how Jesus modeled each of the elements of formation for His disciples.  Based on what you know about the culture at the time of Christ, and based on what we can glean from the New Testament, how essential were time, habits, transparent relationships, community, and instruction to the formation of the early church?

How much time did early disciples spend with Jesus or, in the book of Acts, with an apostle or members of their communities?

How important were habits to the early church?  Acts 2 talks about teaching, fellowship, eating, prayer, giving, sharing, and so forth.

Was transparency important to Jesus and the early church builders?  Did they model intimate relationships, and did they work to cultivate them among their followers?  How important was it to build trust?

How essential was community to the early church? Did they purposefully work to strengthen the Christian community in their areas?

And instruction. How vital was instruction to the early church? How important was it for followers of Jesus to “graduate” from fundamentals to the deeper things of the faith?

Take a moment to write a number from 1-10 in each of the 25 boxes on the upper left part of the worksheet. Feel free to pause me while you fill them in.

The columns on the right are straightforward.  Who is primarily responsible for directing and guiding the various formative experiences?  I’ll give you the answer to the first row.  The person or institution primarily responsible for directing early childhood formation is the parents or guardians of the child.  So, you can just write “parents” in that box.

Take a moment to fill in your answer for the other four rows.  We’ll tackle the sixth row in a moment.

The last column is a “yes” or “no” answer.  In each of these formative experiences, how clear is the vision, path, and context for the formation? Does the person being formed have a clear vision of where they’re heading, a clear path to follow, and a sense of where they are on their journey right now?

Using the military as an example, how clear is the military on what a fully formed soldier should look like?  Do they set clear expectations for recruits about who they’ll be after they have been through boot camp and a few years of military formation? Is there a clear path to get from point A to point B?  Does the military know what steps need to happen for a civilian to be formed into an effective soldier? Can a member of the military determine where they are in the formation process?  Can they easily tell what they’ve accomplished and what steps lie ahead?

Take a moment and put a “yes” or “no” in that column for the first five rows. Again, just pause me if you need some time.

Your Local Church

The last row is labeled “My local church experience.”  This row works differently because it’s based on your own personal relationship with your local church.  Feel free to think about this, considering your church experiences over time or just your current congregation if you’re part of one.  If you aren’t currently part of a local church, just fill in your answers based on your general knowledge.

Your church experience includes things like your weekend worship service, small group, church-led prayer events, Sunday school, church volunteer opportunities, and the like.

-On a scale of 1 to 10, how much time does your church offer to you or require of you? If you are involved with your church every day in some way (not as an employee), you would probably put an 8 or 9 in that box.  If you go to church once a week and aren’t engaged in any other church activities, you might put a 1 or 2.

-How influential is your church on your habits?  This includes your typical Christian habits such as corporate worship, Bible reading, study, and prayer.  But it also means life-giving habits that positively impact your relationship with God, your family and friends, yourself, and your role in culture.  Has your church experience resulted in changes to your habits related to your spouse or your kids?  Or how you spend your time and money? Has your church helped you develop habits to explore your own story, your hidden ideas, and how your story impacts those around you?

-Do you have appropriately intimate, vulnerable, transparent relationships at your church?  Do you have a close relationship with your pastor?  Or with a mature Christian who is actively mentoring you?  Do you “do life” with people from your church, or do you see folks mostly at Sunday service or at a small group once a week or so?  Are you building trust with people at church?

-Immersive community. Compared to your work community, your family, or communities formed around your hobbies or interests, how would you rank your church community as it relates to your heart formation?  Does your church community remind you of other formative communities like a college setting or a military experience?

–Instruction. Does your church provide you with regular instruction that is intentionally going deeper and more complex over time?  Can you look back at your church experience and see how you are growing in your formation, knowing that your church continually pushes you forward into new areas while reinforcing fundamentals in a methodical, intentional manner?

Take a moment and fill in your rankings from 1 to 10 in each of those boxes in the sixth row.  Push pause if you need some time.

Lastly, let’s look at the last two questions related to who personally guides your spiritual formation and whether you have a clear picture of your journey.

Who directs your discipleship?  What person or institution is deeply engaged with your life, your story, and your spiritual journey to help guide you to become more like Jesus?  Your answer may not be directly related to your church and that’s ok.  Maybe it’s a mentor or mature friend who doesn’t go to your church.

Your answer may be “myself.”  Our discipleship today tends to be self-directed.

Perhaps you’ve never really thought about it.  There isn’t a person or group in your life who is intentionally walking with you to help you form into the image of Jesus, and you can honestly say that you aren’t directing yourself.  So, your answer will be “no one” and that’s okay.

Lastly, has whoever directs your spiritual formation provided you with a clear vision, path, and context for your spiritual journey?  Can you tell whether you’re more like Jesus now than a few years ago, and do you know where you’re headed in the future? If you have a clear understanding of your spiritual formation journey, answer yes. If not, answer no.

Okay, great job!  All the spaces should be filled in and you have completed your Formation Evaluation Worksheet, your FEW.

The Typical Answers

I’ve worked through this handout in various small groups and classes, so I’ll share what I normally see.

In general, the numbers in the first five rows end up being higher than the numbers in the last row.  In many cases, the answers up top are 8 or higher. Many of the rankings related to our modern church experience are 4 or lower. Usually, there is a pretty big discrepancy between the top 5 rows and the bottom row.

Meaning, most people recognize the Five Key Elements of Formation are very present in early childhood, college, the military, marriage, and the early church compared to what most of us experience in a church setting today.

In terms of who directs or guides our formation, the answers are pretty straightforward.

Parents direct the child’s formation, college professors or mentors direct the student’s formation in a university setting, the branch of the military or certain officers direct the recruit’s formation.

In terms of the New Testament, Jesus directed the discipleship of His followers, and then the apostles or church elders directed the formation of Christians in local areas.

In terms of who guides or directs our spiritual formation today, most adults answer “me” or “no one.”  A few people have a mentor or an older, more mature Christian they “do life” with, and that’s awesome.

Most people answer “no” to the question about clarity, saying they don’t have a clear vision, path, or context for their discipleship.  They really don’t know if they are being more formed into the image of Jesus or not.

So, we need to dig into this disconnection.  Let’s talk about row 6 and why most of us fill out the worksheet the way we do.

Our Personal Experience

Intensive Time. Compared to early childhood, college, the military, and the New Testament church, we typically spend a fraction of the time with our church community compared to other groups.  There are lots of reasons why, but here are two big ones:

1. Many churches are event-centered rather than relationship-centered.  All the other communities on our worksheets are designed to comprehensively form a person around a purpose, including very intentional relationships. But the modern church isn’t typically designed to do that.  Many churches are structured around weekly services, retreats, and classes, rather than “doing life” together for the purpose of forming a person.  We’ve talked about this before – there is a big difference between sharing information and spiritual formation.

2. The typical American doesn’t have the bandwidth to engage with their church communities for long periods of time.  The last 150 years or so have brought massive shifts to where and how we live.  We aren’t farmers or factory workers who spend our entire lives with our families in small communities.  We are a transient society that is constantly shifting locations, jobs, and priorities.  The idea of “doing life” with our church community is a foreign concept for many of us – we just don’t have the time.

Specifically designed habits.   Modern American church life promotes certain spiritual formation habits really well. This is a strength of the local church.  Corporate worship, devotions, prayer, tithing, the sacraments of baptism and communion, volunteering, and maybe fasting.  A good church naturally cultivates habits that train our hearts towards certain good ideas.

But the church struggles to educate and successfully instill habits comprehensively (across all four relationships), including the challenges we talked about in the last episode: healthy habits for marriage, and healthy habits related to identity, sexuality, value, and purpose.  Many churches don’t see this as their role.   Most of our church habits focus on our relationship with God, but far fewer focus on our relationships with others, ourselves, and our role as rulers of creation.

Intentionally vulnerable relationships. Unfortunately, being transparent and vulnerable is not generally a hallmark of the American church. This is true at both the institutional and individual levels.

In many churches, there is a whole lot of theater going on, and it isn’t coming from the stage.  We’ve been trained to dress a certain way, act a certain way, and present an image of ourselves that conforms to what we think “church life” expects.  If we were to come as we really are – broken, wounded people with internal struggles and anxieties- we fear we would be judged and kicked out.  And in some cases, that’s exactly what happens.

Hopefully, we have developed some wonderful, long-term friendships at church, and there is a lot of value and spiritual formation that occurs as a result.  But we are an image-driven, celebrity-loving culture, and that culture has certainly seeped into the church.

Also, you’ve probably discovered that these Five Key Elements of Spiritual Formation are intertwined.  Transparent, intimate relationships require time, habit, and instruction, hopefully in a healthy community.  It’s hard to develop intentional relationships designed to spiritually form us with people we see once a week for an hour or two.

Immersed in a community. Most of us of working age spend far more time with our work relationships than we do with our church relationships.   Our church community may be very important to us, and it should be.  However, there is a critical difference between the modern church and the other communities listed on our worksheet.  In the top five rows, those communities are either living together or are geographically very near one another and doing life together.

We are not typically embedded or immersed in our church community.  We are more embedded with our families and our work relationships.

New Testament churches weren’t institutions per se, and they didn’t meet in buildings.  They were groups of families and friends who in many cases, lived together, or were physically close to one another. They met in their homes. People didn’t travel all that far from their homes, and a close community was basically an unconscious fact of life.

Robert Coleman is the author of a famous book called “The Master Plan of Evangelism.” He wrote a companion book, “The Master Plan of Discipleship,” an exposition of the book of Acts.

He writes, “The apostolic church did not erect colleges or theological seminaries, or even set up educational seminars.  They had instruction in the tenets of the Christian faith and life, but not in formal classes or institutional programs.  To mold the life of their members, they simply got learners and teachers together in natural settings, where they lived and worked every day.”[1]

In addition, the concept of a city square, or a place where people intentionally gather to discuss and debate ideas, was common in the New Testament.  If someone was Jewish, it was probably a synagogue.  If someone was a Gentile, it may have been in a city square or another location designed for discourse and debate.  The book of Acts records how often Paul went to such places to present his case, reason with people, and debate. Paul visited synagogues and then places such as Mars Hill in Athens.

Europe still retains a sense of this “public meeting space” in its cafes.  Many European cultures provide far more time and space for meals and drinks than America, and it’s culturally accepted to discuss the news of the day, politics, religion, and other social matters in these group settings.

Lastly, let’s talk about Repetitious and Increasingly Complex Instruction in the context of the modern church.

I think we agree that the modern church focuses on instruction, teaching, and preaching. It’s a hallmark of Protestantism.  Though I think we can raise some questions about whether that education is intentionally and carefully designed to move us forward in our spiritual formation.

If we went to Sunday school, we probably experienced a progression of instruction as we grew up.  We learned more mature biblical material in sixth grade than we did in kindergarten. If you went to seminary, you certainly experienced a progression as you moved through your courses.

But do our churches specifically plan instruction that repeats the fundamentals while intentionally pushing and challenging us to explore deeper ideas? Is our church’s instruction designed to progressively form us?

Maybe your experience has been different, but progressive instruction has not been the norm for me.  Some churches offer disparate teaching on many topics, unconsciously assuming we are self-directing our own discipleship.  We pick and choose our services, small groups, books, Bible studies, and podcasts.  That’s a great freedom, but as I mentioned before, we aren’t very good at directing our own spiritual formation. We aren’t designed to do that.

Years ago, we went to a church where the senior pastor only preached the Gospel of Salvation on Sunday mornings.  So, we heard the same variation of the same sermon week after week after week.  His philosophy was that he needed to “reach the lost” on Sunday mornings, and further Christian instruction had to come through Sunday schools or small groups. This is a common philosophy among some pastors and denominations.  Sunday morning sermons are for their brand of evangelism only.

The challenge was that fewer than 100% of people who came on Sunday mornings were involved in any form of Sunday school or small-group study. So, there were many people whose only Christian instruction was the Gospel of Salvation (over and over again).

So how did the church provide progressively deepening instruction if so many people only heard one message?  The answer is they didn’t. The church offered a few topical studies, but they weren’t designed to move someone forward in their spiritual formation.  It was more of an ala carte menu of options.  That’s because they weren’t focused on making disciples. They were focused on making converts.

Providing a progressively deepening education for congregations is a big challenge for churches.  How do they provide more mature instruction if people are coming and going, attending a worship service but not a small group, or if people aren’t willing to commit time to deeper study? The answer is they can’t.  So, they provide options in the hopes that people want to and are capable of directing their own discipleship.

A F.E.W. Conclusions

So, what can we conclude by reviewing our Formation Evaluation Worksheet?

Can the modern local church play the role of the primary disciple-maker? Is the local church directing and guiding the spiritual formation of each of its individual members?  Is it the center of our culture of spiritual formation, of our character formation?  Are our churches set up to guide us into deep discipleship?

In most cases, the honest answer is no.  There are too many gaps between the modern church and the other five formative experiences we’ve discussed. Local churches can create character-forming cultures if they wish, but this isn’t the norm.

The formative experiences on the top of your worksheet are highly intentional and highly immersive. Our formation in all these examples happens because we live a life of formation. Our time, habits, relationships, community, and instruction are organized around the specific goal of formation.  In other words, our lives are ordered around our formation.

A baby’s life is organized around the purpose of growing into a mature person.  A college student’s life is organized around becoming a successful graduate. Not that all of us view marriage this way, but a Christian marriage should be organized around the goal of becoming one.  And the early Christian’s life was organized around becoming like Jesus.  These are all immersive, integrated, comprehensive approaches to formation.

Some of you may be thinking, “Hold on.  These are not all fair comparisons.  Early childhood, college, and the military are special experiences designed to produce a particular type of formation in a certain amount of time.”

Fair point.  For those of us who aren’t children, aren’t in college, and aren’t in the military, American life doesn’t usually afford us the time, community, or relationships to do what we are talking about here.  You may be looking at the comparisons between the early church and the modern church and raising an eyebrow.  We don’t live with our extended families; we don’t stay in one place for years on end.  Most of us don’t work in family or community businesses, and the people we go to church with live and work in entirely different places.

Heck, the average lifespan in the time of the early church was something like thirty years.  We are living two to three times longer.  That’s great, but it also brings a host of realities the early church couldn’t even contemplate.

You may be thinking that comparing New Testament life with American life is an “apples to oranges” comparison.  The societies are very, very different.   You look at the Five Key Elements and wonder if they can even fit into the current pace, goals, and activity of American life.

Well, they don’t fit into the current American lifestyle.  That’s the point I’m making.

Though New Testament society is certainly different from modern society, the Key Elements of Formation are not.  Spiritual formation is spiritual formation regardless of the time and place in history.

For the past 150 years or so, the typical Western lifestyle has steadily moved in a direction that is at odds with the comprehensive, immersive nature of any intentional formation, and certainly of biblical discipleship.

Thus, we have a Formation Conundrum.

If we agree that these five elements are vital to our heart formation, but we also agree that the average American lifestyle conflicts with them, one of them has to give.  And many Christians and many churches aren’t conscious of this conflict.

And if the local church (as it currently functions) is unable to direct our formation, and we aren’t directing our own formation or we aren’t any good at it, who is guiding us to be more and more like Jesus in the way in which our hearts need to be guided?

We’re going to take another look at the modern church in the next episode as we continue to explore our spiritual formation, our journey into deep discipleship, and explore the hidden ideas in our hearts.  There’s no shortage of Christian institutions in our culture.  And, as you might have guessed, you and I have many unconscious, hidden assumptions about these institutions in our hearts that shape how we live and operate in the world.  Let’s go exploring!

Thanks for listening! If you like the podcast, share the podcast! For more information, check out soilandroots.org and you may email us at fish@soilandroots.org.  We’ll see you next time.

 

[1] Coleman, R. E. (1998). The Master Plan of Discipleship (pp. 63-64). Revell.