The Formation Gap
We are now beginning to drift from exploring the first Primary Problem (the Discipleship Dilemma) into the second (the Formation Gap).
According to theologian Dallas Willard (and several others), we live in an age best described as “The Great Omission.” Modern Christianity struggles to form people of genuine relational and spiritual depth. This condition can be solved, though it suggests we intentionally come together to address it and the three significant challenges that exacerbate it.
We’ve spent the last few months wrestling with the first Primary Problem. To become more like Jesus, we must know Him and ourselves better. However, modern Christianity (unlike most previous eras) provides little help or encouragement on the journey of self-awareness and knowledge unless we find ourselves in an addiction recovery program or counseling. Depending on our communities and cultures, we may assume self-knowledge is selfish or dangerous.
But we don’t take the inward journey to stay there—a deep person eventually becomes delightfully focused and intent on others. Though the idea of “self-forgetfulness” is good and admirable, the path to it generally involves mining our hearts first.
The second challenge is that modern Christianity suffers from reduced ideas of what it means to be human. These flawed assumptions have resulted in a harmful lack of intentionally spiritually formative communities. Thus, we may exist in a “Formation Gap.” We don’t have access to safe, vulnerable, long-term, small communities designed to shape us more holistically like Jesus.
This may be a surprising and disagreeable conclusion, depending on your location and culture. The southern United States has a church building on virtually every corner. How can we be missing spiritually formative communities?
I will take my time making the case for the Formation Gap, and I hope you’ll indulge me. I tackle this problem with some fear and trembling because I’m going to question some things we consider sacred and take for granted in modern Christianity.
I’m attempting to help us reframe how we look at and experience Jesus, others, ourselves, and the world—not because God hasn’t provided a grand picture of our reality, but because the last few hundred years of Western philosophy and thought haven’t been entirely helpful. We must carefully examine Western ideas about how a person is formed and compare them to what God has revealed about our humanity and hearts, both in His Word and in creation.
Church Hurt
Let’s start with an illustration. Over the past few months, I’ve been contacted by a few families who have been deeply wounded by their (former) local churches. Their stories share commonalities: narcissistic teachers, subtle but powerful legalism, impotent and naive governing boards, manipulation, gaslighting, and bullying.
By some accounts, narcissism is a plague on the modern church. Predatory personalities seek out faith communities because people following Jesus are supposed to be loving, trusting, and open to relationships – perfect targets for tragically and pathologically insecure leaders.
Clinical psychologist Jim Wilder states, “Virtually all Christians will experience a narcissistic pastor during their lifetime.” Wilder concluded that because of the pervasiveness of narcissistic leaders in pastoral ministry, Christian churches are, to a significant extent, “unable to recognize personality disorders and may even find these disorders desirable in leaders.”
Why would a church find narcissistic tendencies desirable? And why would a governing board protect and defend such a narcissist against an often staggering amount of evidence suggesting the leader is spiritually abusing people in the church?
I can only speak from my own experiences dealing with narcissists in Christian leadership roles and those who have kindly shared their stories of abuse with me. Christian organizations intentionally attract and keep narcissistic leaders for two primary reasons: to maintain or grow their organizational and financial status and/or because the leaders are often compelling biblical teachers.
Uh-Oh.
In fact, in the West, we prize a speaker’s ability to communicate Biblical truth above almost all else (including, it appears, personal character). Just consider how we usually evaluate a church: the quality of the sermon and perhaps the caliber of the music. The most common question after a service (at least a Protestant one) is, “What did you think of the message?” If we hear a sermon that makes us think, slightly provokes us, makes us feel good, or challenges us, it’s been a “successful” weekend event.
If we assume the point of attending church is to learn more…it’s mission accomplished.
Pastoral search committees evaluate candidates’ doctrinal alignment and sermon effectiveness. The modern Protestant church structure and service are usually oriented around the weekend message. Hymns and worship songs are selected based on the topic and communicated via a sign outside the church each week and in online advertisements.
We place great importance on Biblical instruction. Many of our church cultures revolve around it.
At the risk of becoming suddenly and wildly unpopular, I’m suggesting that, though biblical instruction is good and necessary for spiritual formation, modern Christianity drastically overemphasizes and overvalues it and rejects and neglects other essential elements to our journey to become more like Jesus. Modern churches often function from the assumption that formation and information are the same thing, which they are most certainly not.
One primary reason modern Christianity values instruction while ignoring other necessary formative elements is that we live in a set of ideas that reduces our humanity. We live in a set of assumptions that fails to grasp the wonder and complexity of the human person.
Cartesian Confusion
Descartes is famous for wrestling with the claim, “I think, therefore I am.” Without getting too philosophical, he and other important thinkers proposed theories that drove the Enlightenment, which has led much of the Western world to operate on a set of ideas deeply valuing information, reason, and provability. If something can’t be proven, it doesn’t exist. Education is the most vital component of a child’s character formation. Science is the only field we can rely on because something is worthless if it can’t be tested and validated.
If you look carefully, you’ll find these ideas littered throughout all seven mountains of culture (education, family, church, government, media, the arts, and business). We live in the “Information Age.” The first thing to get cut from a school district’s budget is the arts (because reading, writing, and arithmetic carry much greater weight). Our schools and seminaries aim to provide a first-rate education and teach us to think critically (versus to form us to love like Jesus).
But, as a pastor friend once remarked, we aren’t “brains on sticks.” We are wondrously complex creatures made for relationship, community, creativity, experience, passion, joy, and adventure.
The Five Elements of Formation
We will explore the most critical question in relation to our discipleship, our journey of heart formation: How is one person formed like another? This is undoubtedly a spiritual question, though it is also an anthropological one. How does one human being become more like another human being?
Suppose the central premise of the Christian life is not to “get to heaven” but instead to join with Jesus and others to help bring heaven to earth, and we do that by gently and slowly allowing ourselves to become more like our King. How exactly does that process happen? Hint: it is not only through being educated. Not even close.
However, I’m suggesting the answer isn’t very complicated. In fact, we are all being formed every day toward dark and light, whether or not we’re conscious of it. And we have, for millennia, formed and grown communities specifically designed to help form one person more like another. You have experienced such gatherings, though perhaps not in a Christian context.
I touched on this months ago, but it’s time to reintroduce what will be a central theme of our explorations as we move ahead.
One human being is best formed to be like another when she intentionally becomes part of a community designed to form her. Every community I’ve found and researched features five critical elements specifically embedded into the ecosystem to create a transformative outcome. These elements are time, habit, community, intimacy, and instruction. Though they are prominently found in virtually every intentionally formative community, the one place where it’s difficult to find all five is in the modern Christian institution.
We’ve just touched on one reason: we typically operate under the idea that the purpose of our discipleship is to educate, not to form. That idea is based on a flawed, reduced understanding of what it means to be human. And though modern faith groups struggle to embrace a holistic view of heart formation, most other formative communities do not.
Before I close, I’ll remind us of one example of a formative community I’ve previously given.
A Five-Element Ecosystem
Let’s say you discover your daughter is talented in gymnastics. She desires to become a professional gymnast, perhaps even an Olympian. She desperately wants to become more like Gabby Douglas or Simone Biles. Her heart is bent towards one purpose – to become more like someone else because of her love of the sport.
If you have the means and desire as a parent, what is your response to your daughter’s quest to be formed into a professional gymnast? You introduce her to an intentional gathering of people who are forming a gymnastics team.
She’ll discover that becoming the next Simone Biles is not simply a matter of instruction. Sure, she will be taught the basics of the sport, the mechanics of the body, and the rules of competition. But will teaching and instruction be enough?
Of course not. She intentionally engages in a five-element ecosystem to form her body, mind, spirit, and character into a professional gymnast. She will spend extraordinary amounts of time with her coaches and teammates. She will learn and practice a dizzying array of habits – not simply those that train her body but also her mind and will. She will be a part of a laser-focused community of like-hearted people where she can be vulnerable, raw, and trusting. She will have good and bad days, and her community will (hopefully) support and encourage her regardless.
It would be silly to suggest that this talented young girl could become a professional gymnast if she just showed up to the gym once a week for a 45-minute lecture, no matter how effective or witty the communicator. We would laugh at the prospect of her becoming the next Gabby or Simone, even if she spent three or four hours a week in instruction. We intuitively know the journey of healthy character formation requires so much more: time, habit, community, and intimacy.
Over the coming weeks, we’ll touch on other intentionally formative communities, such as marriage, recovery groups, the military, and Jesus’ early gatherings. Spoiler alert: We’ll find the same five elements in abundance in every example. We’ll also discover that effective and healthy character formation is never simply a matter of event-driven instruction. It always involves relationships, experience, trust, safety, and the idea of “withness” that we’ve already introduced.
It also involves a journey inward. We’re about to discover how these Three Primary Problems (the Discipleship Dilemma, the Formation Gap, and the Forgotten Kingdom) all weave together and how we beautifully solve them all by doing the same thing: weaving ourselves together with Jesus to become people of the King.
