What a Spiritually Formative Community Looks Like

Jessica and I recently celebrated our thirtieth wedding anniversary, and it genuinely felt like a celebration. Through all of life’s gains and losses, sickness and health, certainty and upheaval, our marriage has remained a much-needed constant and a source of humor, delight, vibrancy, and safety. My wife is a remarkable woman, and I am deeply grateful that we have been able to walk through three decades together.

At dinner that week, we marveled at how quickly the years had passed. As someone once observed, childhood can feel like forever, while adulthood passes in a blink. Thirty years somehow felt both impossibly long and startlingly brief.

We were married on June 17, 1995, at First Lutheran Church on Grant Street in Pittsburgh. For reasons still unknown to me, the church had not installed air conditioning in the sanctuary, and the temperature that day hovered around ninety-five degrees with considerable humidity. The service lasted approximately ninety minutes because Lutherans are not generally known for brevity, and the presiding pastor was fighting the flu and looked increasingly likely to pass out in front of the altar.

I had composed the bridal processional, which seemed like a romantic idea at the time. As Jessica and her father began walking down the aisle, I found myself torn between awe at her grace and beauty and irritation at the hired organist, who was butchering my composition with considerable confidence. Everyone survived the service and reception, and we began our life together with the same hopes, expectations, and fragile assumptions most newlyweds carry into marriage.

As we reminisced, however, I was reminded of something more sobering. The sanctuary had been filled with dear friends and family, yet for many of them, that wedding became the last time we saw one another. Except for my brother, time and distance eventually eroded my relationships with the men who stood beside me as groomsmen, and many people from our early community, with whom we promised to remain connected forever, slowly drifted away.

Decades later, I still miss the depth and communion of those friendships. It makes me wonder whether we have lost some capacity for long-term, committed, sacrificial community, or whether we simply never learned how much effort such relationships require.

The Formation Gap

At Soil & Roots, we continue exploring what Dallas Willard called “The Great Omission,” the strange condition in which modern Christianity speaks constantly about making disciples while often struggling to help people actually become them. Part of the difficulty is that the word disciple has become so familiar that it can mean almost anything.

To some, a disciple is simply a convert. In other settings, the word describes someone who obeys Jesus’ commands, attends church, learns Scripture, serves, gives, or participates in Christian activities. Those things may all be part of discipleship, but they do not fully describe the slow inner transformation of a human being.

We understand discipleship as the journey of becoming more like Jesus over time. A disciple increasingly learns to think, act, relate, and love as He does. This journey includes prayer, Scripture, worship, service, church life, and instruction, but it is more comprehensive, relational, contemplative, and transformational than religious activity alone.

If people truly become more like Jesus from the inside out, the result changes individuals, marriages, families, organizations, communities, and cultures. A person who becomes less anxious, less controlling, more generous, more attentive, more forgiving, and more capable of self-giving love inevitably affects everyone around them.

This leads to a crucial question: How does one person become more like another? When we examine formative environments such as childhood, marriage, college, apprenticeships, military training, athletics, and addiction recovery, five elements appear repeatedly: time, habits, community, intimacy, and instruction.

These five elements exist in abundance within nearly every environment designed to shape human beings intentionally. Yet in much of modern Christianity, they are fragmented or absent, and that absence is what we call the Formation Gap.

Community Is More Than Gathering

We are now turning our attention to the third of the five formative elements: community. Genuine discipleship is a team sport, and we need to examine our assumptions about community with the same courage we bring to our ideas about God, ourselves, and spiritual formation.

Our natural response is to associate formative community with gatherings we already know: church services, Bible studies, Sunday school classes, prayer teams, small groups, or ministry teams. We hear the phrase spiritually formative community and immediately conclude that we have already experienced one.

Some of those gatherings may indeed become formative. Many provide meaningful teaching, friendship, prayer, service, support, and belonging, and all of those things matter.

But not every Christian gathering is a spiritually formative community. A church service can inspire us without knowing us, a Bible study can inform us without changing the hidden ideas governing our lives, and a small group can meet faithfully while members remain guarded, hurried, and only partially known.

The question is not simply whether the group gathers regularly, studies Scripture, or performs acts of service. The deeper question is what kind of people its members are becoming through their shared life.

What Are We Actually Measuring?

Modern Christian communities often measure participation through attendance, service, giving, programs, books, classes, memorized passages, mission trips, or completed curricula. Those measurements are understandable because they are visible and relatively easy to count.

Spiritual formation, however, asks different questions. Are we becoming less angry? Are we learning to listen to another person’s heart without immediately fixing, correcting, or redirecting the conversation? Are we increasingly capable of forgiving our enemies and seeking their good?

Are we becoming more radically generous, more able to enter another person’s suffering, less anxious, more relationally wise, and more honest with God, other people, and ourselves? Are we becoming more like Jesus?

Most Christian groups are designed primarily to inform the head and mobilize people into service. Both are worthy purposes, but most groups are not intentionally structured to join Jesus in the transformation of the heart.

The heart learns differently than the mind, which means a spiritually formative community must operate differently from a typical class, meeting, or program. It must create the conditions in which people can become known, challenged, loved, and changed over time.

Why Sitcom Communities Appeal to Us

Hollywood sometimes understands human desire more clearly than Christian institutions do. The entertainment industry knows that people are moved and shaped through stories, images, relationships, characters, and repeated emotional experiences. It understands that human beings are not merely thinking creatures; we are people of desire, imagination, memory, attachment, and longing.

One of the most enduring forms of entertainment over the last fifty years has been the situational comedy. Shows such as The Office, Friends, The Big Bang Theory, Parks and Recreation, Cheers, and Community appeal to broad audiences partly because they invite us to experience close-knit relationships we may not possess in real life.

The characters gather in familiar places, know one another’s histories, tolerate recurring flaws, share ordinary life, and remain through conflict, embarrassment, failure, and change. We return to these shows partly because the people keep returning to one another.

Where Everybody Knows Your Name

Actor George Wendt recently passed away, though most people knew him as Norm from Cheers. Whenever Norm entered his favorite Boston bar, the entire room turned and shouted his name in warm recognition.

Norm’s life outside the bar was often portrayed as a humorous mess, but inside Cheers, he was known and welcomed. He did not need to introduce himself, perform, explain his presence, or prove his value. Everybody knew his name, and his arrival mattered simply because he was there.

That image touches something deep within us. We long for places where our arrival matters, where our absence is noticed, and where our presence is received as a gift rather than evaluated according to usefulness.

Dan Harmon, the creator of Community, once described the experience that inspired the show:

“I was in this group with these knuckleheads and I started really liking them…even though they had nothing to do with my career and I had nothing to gain from them.”

That may be one of the finest accidental descriptions of Christian community I have encountered. Imagine a group of ordinary, awkward, complicated people from whom no one expects to gain status, influence, money, usefulness, or opportunity, but who slowly begin to love one another anyway.

A Spiritually Formative Community Knows People

A spiritually formative community is a place where people gradually become known as they actually are. Members know more than one another’s names, occupations, church backgrounds, and prayer requests. Over time, they begin to understand each other’s stories, wounds, fears, ideas, desires, relationships, hopes, and recurring patterns.

This kind of knowing cannot be rushed or demanded. It grows through time, repeated presence, attentive listening, and the accumulating evidence that honesty will not result in rejection, gossip, control, or shame.

To be known is not merely to have personal information exposed. It is to have one’s true self received with curiosity, truth, compassion, and commitment.

This is why vulnerability is necessary for real community. Without appropriate openness, people may gather for years while remaining largely hidden from one another, and the group may mistake familiarity for intimacy.

A Spiritually Formative Community Requires Time

Deep community cannot be created through occasional events. Trust grows gradually, and the hidden life emerges slowly. People need repeated experiences of one another through ordinary seasons and difficult ones.

They need meals, conversations, laughter, prayer, awkward silence, disagreement, misunderstanding, apology, repair, sickness, celebration, and grief. These ordinary and difficult experiences create a shared history in which people gradually become believable to one another.

Time allows every other formative element to deepen, and without it, habits remain superficial, community stays casual, intimacy remains limited, and instruction struggles to become embodied.

A spiritually formative community does not merely complete a study and disband. It remains long enough for people to change, regress, struggle, surprise one another, and become known beyond first impressions.

A Spiritually Formative Community Develops Shared Habits

Formative communities do more than meet. They develop rhythms and habits that shape the way members relate to God, one another, themselves, and the world.

They may share meals, practice silence, listen to stories, examine the heart, pray conversationally, confess, celebrate, grieve, serve, or spend time in creation. The particular habits matter, but their deeper purpose matters more.

Healthy habits cultivate attention, honesty, love, mutuality, courage, and openness to Jesus. They help people slow down enough to notice what is happening within and between them.

Habits also create predictability. Members know that stories will be received, questions welcomed, suffering acknowledged, and each person given space. Over time, repeated practices become part of the culture of the group and begin shaping the people within it.

A Spiritually Formative Community Cultivates Intimacy

Intimacy involves knowing and being known, but it also includes emotional attunement, mutual affection, trust, safety, and the willingness to remain present. A spiritually formative community does not treat people as problems to solve or projects to improve.

Members learn to listen without rushing toward advice, explanation, comparison, or correction. They become curious about one another’s hearts and begin asking what a person is experiencing, what they are afraid of, what longing lies beneath the anger, and what hidden idea may be shaping a particular behavior.

This kind of intimacy is closely connected to presence and spiritual formation. People are often transformed through the experience of someone staying attentive long enough for the heart to become visible.

Intimacy does not eliminate truth or accountability. It creates the relational environment in which truth can be received without shame and accountability can occur without the destruction of belonging.

A Spiritually Formative Community Includes Instruction

Instruction remains essential. A healthy community needs Scripture, theology, wisdom, shared language, correction, and guidance. Without truth, intimacy can become sentimental, confused, or self-referential.

But instruction serves formation rather than replacing it. Members do not simply consume content and discuss ideas; they explore how truth relates to their actual thought patterns, emotions, relationships, desires, behaviors, bodies, and stories.

A passage about forgiveness becomes a conversation about the person we cannot forgive. Teaching about trust becomes an opportunity to notice our need for control, while a discussion of God’s love invites us to explore whether our hearts experience His delight.

Instruction becomes personal, relational, and embodied. It remains deeply important, but it no longer carries the entire burden of spiritual formation by itself.

A Spiritually Formative Community Welcomes Questions

People of depth do not merely know more. They explore more, question more, wrestle more, and sometimes doubt more.

The Psalms offer one of Scripture’s clearest pictures of this kind of spiritual honesty. Their writers ask difficult questions, protest suffering, express confusion, and refuse to hide behind religious polish.

A spiritually formative community welcomes courageous curiosity. Members can ask why, admit uncertainty, reconsider assumptions, and acknowledge that the head and heart may not agree.

Questions are not treated as threats to authority or evidence of disloyalty. They become part of the journey toward truth, and the community learns to trust that God is not frightened by honest exploration.

A Spiritually Formative Community Practices Commitment

One of the most important features of deep community is commitment. My memories of our wedding remind me how easily relationships can erode through time, distance, busyness, relocation, ambition, family demands, and changing seasons.

People who once promised lifelong friendship may gradually become names on a holiday card list or profiles on social media. No one necessarily decides to end the relationship; it simply fades through neglect.

A spiritually formative community requires a different posture. Members commit to remain long enough for trust, intimacy, repair, and transformation to occur. They do not disappear at the first inconvenience, disagreement, awkward season, or personal disappointment.

This does not mean every relationship must last forever or that people should remain in harmful communities. Boundaries and relational wisdom matter, but depth requires more than temporary enthusiasm.

It requires people willing to stay when staying becomes costly.

A Spiritually Formative Community Repairs Conflict

No community made of human beings will remain free from misunderstanding, frustration, disappointment, and hurt. The question is not whether conflict occurs but what the community does when it does.

Some groups avoid conflict and allow resentment to grow beneath polite appearances. Others become controlling, punitive, or divisive, turning every disagreement into a contest of loyalty and power.

A spiritually formative community learns to tell the truth, listen carefully, take responsibility, apologize, forgive, establish boundaries, and repair what can be repaired. Conflict becomes part of formation rather than proof that the community has failed.

Members learn that disagreement does not automatically threaten belonging and that acknowledging harm does not require the destruction of identity. They discover that relationships can bend without always breaking and that repair can sometimes deepen trust rather than merely restore it.

A Spiritually Formative Community Protects Agency

Deep community should make people freer, not more controlled. Members retain the ability to think, question, disagree, choose, establish boundaries, and make decisions before God. No leader, facilitator, or member becomes the final interpreter of another person’s reality.

This is particularly important because intimacy can be exploited. Narcissism in Christian community can transform vulnerability into a tool of manipulation, and an unhealthy leader can use spiritual language to demand access, loyalty, or compliance.

Healthy communities distribute power, welcome accountability, protect confidentiality, and refuse coercion. Leaders guide rather than dominate, and no person becomes indispensable.

The goal is not dependence upon the group. The goal is increasing freedom to love God and others without surrendering agency or identity.

A Spiritually Formative Community Seeks Each Person’s Good

The central question in any formative community is whether the members genuinely seek one another’s good. People are not valued primarily for their gifts, usefulness, connections, money, productivity, or ability to support the group’s mission.

They are valued because they exist and because they bear the image of God. A person may be strong in one season and deeply limited in another, contributing visibly for years before entering sickness, grief, doubt, or exhaustion.

A healthy community does not abandon people when usefulness fades. It continues seeking their flourishing, even when caring for them requires patience, sacrifice, and a change in expectations.

This is what makes the community different from an institution, marketplace, platform, or algorithm. It does not merely ask what a person can provide but how that person might become more whole, free, secure, and loving.

A Spiritually Formative Community Is Not a Sitcom

We should not romanticize community. Sitcoms resolve most conflicts within twenty-two minutes, reset relationships by the next episode, and surround characters with writers committed to preserving the group.

Real community is considerably messier. People disappoint us, misunderstand us, fail to listen, and sometimes leave. Personalities collide, stories trigger one another, and growth occurs at uneven speeds.

No gathering will perfectly satisfy our desire to be known and loved. Only God can carry the full weight of that longing, and asking a group to do so will eventually crush the community and the people within it.

Yet our desire for sitcom community reveals something true. We were made for repeated presence, shared life, familiar faces, mutual affection, and places where our names are known.

The picture is imperfect, but the longing is not.

Deep Calls to Deep

The premise of Soil & Roots is that the response to the Great Omission is the cultivation of deep disciples, people increasingly attuned to God, others, themselves, and creation and culture. That increasing attunement strengthens our attachment to Jesus and expands our capacity to love.

This deepening involves learning, but it also involves wrestling, questioning, exploring, confessing, grieving, receiving, repairing, and remaining. It asks more of us than showing up, listening, and agreeing.

For reasons that seem both beautiful and risky, God formed us to deepen together. We need one another far more than most of us are comfortable admitting, particularly in cultures that prize independence, efficiency, and self-sufficiency.

The inward journey may be personal, but it is not private. Jesus invites us to travel with trusted companions who can see what we cannot see, carry what we cannot carry alone, and remain when our stories become inconvenient.

From Groups to Formative Ecosystems

A spiritually formative community is not simply another group added to a busy church calendar. It is a small, relational ecosystem intentionally organized around becoming more like Jesus.

It brings together time, habits, community, intimacy, and instruction in a way that allows the hidden life to emerge and be transformed. The goal is not curriculum completion, social connection, or institutional participation, though each may occur.

The goal is character formation. Members increasingly become less anxious, defensive, controlling, and self-protective while becoming more generous, compassionate, honest, secure, forgiving, and capable of love.

That kind of transformation is slow and difficult to measure, but it is the fruit Jesus invites us to seek. It is also the kind of fruit our families, churches, communities, and cultures desperately need.

Where Everybody Knows Your Name

Our hearts long for a place where everyone knows our name. We long for people who recognize us, notice our absence, remember our stories, and remain through the strange and ordinary seasons of life.

We want to show up as our messy selves without performance, pretense, or showmanship. We know we are not yet who we could be, but we hope those around us will help us become that person, just as we help them become who they are invited to be.

A spiritually formative community is not flawless, effortless, or sentimental. It is a gathering of knuckleheads with little to gain from one another who slowly discover that love itself is enough reason to stay.

Perhaps that is what Jesus was building with His disciples. Perhaps it is what those strange people in Acts were attempting to recover, and perhaps it is what our fragmented and lonely world still desperately needs.

Duc in altum.

Explore Further

Why Deep Christian Community Is So Hard to Find

The Kind of Christian Community Our Hearts Actually Need

Why Christian Vulnerability Is Necessary for Real Community

The Formation Gap