Why Presence Is Essential to Spiritual Formation
I was asked to speak about spiritual formation at a church in the Dallas area over the holidays. During the talk, I mentioned that passages such as “Be anxious for nothing” and “Consider it all joy when you encounter various trials” do not always inspire or encourage me. Sometimes, they make me feel guilty because I am not doing or experiencing whatever the passage indicates I should.
After I finished, a woman approached me and, with remarkable honesty, said she had considered leaving Jesus altogether. She had grown up reading her Bible, praying, serving, and doing all the good “Christian things,” yet she had not experienced many of the promises she found in Scripture. She still struggled with anxiety, was not sure what “abundant life” meant, and had not experienced anything she would describe as peace that passes understanding. For all the times the Bible told her not to fear, fear remained a regular part of her life.
Her authenticity struck me because I understood her frustration. I want to be content in every circumstance, but my contentment is haphazard. I would like to be free from fear and anxiety, and I have learned to cover both of them rather nicely, thank you very much. I feel fairly settled when everyone is getting along and there is money in the bank, but I can become as rattled as anyone else when hardship, sacrifice, conflict, or uncertainty arrives.
Sometimes, the life of abiding in God can seem reserved for a spiritual elite, some saint or mystic who has figured out what the rest of us are missing. Thank God for the Psalms, because it is comforting to know I am not the only one struggling with the human condition.
How Does One Person Become Like Another?
Because genuine discipleship centers on becoming more like Jesus, we eventually have to wrestle with what may be the most important question in the entire spiritual journey: How is one person formed to become more like another?
At Soil & Roots, we define a disciple as someone who apprentices with Jesus for the purpose of becoming more like Him from the inside out over time. We intend to increasingly think, act, relate, and love as He does. That raises a deeper question about how our hidden ideas, desires, relationships, and habits are actually formed.
Modern Christianity has often answered that question primarily through instruction. We attend sermons, classes, Bible studies, conferences, podcasts, and programs because we assume that receiving correct information will gradually make us different people. Instruction matters, of course, and truth matters enormously, but information and transformation are not the same thing.
Human beings are not merely brains carrying bodies around. We are complex creatures made up of visible and invisible dimensions, conscious and unconscious forces, thoughts, emotions, desires, bodies, memories, wounds, relationships, habits, and longings. The head can agree with something the heart has never experienced.
This is why the Formation Gap matters. Any intentional environment designed to form people over time usually includes five elements: meaningful time, intentional habits, consistent community, trusted intimacy, and transformative instruction. Modern Christianity often emphasizes instruction while undervaluing the other four, leaving many sincere people informed but not deeply transformed.
The Hidden Forces Beneath the Surface
We are often powered by forces beneath the surface of ordinary consciousness. Two of the most influential are ideas and desires, both of which play a significant role in our quest to think, act, relate, and love more like Jesus.
Ideas are not merely intellectual conclusions. They are assumptions and principles in which our hearts are rooted, often without our awareness. Desires are the deep attractions and longings that pull us toward certain people, experiences, identities, and ways of living.
If we genuinely want to be formed more like Jesus, we eventually have to journey inward with Him and perhaps a trusted friend to discover what we actually love and the assumptions from which we operate. This is part of the inward journey with God, and it means discipleship cannot be reduced to learning biblical information or participating in good religious activities, important as those things may be.
Several powerful ideas can hinder this journey even when we are not consciously aware of them. These assumptions shape how we understand ourselves, our purpose, the Kingdom, and even what we believe spiritual formation is supposed to accomplish.
We Are More Than What We Think
One of the most powerful ideas in modern Western culture is that we are primarily thinking beings. We see this assumption everywhere, not just in churches, because the operating theory is that if people receive the correct information, they will change.
James K. A. Smith challenges that conclusion by arguing that human beings are not primarily thinkers or even primarily believers. We are primarily desirers and lovers. If his conclusion is accurate, discipleship cannot be only about instruction, because spiritual formation must also address the mysterious forces through which we fall in love, remain in love, redirect our love, and slowly become shaped by what we adore.
We are not merely convinced into becoming like Jesus. We are drawn, attached, practiced, accompanied, and loved into becoming like Him, which is why relationships and experience are every bit as formative as information.
Transaction or Relationship?
Another powerful idea concerns the way we understand conversion and discipleship. For more than a century, American evangelicalism has often focused on motivating people to accept Jesus, say a prayer, walk an aisle, come forward to an altar, or make some profession of faith.
The hope is that those people will then join a local church, where they will hopefully be discipled. I entered the Kingdom through such a service, so I am not dismissing the good that can happen through those moments.
But if becoming an apprentice of Jesus means entering a new reality and being formed over time so that we increasingly live and love like Him, then an overly transactional approach begins to look incomplete. Greg Koukl once suggested that perhaps people should not merely be invited to accept Jesus, but to follow Him.
The first can sound momentary, while the second describes a life-altering, reality-bending, relational adventure. Jesus did not simply offer people a transaction; He invited them into life with Him.
Escape or Cosmic Renewal?
Another deeply influential idea is that the primary goal of this life is to reach heaven and escape the earth. This conclusion is woven into countless churches, movies, hymns, worship songs, and other forms of Christian culture, usually without much thought or examination.
The idea comes with a price. If the main point of faith is to leave this world someday, then earth has little place in God’s vision of eternity, and discipleship requires little beyond embracing Christ’s forgiveness and helping others do the same.
The emphasis can shift away from becoming loving, sacrificial, radically generous, less angry, more patient, and relationally shrewd, and toward becoming an effective evangelist. Yet if Jesus came not only to forgive us but to reconcile us, restore intimate friendship between humanity and God, and begin the renewal of all things, then the frame changes.
If God’s purpose is not permanent escape from an earth He called good, but the redemption of our relationships with God, others, ourselves, and creation and culture, then discipleship becomes profoundly relational and present. It becomes about learning to live with God now.
Can I Get a Withness?
These ideas share a common tendency: they reduce or eliminate the need for what I call “withness.” Perhaps the path toward abundant life, deep peace, radical love, relational wisdom, and inner contentment is more closely connected to stillness, presence, and being with God, others, and ourselves than we usually assume.
St. Theophan wrote:
“The essential part is to dwell with God, and this walking before God means that you live with the conviction ever before your consciousness that God is in you, as he is in everything: you live in the firm assurance that he sees all that is within you, knowing you better than you know yourself. This awareness of the eyes of God looking in your inner being… searching your soul and your heart, seeing all that is there…is the most powerful lever in the mechanism of the inner spiritual life.”
The essential part, according to St. Theophan, is to dwell with God. It is not merely to learn about Him, perform tasks for Him, or accept a set of conclusions about Him, but to cultivate an increasing awareness of His presence with us and within us.
Presence Is a Formative Force
God often reveals Himself through other people, which makes it worth considering how deeply another person’s presence can affect us. A crying baby may be soothed almost immediately by the presence of a mother, while a toddler becomes delighted when a father turns his full attention toward her.
Certain people in my life cause me to become anxious and guarded. In the presence of others, my body relaxes, my defenses lower, and I become more willing to tell the truth about what is happening inside me.
Presence is a powerful formative force because the heart is always learning from relationships and experience. Someone’s tone, posture, patience, interest, and attention can communicate things that words alone never could.
Think of a conversation with someone who was genuinely attuned to you. There is something deeply peaceful and healing about sharing your story with a person who is truly listening, not because they are waiting to advise, correct, teach, or share their own experience, but because they simply want to be with you in your story.
They are giving themselves to you through their attention. They are awake, engaged, and present to your heart, and their listening communicates that you are worth knowing.
The Counselor Who Cried for Me
Some years ago, after suffering betrayal, abandonment, and rejection, I finally consented to speak with a counselor. I remember very little of what he said, but I remember his presence.
He was kind, attentive, and gracious. Though he barely knew me, he cried for me when I could not cry for myself, and that moment has remained with me long after any specific advice or insight disappeared from memory.
He was with me, and his withness brought much-needed peace, stillness, and comfort to a troubled soul. He did not solve the situation, undo what had happened, or hand me an easy explanation, but his presence helped carry what I was not yet able to carry.
That experience convinced me that someone who is truly with us reminds our hearts that we are worth being known. A person’s presence may become one of the ways God slowly reforms the hidden ideas beneath our fear, shame, and self-protection.
Why Being Heard Changes Us
The need to be heard is not evidence of weakness or self-absorption. Human beings are created for relationship, and our hearts are formed through the experience of being known.
We become more integrated as our hidden stories are spoken in the presence of someone safe. We become more aware of ourselves when another person listens without rushing to interpret or repair us, and we become more capable of experiencing God’s presence when the people around us embody patience, kindness, attention, and compassion.
This is one reason sharing our stories is essential to spiritual formation. Stories that remain hidden continue shaping us outside our awareness, while stories received with care can begin to be understood, grieved, and integrated.
Presence does not remove the need for truth. It creates the relational environment in which truth can be received without fear.
Fixing and Accompanying Are Not the Same
We are quick to teach, correct, diagnose, advise, and solve. Sometimes those responses are appropriate, because there are moments when another person genuinely needs wisdom, instruction, confrontation, or practical help.
But we often rush toward fixing because simply being present makes us uncomfortable. Another person’s grief reminds us that we cannot control life, their doubt threatens our certainty, their pain awakens our own, and their unresolved story frustrates our desire for closure.
So we offer a verse, lesson, explanation, or piece of advice, and we may call it ministry when what we are actually doing is escaping discomfort. Accompanying someone is different because it means remaining present when there is no simple answer.
It means honoring the person rather than treating them as a problem to solve. It means allowing grief, confusion, anger, uncertainty, and unanswered questions to exist without demanding that they disappear on our timetable.
Withness gives another person room to remain human, which is often what the suffering heart needs most.
The Presence of God Through Community
The Christian life was never intended to be an isolated relationship between an individual and God. God regularly mediates His care through other people, using faces, voices, touch, attention, patience, meals, tears, laughter, and shared time.
This is why the kind of Christian community our hearts need cannot be built only around information transfer. We need communities in which people are gradually known, where stories can be told, suffering can be shared, and presence is not constantly sacrificed for efficiency.
A person can attend a crowded church for years and remain almost entirely unknown. Proximity is not the same as presence, attendance is not the same as intimacy, and activity is not the same as formation.
Community becomes formative when people have enough time, safety, trust, and attention to become present to one another. Those conditions allow the heart to emerge slowly and honestly rather than remaining hidden behind religious language and practiced appearances.
Presence and Heartview
We can often see the formative power of presence through the Eight Indicators of Heartview. When we consistently experience safe, attentive relationships, our thought patterns may become less condemning, our emotions may become less volatile, and our bodies may begin to relax.
Our words may become more honest, our relationships less guarded, and our behaviors less driven by fear and self-protection. The experience of being with someone trustworthy can slowly reform hidden ideas that were originally shaped through very different kinds of relationships.
Perhaps we have functioned from the idea that our emotions are inconvenient, our stories are burdensome, or our failures make us unworthy of attention. A person who stays present begins to contradict those ideas through experience.
Their withness communicates that we are not too much, our stories matter, we do not have to hide, and they are still there.
Recovering the With-God Life
The deeper life with God is not simply a life in which we know more biblical information or become more religiously productive. It is a life of communion, one in which we gradually learn to live with the awareness that God is present, attentive, and involved in the ordinary moments of our lives.
Prayer can become more than asking, explaining, or performing. It can include resting, listening, noticing, receiving, grieving, enjoying, and simply being with Him.
This is part of the Good Life with God. The Good Life is not the absence of hardship, disappointment, or struggle, but the growing experience of life with God in the middle of reality.
The woman who approached me after the talk did not need one more command not to be anxious. She needed a path toward experiencing the presence and peace of God in the places where fear still lived.
That path includes truth, but it also includes time, habits, community, intimacy, and the steady presence of people who can accompany us without trying to manage us.
More Listeners and Fewer Lectures
We live in an age overflowing with information. We can access sermons, books, articles, podcasts, courses, debates, devotionals, opinions, and theological explanations at any hour of the day, so we are not suffering from a shortage of words.
What we may lack are people willing to listen. We need more people prepared to sit with us in suffering, sacrifice time and comfort, and remain alongside us when there is nothing obvious to fix.
We are so prone to teach, instruct, correct, and judge that we sometimes forget what our hearts desperately long for, which is someone willing simply to be with us. There are appropriate times to teach, instruct, correct, and judge, but perhaps what we most need in this information-overloaded age is not another lecture.
Perhaps we need someone willing to be fully present, awake, and engaged with our hearts. That is what God has always promised, and it may be one of the most powerful ways He forms us into people who can offer the same gift to others.
Duc in altum.
Brian Fisher is the founder of Soil & Roots and the author of Soil & Roots: Cultivating Deep Discipleship. He writes and speaks about spiritual formation, the inner life, and how people become more like Jesus from the inside out.
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