Why Time and Spiritual Formation Belong Together
The Formation Gap may not be the most popular of the Three Primary Problems we explore at Soil & Roots. Of the three, it tends to resonate least with churchgoers, which is not exactly the strongest incentive to keep reading, but hang in there with me.
The premise is fairly straightforward. The primary goal of discipleship is to become more like Jesus from the inside out, so that we increasingly think, act, relate, and love as He does. This kind of steady character transformation changes families, communities, institutions, and cultures because people who become more loving, secure, generous, and relationally wise inevitably affect the world around them.
That leads us back to the question we keep asking: How does one person become more like another?
As we examine formative environments such as families, marriages, schools, athletic teams, military units, recovery groups, and the early church, five common elements appear again and again: time, habits, community, intimacy, and instruction. These elements tend to work together when people are intentionally formed into a new identity, culture, or way of life.
Much of modern Christianity, however, relies heavily on event-based, monologue-centered instruction. Many people expect churches to educate, inspire, organize, and mobilize them, but fewer expect those institutions to intentionally shape their hearts over time.
There is much to appreciate and celebrate in modern churches, but few of them would identify the formation of human character as their central organizing purpose. That creates a gap between our longing to become more like Jesus and our access to communities designed to help that transformation occur.
Time and Spiritual Formation Begin With Reality
Of the five elements, we begin with time because healing, trust, intimacy, and character formation cannot be rushed.
Several years ago, I fell out of a tree and cracked a few ribs. It is a funny story now, though it was considerably less amusing while I was trying to breathe.
The injury happened in a second, but the recovery seemed to take forever. For the first few weeks, I could barely move or draw a deep breath. It took around six weeks before I could move freely, approximately six months before I felt normal, and nearly two years before the lingering tightness and restriction completely disappeared.
There is not much to do for cracked ribs except take pain medication, rest, and wait. The body needs time to heal, though it also needs the right environmental conditions: nutrition, rest, protection, and careful, progressive movement.
Our hearts work in similar ways.
Relational and emotional wounds may occur in a moment, but healing usually unfolds gradually. Like the body, the heart also requires certain conditions in which to heal and reform properly.
Trauma and the Loss of Self
Psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk writes:
“One does not have to be a combat soldier, or visit a refugee camp in Syria, or the Congo to encounter trauma. Trauma happens to us, our friends, our families, and our neighbors. Research by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has shown that one in five Americans was sexually molested as a child; one in four was beaten by a parent to the point of a mark being left on their body; and one in three couples engages in physical violence. A quarter of us grew up with alcoholic relatives, and one out of eight witnessed their mother being beaten or hit.”
Van der Kolk describes trauma as involving a kind of loss of self. When I cracked my ribs, I temporarily lost energy, movement, stamina, and physical function. When people endure relational trauma, they may lose many of the same capacities, along with a coherent sense of identity, safety, agency, trust, and reality.
Narcissistic abuse provides one example. A person who has been manipulated, blamed, confused, or repeatedly told that their perceptions are false may lose confidence in their ability to interpret what is real. The resulting disorientation can feel paralyzing because the heart no longer knows which thoughts, emotions, and memories to trust.
One of Van der Kolk’s teachers told him that much of human suffering is connected to love and loss, and that the work of therapy is to help people acknowledge, experience, and bear reality with all its beauty and heartbreak. He also observed that some of our greatest suffering comes from the lies we tell ourselves.
To heal, to be formed, and to be re-formed is ultimately to accept and inhabit reality.
This is one reason we emphasize becoming increasingly attuned to God’s ideas, because they reflect what is true. It is also why we learn to pay attention to our own hearts, since without that attention we will struggle to recognize the ideas and desires actually shaping us.
Rub Some Dirt on It
Western culture tends to carry wildly unrealistic expectations about how quickly emotional and relational wounds should heal.
We have instant food, instant communication, instant entertainment, instant shopping, instant information, and almost instant access to whatever service or product we want. Eventually, we begin assuming that the heart should function at the same speed.
Television reinforces the idea. A character experiences betrayal, death, divorce, trauma, or profound loss, and by the following episode they are delivering punchlines and behaving as if very little happened.
Other people may also become impatient when suffering lingers. They wonder why the grieving person has not moved on, particularly after being offered simple solutions: pray more, forgive and forget, get busy serving, stop thinking about it, or rub some dirt on it.
But human beings are not projects waiting to be fixed. We are people who need to be loved.
Formation is not a matter of inserting correct information into a brain and expecting the whole person to reorganize immediately. The heart requires time, care, safety, truth, relationship, and repeated experiences of reality.
The Other Half of Church
Neuroscientist Jim Wilder and pastor Michael Hendricks explore this problem in The Other Half of Church. They define spiritual formation as the process by which we increasingly react to life as Jesus would, value what He values, treat people as He treats them, and “put on the character of Christ.”
They also make a sobering observation:
“We all agree that this was the central task of the church. We also agree that the church was mostly failing at this task.”
Wilder and Hendricks argue that modern Christianity tends to focus heavily on the left side of the brain, which handles conscious thought, speech, strategy, logic, analysis, and problem-solving. These functions matter, of course, and careful biblical instruction engages them well.
Neuroscience, however, suggests that the right side of the brain plays a powerful role in identity, attachment, emotional regulation, relational connection, and our sense of belonging within a group.
They write:
“Our right brain governs the whole range of relational life: who we love, our emotional reactions to our surroundings, our ability to calm ourselves, and our identity, both as individuals and as a community. The right side manages our strongest relational connections, both to people and to God, and our experience of emotional connectedness to others. And character formation, which is a primary responsibility of the church, is governed by the right brain, not the left brain.”
Their conclusion does not suggest that we should abandon biblical teaching. It suggests that teaching alone cannot bear the entire weight of spiritual formation.
We need experiences and relationships that help truth move from intellectual agreement into identity, attachment, emotional regulation, and embodied life.
Why Time Matters to the Heart
If spiritual formation depends heavily on secure relational attachment to God, others, and ourselves, then time becomes indispensable.
Trust is rarely formed in a weekend. Intimacy does not emerge through occasional conversation. A person does not become known through a few meetings, and a wounded heart does not relax merely because someone says it is safe.
Safety becomes believable through repeated experience.
A friend stays after hearing something difficult. A spouse repairs after conflict. A community welcomes questions without panic. Someone continues showing up after we disappoint them. A trusted person listens to the same painful story for the tenth time without suggesting that we should be over it by now.
Over time, the heart begins to accept a different reality.
This is why presence is essential to spiritual formation. The heart is not formed only by what people tell us, but also by whether they remain attentive, trustworthy, patient, and present long enough for their words to become credible.
Building Deep Relationships Takes Time
Modern church life can make this difficult because much of our shared experience revolves around a weekly event and occasional studies with people we may not see in any other context.
We can spend years attending the same church without becoming deeply known. We may recognize hundreds of faces and still have no one who understands our story, our fears, our recurring struggles, or the hidden ideas shaping our lives.
If formation requires vulnerable, secure, long-term relationships, we should ask whether our actual schedules make those relationships possible.
Do we focus our relational energy on a few people, or do we spread it across an unmanageable number of acquaintances, networks, ministries, online groups, professional contacts, and social communities?
We often assume that more relationships automatically create more community.
Sometimes, they simply create more exhaustion.
Less Is More?
The suggestion that we may need to spend time with fewer people in more meaningful ways can be difficult to accept, especially depending on where we live.
Here in Texas, the idea may sound almost offensive. Everything truly is bigger here: houses, stores, churches, roads, vehicles, and contact lists. We often assess a person’s influence by how many people they know, how many followers they have, or how many rooms they can enter with instant recognition.
Jesus seems strangely unimpressed by those measurements.
He occasionally taught large crowds and was certainly mobbed when He healed people, but He spent most of His life with a relatively small number of companions. Even within the Twelve, He appeared to share particular experiences with only a few.
After the resurrection, He did not launch a public relations campaign or attempt to appear before the largest possible audience. He spent time with a surprisingly small number of people, strengthening their hearts and preparing them to embody the same life with others.
Jesus understood that character formation is slow, relational, and difficult to scale.
The Pace of Jesus
One of the striking things about Jesus is how often He seems unhurried.
He walks from place to place. He stops when interrupted. He eats with people. He asks questions and allows conversations to unfold. He withdraws for solitude and prayer, then returns to a small community of companions.
He certainly experienced urgency, conflict, opposition, and enormous demands, but He does not appear governed by frantic activity.
Our lives often feel quite different. We move rapidly between obligations, communities, messages, meetings, errands, content, and crises. Even our efforts at spiritual growth can become crowded with books, podcasts, classes, devotionals, studies, and endless information.
We may be doing many good things while lacking the sustained time required for any of them to deeply form us.
This is part of the Formation Gap. Time, habits, community, intimacy, and instruction must operate together, but time is the element that allows the other four to deepen.
Without time, habits remain shallow, community stays casual, intimacy never matures, and instruction struggles to become embodied.
Healing Cannot Be Scheduled Efficiently
One of the challenges of spiritual formation is that hearts do not obey project plans.
We cannot schedule grief for forty-five minutes on Tuesday and expect it to be resolved by dinner. We cannot decide that trust should be restored within six weeks because that would be more convenient.
We may want a clear timeline for healing, but the heart is less predictable than the body. Even my cracked ribs offered a general recovery window, while emotional wounds often move in cycles.
Someone may feel stable for months and then find grief returning through a memory, anniversary, conflict, or unexpected loss. That does not necessarily mean they have failed to heal.
It may mean another layer is ready to be acknowledged.
Time and spiritual formation belong together because formation is not simply the removal of pain. It is the slow process of integrating reality, receiving love, developing trust, and becoming capable of responding to life with greater freedom.
The Need for Long-Term Companions
Gentleness, compassion, and patience become powerful balms when the heart breaks.
This is one reason I suspect Jesus spent so much time with a small group of people. He knew that becoming a different kind of human being would require shared life, repeated failure, correction, forgiveness, misunderstanding, meals, journeys, arguments, laughter, fear, and repair.
The disciples did not become mature through a single sermon. They became different people through extended life with Jesus and one another.
If we want to become more like Him, it may be worth asking who He is inviting us to know, and to be known by, in a focused and vulnerable way.
Spiritual formation is a messy, long-term, up-and-down adventure. We need people who will remain present through the ups and downs rather than treating every setback as evidence that nothing is changing.
This is why the kind of Christian community our hearts need is usually smaller, slower, and more relational than much of modern church life.
We Need Each Other More Than We Admit
We likely need other people far more than we want to admit and, in some cases, far more than our schedules currently allow.
The quest to become people of depth takes some surprising turns, and one of them reveals that our frantic and disconnected lives may be contributing to the isolation we feel.
We are not wired to maintain unlimited relationships, participate in countless communities, remain constantly accessible, and still offer deep attention to everyone.
Eventually, breadth competes with depth.
It may be countercultural to make space for one or two long-term companions when everyone around us seems committed to expanding influence and connection. Yet a few relationships marked by trust, honesty, patience, and shared life may form us more deeply than dozens of casual communities.
Time and Spiritual Formation Require Intention
Time alone does not guarantee transformation.
People can spend years in the same church, marriage, workplace, or community without becoming more loving or secure. Time becomes formative when it is joined with healthy habits, meaningful community, trusted intimacy, and truthful instruction.
The five elements belong together.
Time allows repeated practices to shape us. It gives community enough history to become trustworthy. It allows intimacy to move beyond polished appearances, while instruction is tested and embodied through real life.
This is how spiritual formation works from the inside out. Our ideas and desires are gradually reformed through repeated experiences of truth, love, correction, safety, suffering, and presence.
Quick inspiration may alter a mood.
Long-term formation changes a person.
The Invitation to Slow Down
Perhaps Jesus is inviting us to reconsider how we use time and whom we give it to.
He may be inviting us to release the assumption that more activity, more relationships, more information, and more influence automatically create a deeper life.
He may be asking us to notice the few people with whom He is inviting us to share a slower, more vulnerable journey.
The heart heals gradually. Trust grows slowly. Character forms through repetition. Love deepens through shared experience.
There is no shortcut around time.
The invitation is not necessarily to abandon every responsibility or withdraw from the world. It is to recognize that becoming a person of depth requires space, patience, and the willingness to remain in relationships long enough for our hidden lives to become known.
We may need each other far more than we have allowed.
And we may need far more time than our hurried age believes is reasonable.
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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