Spiritual Formation is not a Program

This conversation between Mark Labberton and Tod Bolsinger is worth your time. We have programmed spiritual formation to the point of being able to get a PhD in the field. Yet… we are very uneven in producing disciples of Jesus. The goal of spiritual formation should be the identifiable characteristics of Christ and his Kingdom. Yet, we too often see a culturalized Christianity.

The problem is not the seed. The problem is the soil.

There was this exchange:

Mark Labberton: So if the American church in its current state is the production of what arises from the soil that we have, what is lacking in that soil to have produced a church like the one that we see? Which I want to say is, as you well know, too. There’s all kinds of vibrant, healthy places where the church in America is really doing remarkable things, profound things. And then there’s other things that we see that are just so much more problematic. So what is that soil detriment or loss or lack that we need?

Tod Bolsinger: Well, one of the ways to think about it before we talk about lack is to think of it this way. It’s a little bit like the old notion that came out of the leadership world, that your system is perfectly designed for the results it’s getting.

Mark Labberton: Yes.

Tod Bolsinger: Right. There are no dysfunctional systems. They all produce. So your soil will produce the fruit of its health. So there’s been scholars like Kristin Kobes Du Mez and others who have said, hey, look, Trump’s rise and, you know, 80 some percent of white evangelical males supporting him. It was not a surprise. It came out of a culture that was cultivated over decades, particularly within the kind of the evangelical world that you and I have spent our lives in, that this is the fruit that would come.

And that so many of the things that I can remember being in seminary, I say this all the time, when I was in seminary, there was not a single scholar or person I knew who even entertained the idea of Christian nationalism. Not one. And I don’t know a single church that started a program in Christian nationalism or had an associate pastor of Christian nationalism or started a strategic plan for Christian nationalism. It just came up out of the soil.

So if you think about the soil as the nutrients that are there and that have been replicated over and over by what’s grown there and what’s cultivated there and what goes back in is composted there. Well, then we can say, the soil we have of Christianity today is the result of everything we’ve done. And what we have to look at is say, if we’re not getting the fruit we want, then, okay, how do we go back and examine that? And then how do we also change that? How do you actually change that soil to get the fruit we want?

This is the challenge. We are getting the results we have planned. Somehow, we thought we had planned for something different. When I was pastoring, I honestly thought I was planning for something different. Yet, when the rubber met the road… the language we were all using wasn’t the same language at all. I was using what I thought was language coming out of the Kingdom of God and that mentality. People were hearing it and their “translators” were downloading it into political parties and their lingo.

We are deeply formed culturally and historically. When that gets threatened, and we haven’t allowed the Gospel to truly work through us… we haven’t cultivated our soil well… we get cultural responses rather than Kingdom responses.

Bolsinger described it this way:

And that the experience of being a belonging, of being loved, of being known, of having someone attend to you in your fear, like a huge part, I believe, that is shaping the church today is how much reflective fear and how much fear specifically of loss is keeping us from being able to live as Jesus followers. The Jesus who told us to lay down our life, the sermon on laying down your life never seems to lead people to actually lay down their lives because the precognitive and the unconscious realities of our life are stronger than our words.

We hear about laying down our lives. We read about laying down our lives. Yet, fear grips us and we default to what our culture demands. When we are the dominant culture, we default to fear. We have to hold onto our power!

How do we cultivate our soil? The bigger question is this: do we even WANT that kind of change?

I like my comfort. Change is a LOT.

The main thing is this: I need more humility. I need to be more aware of what is going on around and at minimum… just shut my mouth and let others talk.

Hear their stories.

I try to learn my own story as well. I am a white American male. I am the dominant culture. That’s the soil and I need to cultivate it.

So, I need humility when I learn from others. I need to listen and not just hear so I can build an argument about why my way is still better.

I also need humility to learn my own past. Yes, as far as I can trace history through what Ancestry.com gives me, which is only reliant on other people putting in accurate information, my family roots reach back to Colonial American. Now, I am white and entitled. I’m not the grandson (entirely) of immigrants who came through Ellis Island.

But I reached past that and I come to the understanding that, if the input is correct, my family on both sides fled religious persecution in different parts of Great Britain. They were the religious minority being shoved out.

I need this reminder.

The humility is also needed to bring myself to understand I recognize cultural responses and then demand Kingdom responses instead.

Labberton and Bolsinger talk about Mother Teresa at one point and she demanded their group go into an area that was being bombed because there were disabled children there. Everyone else said, “But the bombs are falling! We need to wait because it’s not safe!” But she said, “We must go in there because the bombs are falling!”

Hers was the Kingdom response.

I need to bless others when they reign down derision on me because I am incapable of another response. THAT is the Kingdom soil. And until then, I need to walk humbly before the Lord and keep tilling my own soil.

I would love to be “smart” and get that PhD in Spiritual Formation… but that won’t solve anything. What I need is to have the Kingdom so thoroughly work through me that my soil receives the seed of the Kingdom and Kingdom fruit is produced. This is the need of the hour in American Christianity.