Beyond Fad Spiritual Formation
I have grown concerned over the years that the present iteration of the spiritual formation conversation will bury itself by becoming faddish spirituality. There are several ear-marks of faddish spirituality we need to be aware of. This kind of spirituality is:
focused on periphery spiritual practices rather than the typical means of grace;
reductive in its understanding of spiritual growth, often assuming that spiritual growth is identical with natural growth;
obsessed with pop-psychology and sociology, often trusting whatever is currently on the market in those spaces rather than the deep theological vision of the Christian tradition.
This has led to an overemphasis on spiritual disciplines, well beyond the focus we see throughout the Christian tradition. That is not to say there wasn’t a focus on spiritual discipline in the tradition, there was, and it is significant. But discipline wasn’t its own category. It didn’t have its own focus. It was a part of a larger vision of Christian existence as life in God. We have focused on discipline often without the gospel and communion with God being the primary location of our discipline.
There is, however, good reason for why the conversation has developed the way it has.
The most recent iteration of the spiritual formation conversation, usually understood as beginning with the publishing of Richard Foster’s book Celebration of Discipline, focused on spiritual practices because these folks grew up in churches that never talked about things like fasting, solitude, and meditation.
This was an important task, and was something the first wave of spiritual formation focused on almost entirely (Willard is an important counter-example, whose project was much much holistic). But if you look at the subsequent publishing tidal-wave over the past 45 years, the bulk of it has been about doing spiritual disciplines.
SIDE NOTE: The conversation about spiritual disciplines - and doing spiritual disciplines - is an important one. The goal, of course, is not to react to this overemphasis with an underemphasis. If you are interested in the original evangelical vision of spiritual formation, see my book Formed for the Glory of God, which reveals that our contemporary discussion of spiritual formation is not new, while also adjusting how we’ve come to think about spiritual disciplines.
As spiritual formation explodes with interest in the popular publishing market, my worry is that mistaking spiritual formation with spiritual disciplines will undermine any meaningful change. What will happen instead is this:
People will treat this as the new fad that will “fix” their spiritual life or their church.
It won’t work. Doing spiritual practices won’t fix their problems, because they will misunderstand the ground and purpose of spiritual discipline.
Awoken to the deeper brokenness of their hearts, and their church’s and new guru’s inability to narrate deeper realities, people will despair.
Churches will then find something new, cast a new vision, and try to recover the feeling that we’re going somewhere.
This is the way of things in evangelicalism these days. But it is also the path of fad diets and other such fads that have infiltrated our culture.
We do not need the spiritual equivalent to a fad diet. What we need is a deep and abiding vision of faith, hope, and love. We need a robust spiritual theology that draws deeply from the well of the Christian tradition broadly, and the Protestant tradition more narrowly.
More often, we trade that depth for something reductive, simple, and marketable.
A rich spiritual theology will lead us into a deeper conversation about drawing near to God and sharing in God’s life. To use the older language, we need to recover our focus on union and communion with God, in Christ, by the Spirit.
What this will also reveal is that the spiritual formation conversation is a mixed bag. Some have reached deep into scripture and our tradition to help recover a depth of insight and understanding of God, salvation, and maturation. Others have sought to sell us a fad diet of spiritual practices, many of which are, at best, on the periphery of Christian existence, and which have little to no relation to life in the church, whose logic owes more to contemporary notions of the therapeutic than they do to holiness.
As far as I can tell, the only way to push against this trajectory is to demand something deeper. Let’s collectively seek an integrated vision of spiritual formation that helps us to recover the depth of spiritual living we can know in Christ by the Spirit.