Comer and Willard: Comparing Foundations for Spiritual Formation

Photo by Ian on Unsplash

It is important to start this post with the qualification that this isn’t a take-down piece of Comer. I am not interested here in evaluating his overall project. I do think it is important with someone like Comer to remember that he is a popularizer, something he is very honest about, and to engage his work with that in mind.

That said, we need to consider how popularizers go about their work of popularizing. There is a lot of temptations in popularizing but it is a profoundly important work.

When Comer talks, for instance, about his book Practicing the Way, he claims he is summarizing the past 30 years of the spiritual formation conversation (it is technically a bit more like 45 years). One of my frustrations with the book is that he never says that in the book itself, but only afterwards on podcasts, but it was nice to hear that clarification (because if you know the past 45 years of the spiritual formation conversation, it is clear that is what he was doing).

But, importantly, even that claim is a bit of an over-simplification. No one simply summarizes, especially when his style is not to narrate the conversation itself. He is never saying, for instance, “Here is what happened in the spiritual formation conversation.” Rather, he is articulating a view of spiritual formation from the pieces of the spiritual formation conversation. In other words, Comer is taking from a series of different projects and piecing them together, and so in “summarizing” in this way, something new emerges.

In one sense, Comer is clearly doing what he claimed to have done, with one major caveat. His summary ends up taking in work that was never a part of the spiritual formation conversation, borrowing from figures that were, at best, on the periphery (most obviously folks like Rob Bell and Randy Frazee). If you took Rob Bell’s Velvet Elvis, some Foster and Willard, along with Randy Frazee’s The Connecting Church, put it into Chat GPT and said, “summarize in the voice of Comer,” you would get something like Practicing the Way.

But it is not only significant that Comer chooses to add in folks like Rob Bell, but where he does so. His project is built on the foundation set by his use of Rob Bell (who himself was employing the work of Ray Vander Laan in a similar vein). In doing so, Comer built his project on a foundation of disciples and discipleship that do not play the same role in someone like Willard (for my own thoughts on this, and a critique, see my mini-course on discipleship in the church “Why Discipleship Doesn’t Work”).

Another way to think about this is that, as a popularizer, Comer is working with a series of puzzle pieces, but he is taking pieces from different puzzles and putting them together into a work of his own. Like a tile mosaic, the image has changed with the new tiles inserted and with a new agenda brought to the project.

So if Comer is ultimately trying to popularize someone like Willard, the question we need to ask is: how faithful is that summary?

At first glance the answer would be, “Incredibly.” Willard is everywhere in this book. In many ways, the best way to think about what Comer was doing in Practicing the Way was to write a Cliff’s Notes guide to Willard. But there is a subtle and significant difference.

There is no doubt that the theme of disciple and discipleship pervade Willard’s work. But let me suggest that it is not the foundation, but the framework he uses to build on the foundation. For Willard, the foundational dynamic of following Jesus is not a development of something called “discipleship” primarily. Rather, the foundational dynamic of spiritual formation was Christ’s establishment of the kingdom of God. How we embrace life in the kingdom was understood through the lens of discipleship.

Willard’s foundation was about the kingdom of God as realism, and within that framework, the call of the Christian to be a disciple (i.e., apprentice of Jesus). In this sense, the controlling reality of Willard’s vision was the kingdom rather than discipleship, even though his view of disciples as apprentices advanced his view of the kingdom.

On Comer’s rendition, disciple and discipleship are the foundation, and everything builds from this.

Leaving aside questions about why the term disciple is never used after the book of Acts, or Comer’s claim that the word disciple is never used in the verbal form in the New Testament (it is, and is so in the Great Commission), it is important that what Comer has done is tried to put a Willardian structure on a Rob Bell foundation.

But does this change anything?

Yes, I think it does. The problem with advancing the kind of view of disciple and discipleship that Comer does is that it will never ultimately make sense of life in the church. It is a pre-ascension vision of the Christian life, which is one of the reasons, I think, why Comer rarely gets around to talking about Paul. His model is based on following Jesus around Galilee, something that is no longer the proper framework to consider the Christian life. Whatever it means to follow Jesus has to be entirely reimagined in light of his death, resurrection, ascension, and the sending of the Spirit.

For Willard, the Gospel accounts provided a view into the reality of things, which he used to situate a vision of discipleship as learning from Jesus to live within the kingdom (i.e., reality as it actually is). His work established a certain reading of the Gospels Christianly. Willard’s model, in other words, was not stuck in an ancient (albeit post-biblical age) vision of what a disciple is (as is Comer’s), but it understood discipleship as living the life of Jesus through our lives here and now by the Spirit.

It is, of course, possible to take Comer’s work in the same was as Willard’s and adapt it, but that would be going against the grain of Comer’s actual account. What he ends up doing is exactly what Willard does not do, which is to develop a vision of what a disciple was using sources after the Bible was written, and then employ those to talk about following Jesus. Willard, instead, focuses on the kingdom of God as the proper framework within which to reimagine discipleship.

There are questions, of course, about how best to do this, or if I am providing an adequate reading of Willard. There are folks who know Willard’s corpus better than I do, and they will have to judge. What this does highlight, I think, is that the question we need to ask concerns the proper context for Christian formation. Where are we formed? How does our formation work? How do we hear the call to “follow Jesus,” given that we are no longer wandering around Galilee and that Jesus as ascended to the right hand of God?

By changing foundations, the project has moved in a direction foreign to Willard’s thought. That does not mean, necessarily, that it is wrong, but it is worth attending to. Comer explicitly wanted to popularize Willard, and so this change of foundation is curious. How different it is from Willard’s vision will be seen, I think, in the future work that Comer does. The logic of his project will, I think, continually make itself known, revealing what is the undergirding vision beneath it. This is, I think, worth paying attention to.