The Future of Spiritual Formation

A Dispatch from the Spiritual Formation Summit

Photo by Vitaliy Paykov on Unsplash

I am starting to write this at the Spiritual Formation Summit held at Fuller Seminary in February 2025. The summit is an attempt to bring together people who work in the spiritual formation space across the Protestant world, and ask questions about what is going well, what do we need to address, and what is the next step forward.

Since, for me, writing is thinking, I am writing.

There have been several helpful taxonomies of the different waves of the spiritual formation movement (here is my podcast on that topic), but I also think it is helpful to reframe this discussion around the notion of maturation. As a conversation that has advanced mostly in publishing spaces, along with some gatherings over the years, I think we can still talk about the current adolescence of the spiritual formation conversation.

I locate the conversation in adolescence because it still really hasn’t come into its own. When you look at the bulk of the books published, and the nature of the conversation, it really hasn’t meaningfully developed from 30 years ago. In fact, in the popular publishing space, much of it is just summaries of what was said 30 years ago, as if spiritual formation was perfected in Willard and now we just have to market it.

This kind of approach fails to recognize that the earlier work in spiritual formation was located in a specific context with the insight and blindness that inevitably characterizes cultural moments. This is a failure to situate the current conversation in the broad movement of the Spirit across the centuries. Simply reiterating the past 30 years, or just popularizing it, is not the work of adulthood. If the conversation is going to grow up and stand on its own two feet, I think we have to see a change. What is that change? That is the goal of this post.

A Proposal

For the spiritual formation to grow up, it has to move beyond mere spiritual formation. I use the word mere here in light of the oft-used phrase “mere Christian.” Thus far the spiritual formation conversation has tried to articulate a vision of spiritual formation that is a kind of “one-sized-fits all” approach, as if doctrine, church, and culture are irrelevant to the discussion. This, in my mind, was necessary to start the conversation, but it has also kept the conversation in immaturity.

So my proposal is this, 1: We actually do need to cultivate a kind of mere Christianity, but we need to do so to stand in relation to one another well. We need to recognize that there is a core commitment to the spiritual life that cuts across Christianity broadly and Protestantism more narrowly. But we also need to affirm that this is not enough.

You cannot do serious spiritual theology or formation with only a mere Christian approach. This kind of approach is still very modern and very Western, and seeks to walk whatever path one wants. We are tempted to utter things like “mere Christian” or “the spiritual path” to not be held accountable a tradition. These terms can cloak the individualistic desire to not have to submit to anyone or any authority other than my own view of things.

The way this often shows up is treating the tradition like a buffet-line of spiritual practices and ad hoc ideas that you can piece together whatever way you want. Rather than recognizing that we need a true spiritual theology, we trade that out for a mosaic of our own making, arranging the tiles of spiritual practices into an image of our modern selves. This is how we would keep spiritual formation in its adolescence and where it will eventually die on the vine.

And, therefore, 2. What we need is a “traditioned” spiritual formation. This does not mean we need to just go back and simply reiterate prior thinkers, or that we are somehow trapped in a broken system of practice or belief. Our retrieval might be critical and creative. But we must enter deeply into a conversation that has been going on before us and will continue beyond us. We must moor ourselves deeply to the broad tradition, but also more narrow traditions, trusting that we do not own this conversation, but are merely called to faithfully shepherd it.

Two Paths Diverge

This all leads to a particular danger I see that I want to name clearly here, because the entire future of the spiritual formation conversation depends upon it. I realize that seems a bit apocalyptic, but I think this is true.

There is one way to approach spiritual formation (in the broadest terms) that is sub-Christian. This is to think that there is something called spiritual formation “out there” that we can articulate apart from the broader theological and ecclesial realities of the Christian life. In other words, this approach sees “spiritual formation” as the goal.

There are some really radical versions of this, often heretical, that sees spirituality as a shared heritage that is the greatest category, sometimes being greater than even Christianity itself. On this view, Christianity, and perhaps other religions, are all for the same purpose: to get us into the shared “spiritual” heritage.

Now, in the contemporary spiritual formation conversation, I don’t know of anyone who does anything like this. There are some doing this today, but they are not Protestants and are not really a part of the conversation. But there is a subtle error that can mimic these more radical views that still treats spiritual formation almost as if it is a theological system in its own right that trumps the traditions, churches, and theologies that gave rise to these movements.

As a brief aside, one of the bad fruits of this mistake is that folks who go down this path are inevitably theological illiterate, and typically have a view of the church that is entirely pragmatic. The church, for them, has become a secular enterprise, and theology feels to academic and heady and they want to get down to the real work of “change.” I put the word change in quotes because I often find that this word is used to articulate natural self-formation, and that is just assumed to be the same thing as spiritual formation.

The other path, the one that the Christian tradition continually takes, is the recognition that spirituality can never be divorced from theology or ecclesiology, such that we have to “tradition” our spirituality accordingly. This is why, to use one example, we find accounts of Reformed spirituality that, while sharing broadly similar theological convictions as Lutherans, nonetheless have a different spiritual vision.

What we need today is an irenic and broad conversation across the Christian tradition that does not undermine but deepens the traditioned nature of spiritual formation.

Now, I know that many evangelicals read this who might be thinking: do we have a spiritual theological tradition? We do. It is a bit more ecclectic than most, and is not as highly specified, but I think a clear evangelical tradition can be articulated (I often do so under the rubric: A Word-centered, Spirit-Empowered, Whole-Life spirituality). I tried to articulate the broadest features of this tradition in my book Formed for the Glory of God, using Jonathan Edwards’s spiritual vision as an example of a shared evangelical heritage. But the evangelical spiritual tradition is a room with a lot of space, continually grounding us in scripture, Spirit, and church for the transformation of a whole life.

The Deeper Life

What the Christian centuries reveal is that there are always folks, of every generation, bearing witness to a deeper way to be with Jesus and to become like Jesus. We often think of these figures as spiritual sages in the faith. But none of them were trying to become “spiritual sages” generically. In fact, they were trying to be evangelicals or Anglicans or Presbyterians or Lutherans, etc. It was in their embrace of a tradition that they became sages, not in losing sight of their tradition and embracing something generic called “spirituality.”

To paraphrase (and rework) a famous quote from Bernard McGinn, we might say that no one in the Christian tradition was ever trying to be spiritual but not religious. That is a modern phenomenon. Rather, in the tradition we find women and man who were spiritual giants because they were trying to be deeply Christian within their tradition, and not in spite of it.

I think it is a massive mistake to try to extract a generic spiritual vision and use that to reimagine the church, practice, and spirituality, as if Christian spirituality could ever be “traditionless.” The reason we try says a lot more about who we’ve become, our current cultural moment, and a life-hack generation that is looking for answers to a broken system. But we must not flatten out the spiritual tradition into a monolithic and a-theological (and a-ecclesial) monolith. Any attempt to do so will be to make it an impotent spirituality void of true spiritual insight and depth. It will inevitably become faddish.

Rather, what is needed are people who embody their tradition with depth, insight, and wisdom, not only in knowledge but in practice. This wisdom cannot be mass-marketed and disseminated. You cannot turn spiritual formation into a fast-food church project. It is more than just doing practices. Wisdom requires presence.

For spiritual formation to mature as a conversation, we need to have honest conversations with one another, and we need to read and converse broadly and deeply, to embody more fully a theologically-rich vision of formation.

I genuinely believe that this conversation is at a tipping point, where it must consider whether to grasp depth along with breadth, or if we will walk down the path of marketing strategies and a buffet-line approach to spiritual formation. The future of the conversation depends on the choices we make here and now.