Spiritual Formation
The second half of the Great Commission calls us to make disciples by enabling people to bring their life into full obedience to “everything Christ commanded us.” That is a big job. It involves more than listening to interesting sermons and singing cute songs. It involves Scripture, relationships, learning and transformation. Down through the years various labels have been used to describe this process. The newest one is “Spiritual Formation.” But, before we talk about this new term, how about a short history of recent terms for this process of disciple-making?
Sunday School
Sunday School was the hot term in my denomination in the 1950’s and 1960’s. It was the “right arm” of the church (morning worship being the left arm, Sunday evening service and prayer meeting being the legs and the whole body was dressed with two revival meetings and one camp meeting a year. That pretty much summarized the “purpose-driven church” of my denomination of the 1950’s (and even 1960’s). Sunday school was the most exciting thing going. It was the most “seeker sensitive” of all meetings of the church. Almost all churches in my denomination had a larger Sunday school attendance than worship in the 1950’s. Most everything else the church offered was a “large gathering run by the preacher.” Sunday school included smaller groups run by the laity. And, it was for teaching: teaching children the basics and teaching adults how to handle and apply the Bible. Sunday school was king in the 1950s and 1960’s in my denomination and everyone liked the term.
But the term “Sunday school” wore out and became a joke. In the 1960’s and 1970’s my denomination was on its way up the socioeconomic ladder toward becoming respectable and more mainline. In many mainline churches Sunday school is mostly for the children not respectable adults—they went to worship while the kiddies went to Sunday school. Sunday school featured prizes, contests, competitions, banner class awards, Sunday school picnics, opening exercises, and a string of pins for loyal attendance. These seemed trivial to the increasingly professional people in my denomination. Thus a perfectly good name like “Sunday school” got tarnished and never recovered respectability again. S-U-N-D-A-Y S-C-H-O-O-L became synonymous with M-I-C-K-E-Y- M-O-U-S-E. My denomination sought a better term.
Christian Education
There was a perfectly good alternative to “Sunday School” available—“Christian Education.” But nobody could get my denomination to buy it. Twice there was an attempt to consolidate all disciple-making ministries at our headquarters into one department of Christian Education, but the general conference voted it down both times. With those defeated plans went the term “Christian Education.” We were left with a Sunday School Department and a Youth Department, and a programmatic competitive approach to ministries at all levels. Attempts to get people to think beyond programs or “departments” to the concept of Christian Education were largely fruitless—the grass roots didn’t buy it.
So why didn’t “Christian Education” find traction in my denomination? Who knows? Was it because CE was seen as a giant ogre gobbling up all the little “program departments” and jobs? Did CE fail to catch hold because it was too near the term “Religious Education” so popular in the liberal churches at the time? Was the term rejected because the emerging Christian school movement had co-opted the notion of “a Christian education?” Or, was it rejected because its last name—Education—which had a classroomish flavor with fluorescent lighting, a whiff of chalk dust and droning lecturers? Did people want a more dynamic name that reflected something more transformational? Who knows? For whatever reason, “Christian Education” never got traction except in the colleges and among some local churches—never at the denominational level.
In the 1970’s my denomination introduced a compromise term—“Local Church Education.” It jumped the hurtles and was enacted in one department overprinting the worn out Sunday school label. But nobody ever really liked the term much. It accomplished distinguishing the work as local church oriented (rather then education that a college might offer), but it still did not clarify how “LCE” was different than local church education done by what were now called “Christian schools.” Like many compromise terms, it was accepted without enthusiasm. About the only people who liked it were the wise guys who loved to dismiss the whole enterprise by mocking the letters as secretly being the name of a cow.
So “
Discipleship
By the 1980s and 90’s Sunday school was in a full nosedive. Increasingly it was becoming a children’s program. Grown ups went to worship while the kids went to Sunday school—or combined Sunday-school-children’s-church. A new small groups movement made a major bid to replace Sunday school and actually did in some churches for a while. That is, until the church leaders got tired of investing the energy to keep the small groups going. Many of these churches who dropped their Sunday school in favor of small groups eventually dropped both and adopted the mainline pattern of adults-go-to-worship-while-the-kids-go-to-Sunday-school. Discipleship was a great term—it denoted life transformation, not just “study” or “lectures”. It was a word denoting mission not means. Discipleship has strong Bible roots and looked like it would gain space in people’s mind.
But the Navigators ruined “Discipleship.” Not that they intended to. All publishers helped them. Once the term started catching on, publishers “committed to serving the church’s needs” came running with all kinds of “Discipleship materials.” The Navigators model prevailed: discipleship became “working your way through a fill-in-the-blank book.” People got tired of this fill-in-the-blank homework. The term was largely discarded by the turn of the millennium.
Spiritual Formation
The latest term for the disciple-making process is Spiritual Formation. It is based on Colossians 4:19 where Paul says he is “in the pains of childbirth until Christ is formed in you.” This new label (new for us) has the transformational flavor we want. Paul used the notion of transition from fetus to birth in his writing to the Colossian church. The term is clearly progressive and journey-oriented which fits out model of making “fully devoted followers of Christ.” And it is a term that sheds all past negative associations with either Sunday school or education. I like the term.
But the
really important reason I like the term is the process is hard to be individualized. That is, Paul wanted to form Christ in you
(plural—you the whole church, not just an individual). That is, spiritual formation is the process
of birthing Chritlikeness in the body of Christ—the
group, not just individuals. In
spiritual formation the church—the body of Christ—takes on the spirit, the
characteristics, values, and actions of Christ as a collective group. This is why Paul was feeling “labor
pains.” He was serving as the midwife for the birth of the character of Christ
into the body of Christ.
When someone kills the term “Spiritual Formation” it will probably be because they have individualized the term out of ignorance. They will probably make the term mean equivalent of “personal devotions.” They’ll talk about spiritual formation as if it is forming Christ in you (“you” singularly, not plural). Spiritual formation does not mean having devotions—it is the process of making the church function as the body of Christ—becoming the incarnation of Christ’s character on earth. It is making the body of Christ think, feel and act like Christ. This larger meaning of Spiritual formation is why I like this term so much.
So, how do we “form Christ” in the church?
Maria Harris has answered that most effectively for me in her book on curriculum Fashion me a People. She describes the “curriculum” of spiritual formation as far more than printed materials used in classroom education. Rather a local church is transformed to become the body of Christ on earth through at least five major experiences: fellowship, prayer teaching, preaching and service. People are spiritually transformed as much (or more) by a missions trip focused on service as they are a classroom lecture using traditional curriculum. To Harris, the total life of the church that is designed to “form Christ” in the community of believers. Here are her five primary means to spiritual formation in the church as I adapt them in my own teaching:
1. Koininia: -Spiritual formation of the church through fellowship and caring.
2. Leiturgia: -Spiritual formation of the church through prayer and worship.
3. Didache: -Spiritual formation of the church through orderly teaching.
4. Kerygma: -Spiritual formation of the church through of proclamation by preaching
5. Diakonia: -Spiritual formation of the church through service and social action.
I like Maria Harris’ approach. It helps us think about spiritual formation as the duty of the total church experience—not just the classroom teaching or Didache. She sees the spiritual formation “curriculum” including a carry-in dinner and mission trip along with classroom teaching and running around the bases of the new member classes. To her “curriculum” is the sequence of experiences the church offers that leads to the transformation of itself into the functioning body of Christ—representing Christ-on-earth in word, thought and deed. I like this thought better than the older “program” approach to things.
So, I like the new label for disciple-making—Spiritual formation. I think I’ll try to persuade my university to change the name of that course I teach from “Local Church Education” to “Spiritual Formation in the Church.” I need to start using this new term before someone ruins it too.