The Christian journey is a lifelong pursuit of being formed into the likeness of Jesus. But how does spiritual formation actually happen? As the director of Talbot School of Theology’s Institute for Spiritual Formation, Kyle Strobel helps Christians grapple with this and other questions to experience spiritual growth powered by God’s Spirit.
Strobel is a systematic theologian interested in theological anthropology, Jonathan Edwards and prayer. He has authored or co-authored several books, including his forthcoming work When God Seems Distant: Surprising Ways God Deepens Our Faith and Draws Us Near (Baker, releases Feb. 3rd), written with John Coe.
Strobel sat down with Outreach to discuss how growing up as the son of famed apologist Lee Strobel impacted his faith, the nature of spiritual formation, and what it looks like for Christ’s power to be made perfect in our weakness.
My first question is a serious one. Your birth was somewhat famously depicted in the feature film The Case for Christ. Do you feel like you were fairly represented?
Well, it took two baby girls to play one of me, so that’s the sheer emotional range we were working with. I can assure you, though, there’s nothing weirder than sitting in a movie theater with strangers watching your birth. That was something I’m not sure anything could have prepared me for.
How did growing up in the home of a man who would become one of the most influential apologists of his generation impact your journey with Jesus?
I’m thankful that my dad’s visibility and status came later in life, and that he never really had his own organization, either a church or a ministry. Because it is a weird experience growing up very visible in evangelicalism, and I think I was saved from a lot because of that. I also had a father who is just profoundly honest, who was a convert who never lost sight of the fact that Jesus has rescued him so incredibly.
I would say one of the great gifts I’ve been given was the realization before I began that I would fail. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve met who relate to me as a failure from the get-go because I’ll never be my father. And the gift in that is I don’t have to try [to be him]. I had a father who always encouraged me to follow the path the Lord laid out for me, and I’m incredibly grateful for having a father who has supported me in going in a very different direction than he went and understanding that we are both ministering to the church, just in different ways.
Was there a moment when you realized that, or was it a process over time?
I can think of a handful of conversations where it was really clear that people found me to be a disappointment because I wasn’t doing the same sorts of things that [my father does].
This is not just true of people with famous parents, but I would imagine it’s true of people who have wildly successful parents in the business world or the like. The temptation is to think, I could just be faithful with what I have, but then to see this [prescribed] path laid out for me. I mean, the number of folks I know who’ve been like, “I’ll just work for my dad’s organization. I’m guaranteed a job.” I never had any of that. So, there was never that opportunity, and then realizing that if I did try to ride [my father’s] coattails, I would ultimately be perceived as a failure, because that’s not who I am.
You’re the director of the Institute of Spiritual Formation at Talbot School of Theology. How do you define spiritual formation?
Spiritual formation, put very simply, is the Spirit’s work to form us ever increasingly into the likeness of Jesus. Now, right away, there are some important distinctions we have to draw. Spiritual formation, which every Christian believes in, I take to be unprovocative. Every Christian believes presumably that the Spirit’s at work, and the Spirit’s work is forming some likeness of Jesus.
But that has to be differentiated from the spiritual formation conversation that’s happened … this current iteration of it. My own background is in Puritan and evangelical models of spiritual formation. And so because spiritual formation is a part of a field of theology, just like any other theological kind of doctrine or idea, there’s going to be a Lutheran approach to that. There’s going to be a Reformed approach to that, right?
One of the great mistakes in the modern conversation is that a lot of folks naively assume that spiritual formation is a view. Oh, you believe in spiritual formation, therefore you must believe X, Y and Z. And that’s where a lot of confusion happens, where everyone gets lumped together.
The distinct thing that Talbot has really emphasized is our interest in spiritual theology. What is the nature of the Christian life? What kind of life is this? What does it mean that Christ is our righteousness and Christ is our sanctification, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 1:30? What does it mean that we need to bear the fruit of the Spirit?
We’re also going to have to talk developmentally. What are the processes of growth? Why does the New Testament talk about my growth in the same way as physical growth? John uses the imagery of children, young men and fathers. You get this developmental maturation, where you’re on milk, but you should be on solid food.
The New Testament uses our physical maturing into adulthood to talk about our spiritual growing into adulthood—or even with Paul, into the manhood of Christ, the completeness of Christ. And so spiritual theology needs to attend to what does it actually mean to grow, if the growth isn’t from me but, according to Colossians 2:19, it’s a growth that comes from God?
But then we also need to talk about directives, because whatever we’re doing, there are going to be imperatives. There’s going to be things we’re commanded to do. And so spiritual theology is the mode of theology that helps us articulate the nature of the Christian life as a life in Christ by the Spirit, the maturation of that life into the likeness of Jesus by the Spirit. But then [there are] the directives so that we can help shepherd souls, so that we can actually grow with a growth that is from God. Because at the end of the day, spiritual formation is about obedience from the heart.
What are the stages in spiritual formation that we can see and predict as a believer grows to fully mature in faith? Is there a predictable path that every Christian travels?
In some ways there is. The fact that Paul seems to presuppose that—that he can know who’s on milk and who should be on solid food—is an example. Scripture often talks about what we usually generically talk about as virtues but are more often in Scripture, things like the fruit of the Spirit, which I take with a lot of the tradition, including Jonathan Edwards, to be singular. So the fruit of the Spirit is love, semicolon. And then you see the remainder of that list, gentleness, kindness, faithfulness, self-control and these things are the way love characterizes a soul.
In Romans 5:5, we see the Holy Spirit’s pouring forth love into the soul. Love’s not a commodity I own. It’s not something that’s handed over to me. It is a way of me receiving God’s very life, so that his life begins to give shape to my life. And that’s in and through love. The way love characterizes my person needs to come out in various ways. I need to be transformed, and the way that transformation happens is going to be a work of the Spirit.
But one of the things that the Christian tradition has always pointed at is these three seasons of the soul. Consolation, which is that kind of milk phase, is that living on the bottle. Young believers are often flooded with joy and pleasure in the Christian life. Every Bible study is the most profound Bible study that’s ever been had. Every sermon is the greatest sermon. Every worship set is flawless. Everything is full.
The thing that gets confusing is that when you’re flooded with pleasure, you’re actually cut off a little bit from the brokenness of your soul. And this is, biblically, typologically, we would say, this is the plagues. When Jesus is raining down plagues on Egypt, and he marches out his people, and they’re just getting gifts of gold, they’re flooded with consolation. Everything’s wonderful.
The next thing God does is he marches them into the desert to show them what is in their heart. Our tradition often would talk about this in terms of the desert. Sometimes, we just talk about it in terms of dryness. And this often will happen in a kind of adolescence of the faith, where we’re in this season where—and sometimes it takes a while to even realize we’re in the season—we realize it when we’re bored, or we’re no longer expecting the greatest sermon. You might actually be a little critical of a sermon, or you might critique the worship leader’s decisions on what songs to sing.
The Lord often will lead his people into these seasons of the desert to show what is in our heart, and what we realize is the Lord is actually leading us to depend upon him. The Lord is leading us not to rely upon ourselves, not to rely upon our flesh, but to rely upon his Spirit.
The problem is that in consolation, we came to wed together God’s presence with an experience of pleasure. For a lot of Christians, this season becomes undoing, because they now begin to go, Uh-oh, this doesn’t seem to be working. God’s not here. There’s a danger in the desert season to try to inject consolation into it, to try to get excited.
But then the Lord will lead us into a season that much of the tradition will call dark night of the soul—our own tradition calls it spiritual desertion. And spiritual desertion is the counterpart to consolation. In consolation, God gives you a gift of his pleasure. In the desert, he just takes away pleasure, but he’s present to you. But now you have to learn God’s presence by faith and not by sight.
The desert showed you that you still have sin in your life that you need to address. But now the Lord wants to show you that even your spirituality is fleshly, that you preach out of jealousy and selfish ambition, as James 3:13 and following says. You give to the church, but it’s actually out of a kind of greed. You worship God because you think that if you do so, you’ll get what you want.
This is where our tradition wants to remind us—because we really are the “filthy rags” tradition—evangelicalism is the tradition that reminded us it is actually your “good works” that you’re most liable to rely on, your own righteousness rather than Christ’s. And so instead of clothing ourselves in our nakedness, the call was always to receive Christ’s robes of righteousness.
What does it look like, on a practical level, to remain engaged during those difficult seasons of feeling God’s absence?
The real temptation here is going to be threefold. The first is going to be turning to yourself to fix it. The second is to just try to generate consolation. A lot of people try to generate the feeling of excitement again. Because they became convinced that God and pleasure always go hand in hand, when God takes away the pleasure from them, they imagine God’s gone, and so they think the way to get him back is to get excited again. And this is where a lot of people will desperately scramble.
The third thing people will often do is turn to a strategy to fix their life. This is where we have to be very careful, because there are good things we should do that will fix our life. The problem is when we are using the Christian life to try to get life back, on our own terms, rather than giving ourselves to God. The solution is not to get out of where I am but to discover the Lord where I am.
One great example of this would be the thorn of the flesh passage in 2 Corinthians 12, where the Lord gifts Paul with a messenger of Satan to harass him. And we’re told the reason he does so is because Paul’s tempted by pride because of the other gifts God has given him. And after Paul pleads with the Lord to take this away from him, the Lord finally tells him, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in your weakness.” And so everything you do in this season not to know that [truth] is going to work against the Lord. We know what the Lord’s doing. The Lord’s always teaching us his power is made perfect in our weakness.
Most people, when confronted either with the desert or desolation, rise to abandon their weakness, and they try to find strength, or they try to abandon faith for sight, and they try to find something they can see, something that works, often something pragmatic. And that’s where it’s really dangerous, because those things might feel like they work for a short while, but they end up leaving us feeling consumed.
What’s the danger of becoming a virtuous person but not a spiritually mature person?
In Galatians 3:3, Paul is critical of the Galatians: “Why have you begun in the Spirit, but now you think you could be advanced by the flesh, be perfected by the flesh?” Paul is being really critical of a church whose error is they were trying to live the Christian life, not in the Spirit, but in the flesh.
What they weren’t doing is just sinning. I think the problem is a lot of Christians read “the flesh” as always sin—and it is sin in one sense—but here it’s the sin of autonomy. The Galatians had all sorts of problems. Sinning and thinking, If I sin more, I’ll grow, wasn’t one of them. They weren’t that bad. But they traded the gospel for a vision of spiritual formation that was of the flesh and not the Spirit.
In the New Testament, what we discover is that there are two parallel ways of life. There’s a way of life that has let go of Christ, who is our head as Paul says in Colossians 2:19, and there’s a way of life that is growing into our head, who is Christ, with a growth that is from God.
If someone is just trying to be good, this is what we would often call the moralist or the legalist—they’re just trying to be a good person. The goal is their goodness, and the way they achieve their goodness is by wielding their selves, their fortitude, their flesh. So we all have the capacity to develop habits to be good. That’s just Aristotle. Not only the Scripture, but the entire Western Christian tradition says you cannot live the Christian life according to the flesh.
I have little seeds in my life of things like humility and kindness and patience in the flesh. I can become a more patient person. I could have more fleshly self-control. An atheist can do that. As a Christian, I’m called to be holy. I don’t have holiness in me without Christ. I have to receive it from him, and so that means I’m still going to have to develop habits. But now they’re habits that I’ve received from him, and they’re not ordered to my growth, because my primary goal isn’t growth. My primary goal is to give myself to my Lord. My goal is to abide in Jesus. And so it is in abiding in Jesus that I bear much fruit, not in trying to bear much fruit.
One of the great temptations of the spiritual formation conversation has been to try to reduce spiritual formation down to spiritual disciplines. And my worry is, in a life-hack generation, that a lot of people have falsely come to believe that spiritual formation is simply doing spiritual disciplines to be good. It’s exactly what Paul warns about in Colossians 2.
Evangelicalism is a very pragmatic tradition, and we’re attracted to what works. Are there ways in which evangelicals are uniquely susceptible to being tempted to use spiritual practices as a substitute for actual formation?
I think there is. We are called clearly to be practical. The temptation is pragmatic, and that’s when the practical loses sight of Christ in Christ’s work. I’ve met a lot of Christians who have underlined, “My power is made perfect in your weakness,” but who’ve never believed it for a moment. And I’ve been to a lot of churches that clearly don’t believe that’s true. What we’re susceptible to is developing pragmatic programs where Christ is not necessary and where we can judge it with the eyes of the flesh, rather than with the eyes of faith.
You’ve written about the pursuit of power and success in the church. In recent years, we have seen scandal after scandal. To what measure is the crisis of pastor abuse scandals a crisis of formation?
We have the unique privilege—maybe that’s a hard word to use with this—of having a front row seat to what happens when God judges his church. And what we are seeing is a tree bearing its fruit. And on almost every account, we could say we are a profoundly sick tree, and I think we need to adjust.
This is one of the reasons that Talbot now requires all students take a year and a half of spiritual formation as a part of their training in ministry. Because we were looking at the lives of pastors, and we were seeing failed marriages. We were seeing quite a lot of immaturity. We were seeing people who were funding their ministry with rage rather than love. We were seeing people who, when they did use their words, either online or personally, they were bearing witness to a kind of sickness of soul.
And it actually isn’t a problem of power. In many ways, we really should pursue power. Christians should become powerful Christians. But it’s only ever a power made perfect in our weakness, and it’s only ever a power that comes from God. And so it’s a power that leads to my humility, that leads to me being shaped and conformed to Jesus. But I think what’s happened is we’ve come to believe there’s only one kind of power, which is worldly power.
We’ve had Christians pursue worldly power, thinking foolishly that they can sow to the flesh and reap in the Spirit. And that’s going to be true in every area of life. And this is where in James 3:13 and following, James lists the two ways: the way from above, which is the way of Jesus, and the way from below, which is the way of the world, the flesh and the devil—that is oddly and interestingly characterized by selfish ambition and jealousy.
The problem is selfish ambition and jealousy can fund a ministry. It could fund the Christian life. It could fund whole movements. And I think our temptation is to assume that just because we can do that and it looks like it works, it gets good numbers, then that must be God’s blessing on it. It turns out God showing up somewhere and blessing might look like the thorn in the flesh. We have to discern these things by faith.
And that’s where the pragmatism really has come home [to roost] in evangelicalism. I can’t even tell you how many people have said something to me like, “I know my pastor’s a total narcissist, but man, can he preach.” And I’m going, “I don’t even know what we’re talking about anymore.”
Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians [1:17] that there’s a mode of preaching that empties the cross of its power. And we are seeing what happens when a sick tree bears its fruit. I think the Lord is judging his church right now, and the division that is occurring, the wrath from people, the divisive behavior, the reductions, the refusal to relate to one another honestly in good faith and charity—all these are fruits on a sick tree that the Lord is now showing us. The question is, what do we do in response? Will we respond in the flesh, or will we respond in the Spirit?
How can pastors help their people see through online personalities that grow their platforms with selfish ambition under the guise of Christian virtue?
I think one of the sick fruits that has occurred because of pragmatism has been almost an assumption that wolves and hired hands, to use Jesus’ language, are rare. Whereas, if you’re in the New Testament, the assumption is Satan is always at the gates. Satan is always sowing discord. It’s not only wolves that are a problem, but hired hands. And that isn’t a matter of if, but it’s how these things are trying to infiltrate our churches and individual Christian lives.
We have to help our people not just look at Scripture, but, to borrow an image from John Calvin, to wear Scripture as a set of glasses that we look through, so that Scripture actually helps us see what’s going on in the world.
We need to begin to hold public personas accountable. I would say anyone who has a social media account that is declaring things are true has become a teacher. And we’re warned that not many of us should become teachers. I would say churches need to start using social media accounts as a bit of a litmus test for who should be in leadership and who should be elders.
I personally help run a church. If I found out an elder candidate was spending a lot of time debating theology online, that would become a major red flag for me. If they were demeaning other people online, there’s no way they could be an elder. So we need to start using biblical frameworks and metrics. People who lie and spread lies in Scripture are people who are telling you where they’re from.
One of the problems with pragmatism is it reverses how Scripture weighs these things. In pragmatism, someone who for good ends uses evil means—that’s not great, but we allow for it because we’re pragmatic. There is simply no room for that in the kingdom of God.
I’ve learned this in a way that was humiliating. You alluded to The Way of the Dragon or the Way of the Lamb, which I wrote with my dear friend Jamin Goggin. We chose seven people in the entire world to point at and say, “These are the people who’ve modeled the way of Jesus.” And one of them turned out to be a serial abuser.
Jamin and I found that out on a Friday night. Earlier that day, I literally had just given a talk on how to discern wolves in sheep’s clothing. And Monday morning, we were on the phone with our publisher, asking them to take our book out of print. And we spent many months wrestling through, what do we do when we wrote a book on how to name evil power, and how to depict the way of Jesus and discern the way of Jesus, and we were duped?
But one of the things that taught us is that growing up in the evangelical church had actually led us to an overly simplistic vision of, Oh yeah, there’s one kind of person out there, and they always look like this. They’re always a toxic narcissist who’s always boasting in these ways and saying demeaning and false things online. We came to create a caricature, and we missed that.
It turns out wolves are actually really good at hiding, and it means that we’re all going to have to take on a kind of training. This is a hard work, but the New Testament in particular gives us quite a lot of material, training us on how to discern these things. We need to train people individually, but I would say even more so we need to constantly help people understand what God’s power in weakness looks like.
But then, institutionally, we have to begin to ask some serious questions, like, “Do our hiring practices take into consideration that God’s power is made perfect in weakness, not in strength?” And I would say most often that’s not the case. And the reason why toxic people end up in ministry is because churches want them. People and congregations want them. This is something that it’s not one or two people. There’s a systemic issue, and the call of the cross is to stand and bear witness to a different way.
For pastors and leaders who are looking out on the challenges of our day, what can they do to cultivate love and joy in their relationship with Jesus as they try to serve their people out of the well of that relationship?
I would make sure you’re always going godward. If your congregation frustrates you, tell the Lord. Draw near to Jesus. When we live in ages like ours that are hard—there’s a lot of challenges, there’s a lot of things to be worried about, there’s a lot of things to be afraid of. The advantage of living in this kind of season is there’s absolutely no hope in ourselves. It is literally going to take an act of God.
The temptation is to constantly look at the speck in someone else’s eye, but I would say, start with your own heart. If you see a narcissistic pastor, begin with your own temptation to pride. If you see someone who’s using words that are antithetical to the way of Jesus, who is bearing false witness, who is lying, who is not seeing others as more significant than themselves, start with your own temptation to those things.
Starting with our own sin and brokenness, taking that to the Lord, and entrusting him with our lives, we’re now going to be able to help other people navigate the world without just reacting to it.
The problem is people are tending to react and then overreact. The temptation is to constantly respond. And that stems from a deep belief that you don’t believe God will actually show up. We always need to be driven back to our Lord, spend time praying the Psalms, and allow the Psalter to shape your expectations. Allow the Psalter to teach you how to take your worries and fears and angst and anger all to the Lord as a way to just rest in him and rely upon him.
I would make as a constant companion John 15:5: Without you, I can do nothing. And don’t begrudgingly say that. Remember that that’s good news that his power is made perfect in your weakness, not your strength. Trust that God will act, and God’s not waiting to act until you get your act together. God’s called you to come to himself.
For people in ministry, you’re going to need a lot of reminding that you’re in desperate need of Jesus, because you’re going to always be tempted to think that what people need is for you to look like you have everything together. What they actually need is a pastor or a leader who relies entirely upon Jesus and who bears the fruit of the life of Jesus in their own life. So that’s my call to them: Don’t forget that the true end of all your action is abiding in Jesus.
Dale Chamberlain serves as content manager for ChurchLeaders.com.