Spiritual formation involves disciplines to strengthen our faith in order to become more like Jesus. Finding structure helps us not just grow but be pruned to bear sweet fruit.
My pastor once talked in a sermon about spiritual formation being like a trellis, a structure that guides vines and flowers. Growing in the Christian life happens more easily with a framework to help us to grow: rhythms and practices of prayer and service, some done in solitude and if possible some done in community. Otherwise it will become harder to find our bearing as we grow.
It’s difficult to objectively identify our own place in culture while we’re living in it. The pursuit of spiritual formation allows us to see the failings in our heart and be shaped by the culture of Jesus. A growing spiritual formation, no matter how fast or slow, is an elixir for anyone whose heart tends to worry, fixate on hot button issues, or center on ego. In other words, most of us.
Culture wars and ideologies like Christian nationalism look to the external world to find enemies and threats. But as Christians who define our identity inwardly, through a deepening and growing relationship with Jesus, we find health. The promise of hidden, inward transformation is gorgeous hope.
American Christians are a tiny corner of the church today, a bedroom community outside a great city. The church is thriving in emerging nations, with two-thirds of Christians residing in the Global South. America is far from the first nation to have trouble separating culture from Christian faith. In the early church, Greeks struggled to separate broader societal beliefs from their identity in Christ. Instead of nationalism, gnosticism—the idea that the body is inherently bad and the spirit good—was infused in the church.
During my youth, evangelicals who read headlines about communes becoming cults and were suspicious of the New Age movement were tepid about the idea of exploring and teaching their kids about spiritual formation. Instead of getting fancy with liturgy, I was taught to simply read my Bible during a daily quiet time, which reinforced the biblicism of evangelicalism—Catholic practices, including monastic prayer and liturgy, were performative.
While spiritual formation is ecumenical, Jesuits developed deep formational practices that have informed much of the tradition today. The rise in popularity of spiritual disciplines aligned with historically Catholic practices led to a tepid reception by evangelicals who questioned the eternal salvation of people who prayed to Mary or went to a priest to forgive their sins while sitting in a stuffy confessional box.
Dad was used to taking an “us versus them” posture in culture. He was waiting for Jesus to return while some friends thought he was crazy. In my family, it was also natural to draw the line between Protestants and Catholics. If we’d met any Greek Orthodox families, they’d have been on the other side of the line too.
Plus, no one knew much about contemplative Christian practices. They weren’t part of the zeitgeist. Instead of a rich practice of using liturgy and listening prayer to form a foundation that could withstand a changing culture, I was fed vacation Bible school curriculum and Christian summer camp songs around the fire that burned out after the weeklong programs concluded.
With no adaptive framework that grows with each generation and maintains relevancy, stories about Jesus can easily become nostalgia. The flame of “on fire for Christ” youth rallies will burn out if young perceptions of Jesus are not set up to grow with emerging minds.
Some of my Gen X peers who left the church did so because the church didn’t look or feel like us. Some who stayed until after we were out of our parents’ house or college bubble eventually left because we had not learned how to flourish as Christians in the wide world—where most white evangelical families lived identically to everyone else.
Friends who came of age in ’80s and ’90s American evangelicalism moved to cities, started careers, and began families. We shared a common experience: cultural assimilation, as Mark Sayers and John Mark Comer talk about in their podcast This Cultural Moment. The Missional church era I encountered in the early 2000s featured a lot of sermons with Matrix red pill/blue pill analogies and Sunday night services in bars that looked a lot different from my parents’ church.
Inside Mom and Dad’s nondenominational sanctuary, mauve pews matched mauve carpet. A capped hot tub rested behind a screen and served as an occasional baptismal. To appease older members, an 11:00 a.m. modern worship service designed to attract young families was launched after the 8:30 a.m. traditional service that stuck with organ-led hymns. Seasonal wreaths flanked both sides of the stage along with festive flags. When attempts to maintain relevant fizzled, churches like these began to lose the attention of younger members.
My own spiritual estrangement led to a wandering that lasted 12 years. I was drawn to the city and to a church culture that was different from what worked for my parents. Naively, I thought I could change the city, when really it changed me. Quickly.
You should have seen me at Victrola, the coffee place in Capitol Hill we’d walk to after church. I did not carry a Bible. I did not wear a cross. I did not dress for Sunday. I just looked like a typical twentysomething wearing a vintage dress and ordering an Americano.
In my mind, it was impossible to live in the city and be a Christian, because I’d never learned how. I was a Christian spy. I was undetected as I stood by the cream and sugar station. In those years, I worked very hard to manage the image of my faith in the city, which surfaced as an awkward self-consciousness.
I moved to the Pacific Northwest to help start a cohousing community that ended after two years. I witnessed friends beginning to shed our shared evangelical identity. Those years broke apart my certainty about what I believed about God. My experience was common for the time, with intentional communities and house churches across the country flaming out in those same years.
It took years for me to slowly retreat from protecting my own reemerging identity and find a way back toward Jesus.
The spiritual reconciliation that knitted my belief about God together after more than a decade of lukewarm faith—and assimilation into a spiritual but not religious culture—flourished through a new approach to spiritual formation.
I began to explore Ignatian spirituality through Debbie Smith Tacke, who was on staff at my church as the director of spiritual formation in the late aughts, when more churches were beginning to weave in contemplation and listening prayer. I found my 1978 copy of Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline and discovered the classic themes remained fresh. The book highlights inward practices, including prayer and fasting; outward disciplines, including solitude and simplicity; and corporate disciplines, including worship and celebration. “The need to change within us is God’s work, not ours,” Foster writes. Slowly, imperfectly, moving toward several of these practices became the trellis that grew my faith. One of these practices was participation in Quaker clearness committees.
In 2017, my husband, Drew, and I considered moving back to the Midwest after living in Seattle for more than 13 years. We talked for hours about every aspect of the decision. We outlined each scenario on 11×17 pieces of sticky paper and wrote on both sides. We talked to friends about the decision. We waited. And, ultimately, we remained stuck.
Debbie recommended gathering a few folks from our church to form a discernment group inspired by a Quaker clearness committee, a process to move toward clarity about a central question or decision. I’d been a part of a clearness committee led by a Jesuit priest in a discernment class in grad school, and valued sitting in a small group by candlelight and asking prayerful, open-ended questions to a classmate. I didn’t realize how vulnerable discerning out loud can feel, but with help from the group, after a series of meetings, we discerned that we should stay in the Northwest.
The decision to become rooted in Seattle brought a season of grief for the choice we didn’t pursue. But it also felt like removing a hair shirt or taking weight off my neck and shoulders. I learned through the process that a discernment about moving was more about calling than place, more about identity than geography.
Debbie and I also talked about applying Ignatian indifference to a central discernment question I was carrying about vocation. This Jesuit idea of “indifference” doesn’t mean we don’t care. Instead, Ignatian indifference is an active and healthy detachment from a decision, person or experience. In my life, it looks like coming to an open-handed posture in front of two sides of an idea or choice and being willing to let one or both things go if they do not bring me closer to God’s purpose.
To better love and follow God, we can pray to interact with what helps us flourish and release what doesn’t. This framework has changed the way I think about discernment questions and helped me move from quick-tempered reactivity to healthy detachment.
When we’re spiritually formed to practice applying a holy indifference, we can better extend grace to people in our lives who vote on the opposite end of the ticket. We can even disagree with fervor while loving each person God loves. We can release ourselves from balking, from knee-jerk outrage, and, at least once in a while, we can hold our beliefs with a looser grip.
Excerpted from Orphaned Believers by Sara Billups. Baker Books, a division of Baker Publishing Group. Copyright 2023. Used by permission. BakerPublishingGroup.com
