The Emergent Nature of Spiritual Formation
As a counselor, professor, and Christian, I work at a fantastic intersection of life. Change, growth and formation is something that people are hungry for, and something I am challenged daily to help people with. As I reflected on the last few months, I notice that struggling clients, students, and friends hardly ever bring up growth and development directly. They hardly ever pay attention to how they get into their current predicaments in the first place. We all do that—we speak about one thing (often complaining about a problem or hurt) and forget to realize that the struggle emerged over time. For example, we might be anxious about our body shape, and forget that we have been filling our minds with Instagram celebrities, and strong messages about the ‘ideal’ for years.
Reading Matthew Crawford’s book, The World Beyond Your Head, I have been confronted with the reality that we rarely pay full attention to anything. So much of our lives are busy, split, harried, despite the amount of information our unconscious brain is handling automatically. We don’t slow down and consider just how much of our time and attention are organized around what other people have suggested to us. Crawford says the “Choice Architects” (the advertisers and designers of our social world) really dominate what we ingest and notice: media, posts, brands, etc. Yet, in this melee of information and experience we are hoping to spiritually mature.
The crazy part is your formation began years ago. The first relationships you were in created a dynamic web around you. And that web was embedded in a specific type of community. And that community slotted into a cultural and historical moment. All this interweaving of people, places, preferences, choices, relationships, created a formative system that experientially suggested to you what to like, engage, value, follow, retweet. This keeps happening. You and I are being shaped every day as we don’t pay attention. Even though we will occasionally say things like “I am really thinking about my life with the Lord right now,” our choices and actions are still embedded and emerging from a formative context that we often don’t even see.
Take a look at 1 Corinthians. Paul shows us that falling prey to formative contexts and how they shape us is nothing new. In fact, Paul strategically responds to the lived, ongoing, socialization and enculturation of the Corinthian Christians. They are neurologically, historically, narratively, socially, and relationally used to a way of life—it is their old home and they are laying its rules over the gospel. As a result, they are increasingly formed like their old home.
Today’s culture puts you and me squarely in a developmental context of idea dispersion, subjectivism, self-definition, loyalty to micro-communities, branded identities, and self-expression. What emerges is some very specific formation. As we bubble along, exposed and unaware, we are shaped by our day, culture, and moment in history. We are shaped by what taps into our desires and historical formation.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying you just passively receive and do. But I am noting how significantly we are shaped. So, what does emergent spiritual formation look like when we are embedded and active in Godly communities that pay attention to how they organize themselves, relate to others, and use the Kingdom as their plumb line? What does it look like when we are in communities that recognize our present moment is distinct and yet the gospel transcends; communities that are savvy about what they ingest and enjoy; communities that intentionally love and guide? That spiritual formation will look culturally relevant, attuned, fitting, and also much more distinctive than what we currently find.
Returning to body stress as an example, formation emerges from a collection of changes: attending to the cultural messages we are drinking in; tuning our attention to the blessing of exercise, rather than the 36” waist that used to be a 32”; realizing it was middle school ridicule that provoked a self-critical view of the body; having accountable spiritual friends hear our struggle and attend us in our shame; resisting the doom scrolling of Instagram; committing to a kingdom minded community where liturgy combats our wayward temptations. In short, using our attention, actively looking towards the Kingdom, changing our developmental contexts, and returning to Jesus personally, truly facilitates emerging spiritual formation.
