Spiritual Formation in the Future of the Church (Featuring John Mark Comer)

[MUSIC] Welcome to the first episode of the Contemplative Pastor. A podcast we're starting and practicing the way for pastors seeking to recover a formation way of life and leadership in the way of Jesus. My name is Brian Roundson and I'm a pastor at Canopy Church in Costa Mesa, California, and I'll be one of your guides throughout this podcast. But before we move into today's teaching with John Mark Comer, where we'll spend the majority of our time, I want to give you a sense of what you can expect from this new podcast. Each episode of the Contemplative Pastor will focus on a teaching or conversation from different guides and sages exploring the important topics within spiritual formation. Together with my co-host Bethany Allen, we'll follow these teachings with practical conversations, guided prayers and reflections to help translate what we're hearing into our own lives and into our communities. Our prayer is that this contemplative pastor can serve as a much needed companion for your journey in pastoral ministry, helping you feel seen, inspired, and met by God. Okay, with that said, let's move into our first episode. This first teaching titled spiritual formation in the future of the church was delivered by John Mark at the first annual practicing the way pastor conference in Portland, Oregon in the fall of 2022. This event had a thousand pastors from all over the world coming from wildly different context traditions and denominations, yet united around a shared curiosity and a deep longing to see the life of the church and its witness ordered around a slower, more formational way of being. Gathering this many pastors always carries a sense of shared understanding. To be in a space where so many others, even if strangers at first, know the gifts and pains that you carry as a leader is a powerful experience and this was a wonderful time. In this talk, John Mark zooms out to explore how spiritual formation in the context of the Western church has arrived at this current moment and then offers an invitation for what might be next. As we prepare to hear this teaching, let's begin with prayer. As we enter this time, I take a moment to slow down and make room, to breathe, to settle, to notice God's presence here with me. Spirit of God, gather my attention and quiet my hurry. May this conversation become a place of encounter where my heart is awakened, my mind renewed, my life gently formed in the way of Jesus. I'm sitting at a little vegan lunch spot I love in Costa Mesa, California with Alan Fadley. If you're not familiar with Alan, he's a writer and a long time spiritual director to pastors. He's in his early 60s and I think similar to John was in that band of Southern Californian pastors who were in Willards Orbit for years in Alan's case in an unofficial mentee mentor relationship. Meaning, he's been in the spiritual formation world since its rebirth in the Western Protestant stream of the church about four or five decades ago. To timestamp this, this lunch was about seven or eight years ago before we started practicing the way at Bridgetown and at the time, I believe the word for what I was is messed up. Through a long series of events, I had been turned on to formation literature. Willard was kind of my gateway drug and I was just like drinking it all in. It was like discovering good water for the first time. But it was dawning on me and I was like really like something had turned upside down in my heart because it was dawning on me that our model of church was in all honesty, not designed to yield a high level of transformation in our people. Not that people are widgets and if you come up with the right strategic approach to church or the right model, you put them on the assembly line and three years later they come out living the sermon on the mount if only. But the architecture of our church was not built with the intention of walking people into a way of life that was conducive to in the language of the New Testament transformation of a soul into a person of love in God. It was set up for good things, things like preaching the gospel or what we would have called evangelism or for mission or for making good friends in the city. It was not set up for what my friend Rich Viotis calls the deeply formed life. So I was a bit of a mess and I was living not through a crisis of faith I've been through that too but through a crisis of discipleship and kind of a crisis of church. I had somehow been through Bible college and seminary I may or may not have graduated Kuma, South Laude, some Latin word, something. I was leading a church that at the time was quite large but about 70 or 80% of what I was learning about the healing and growth of the soul, about how we become people of love, about how we move deeper into union with the Father and the Son and the Spirit. Most of what I was learning was new information to me. I thought how did I get this far and not have a cursory grasp of a very simple question how do people change? When I was searching for a way to integrate all that I was learning about formation into our church but for the life of me I could not find any working models. So I asked Alan, "Hey do you know of any churches?" Like not just I have amazing books that I'm reading but do you know of any churches that are actually working this stuff out in real time? In response he gave me this framing of the spiritual formation movement in three waves. This is not like chapter in verse, this is Alan so if you disagree it's him, alright? Not me. Verse 1 was books, Richard Foster as you know wrote celebration of discipline. I think in 1978 just about 30 minutes from here, Willard after that wrote the Spirit of the Disciplines. These two books arguably launched and kind of sparked a whole movement and launched dozens more kind of bringing people from the church tradition that I grew up in at least back to this ancient kind of stream of the church that had been lost over time. You could argue they came as a counterbalance to the rise of the mega church and the secret sensitive movement and to kind of as a response, a loving response to the bankruptcy of discipleship, shallow spirituality and a historicity that had become endemic in evangelicalism. That was wave 1. Wave 2 non-profits were started to gather people together around these books and ideas and learnings and practices to walk people into ancient disciplines from the way. Renovary of course was the flagship but you have the Transforming Center with Ruth Haley Barton I think starting in the early 90s and many more. But they were all outside of the local church. It's not a critique, it's just a statement of fact. They were run at a retreat center or a seminary or in a cohort model not bad but not in the local church. Wave 3, Alan said, was some churches dedicated a pastor or a staff member to spiritual formation. But he said one, it was very few churches that would do that and two, most of the time it was just a rebrand of the small groups pastor or the family life pastor. But occasionally, oh that was a little too close. We have inner healing prayer that will be available after this morning session. But occasionally, they were actually doing formation work whether that was spiritual direction or inner healing prayer or teaching on the disciplines or retreats or whatever. But it was very rare and most of the time it was relegated to the periphery of the church as a whole never to the center. And then Alan was quiet. And I said so, wait, when was Wave 4? When pastors woke up to the reality that how we do church in the modern west is a, not the way that church was done in some of the best seasons of its history for 2000 years. And two is not conducive to transformation in a large number of people in any significant way. And we honestly need to remodel or rearchitect how we do church to make formation the driving aim if I'm reading the New Testament right. And he put his head down and said, sadly it never happened. It never made it to pastors and it never made it into the church. Apparently, and I have this third hand, so who knows, but whether or not this story is factual, it's still true. But apparently, it's not a theological statement, I promise. But apparently, Willard on his deathbed said, if this movement doesn't get into the life of the local church, it will be nothing more than a passing fad. And this was the logic as it was passed on to me because the only institution that will be around a thousand years from now is the Church of Jesus, not practicing the way, not Bible project, not you film the blank, the Church of Jesus. Already, for all of the formation literature out there, from my vantage point, I see a sharp. drop off and decline in the number of pastors and leaders that are even asking questions or interested in formation. I would argue the FAD is already over. Now, pretty much every pastor I talk to with a rare exception would agree that discipleship or formation, and I use those two terms interchangeably, is a major weak spot in the Western Church, yet very few of them propose workable solutions. So either, and I'm sure this is something like your experience, they give a scathing critique of the status quo, but not really with any better alternative beyond vague theories, which is a dysfunctional pattern that my generation has honed to perfection. Or they default back to older models of discipleship that, and I don't want to sound ungracious, but honestly didn't work all that well in 1982, and definitely don't work very well in 2022, in the complexity of our cultural moment. But my thesis is that the crisis of discipleship in the modern church, and of course I'm speaking in that very broad sense of Western, isn't a bug, it's a feature. As the saying goes, in the business world, your system is perfectly designed to give you the results you are getting. Since at least World War II, in North America and far beyond, I know a lot of you are coming from other cultural contexts, but at least here, the gospel has been preached in such a way that you could become a Christian without becoming a disciple of Jesus. That's just true. We have separated Jesus' twofold call to make disciples that we just read, both baptizing them into the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, or what I grew up hearing called evangelism, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you, what was called discipleship. Now, of course, this raises the question, what exactly are we baptizing people into then? Is it even the kingdom of God in Jesus' imagination, or is it just a Christianized version of the right, or the left, or materialism, or careerism, or American success, or social justice, or whatever it is? But this ribbing a part of evangelism, quote, and discipleship, and to add insult to injury, the demotion of discipleship to an optional secondary phase in your spiritual journey, has created a two-tier church across the world, and for sure in this country, where we have a wide band of Christians who have a nominal faith that is really a syncretism of the way of Jesus and the left or the right, who are consumer-oriented and all honesty, and whose primary reference point for spirituality is the self-life, not the self-debt. Then you have a minority who are actually following Jesus and living as disciples or apprentices. As you know, even in our post-Christian culture, something like, and I'm sure it's much lower for those of you from New Zealand or whatever, but in America, something like 70% of the population still identify as Christians, not in a city like Portland, but in the nation as a whole. But a number of pendant surveys all put the number of Americans were actually following Jesus at around 8%. When Barna did that, I'm sure a ton of you read it, that wide-ranging survey of millennial spirituality across 26 nations, East and West, all around the world, they came up with an even lower figure, as you would imagine, for millennials, of millennials who grew up in the American church. So not millennials in general. This is millennials who grew up in the American church. 8% are what they called resilient disciples, and that sounds cooler than it actually is if you read the literature. That's not like the next David Platt or Francis Chan, all right? This is what John Stott called "basic Christians." Like they go to church a few times a week. They read their Bible and pray, their Orthodox anthology, and they want to live like Jesus. Like basic Christians. Friends, 8% is not great. It's not even close. Cue the Willard quote that I just come back to again and again. The greatest issue facing the world today, let that sink in. With all its heartbreaking needs, is whether those who are identified as Christians will become disciples, students, apprentices, practitioners of Jesus Christ, steadily learning from Him how to live the life of the kingdom of the heavens into every corner of human existence. And for those of you who have not read the divine conspiracy, forgive the spoiler, but to save you 400 pages of tough sledding. He said, "What we need to move forward is what he called a curriculum for Christlikeness. We have a curricula for books of the Bible for systematic theology, for marriage, and parenting, more and more for work and vocation. What we need is a curriculum for how to become a non-anxious presence, to let co-op outcomes, to suffer lovingly, as Cassade said, to love your enemy, to forgive those who hurt you, to let your wounds, because we all have wounds, become sacred wounds. A curriculum to become the kind of person for whom living the sermon on the mount is the natural byproduct of your inner life of God and your outer life in God's community." The original name for what we call practicing the way was curriculum for Christlikeness. I have all these old docs that say CFC on it, but we ended up rebranding due to the word curriculum, having negative academic connotations. But the reality is, Willard never wrote one, and that is not a critique, that is a call. And you, on me, on us, to take up the baton and carry forward what he and many others started, or really restarted in our stream of the church. Now I can't speak for you, but I for one, you know, I just hit that kind of midlife, actually, I'm full on into midlife at this point. But I for one am not interested in spending the next 30 or 40 years of my life managing the decline of the traditional Western church. I have better things to do with my time. If the portlands of the world are any indication of the future, that is a surefire way to bleed your soul dry. But I would love to give the rest of my life to working out a way of following Jesus, doing life together in his family, that I could hand down to my children and my grandchildren and should God carry my great grandchildren. That would empower them to walk with God for centuries to come, no matter where the culture goes or does not go. C.S. Lewis once said that the essence of friendship can be summed up in the simple phrase, "You too?" "You too?" "You're into that too?" "Murders? Only murders in the building?" "You too?" Hopefully, it's deeper than that. You know what I'm saying. This gathering is a "You too" moment. We're here from all over the world and the questions that brought you here, the questions that you're asking are, sadly, not the questions that all pastors are asking. And that's not a judgment call. I mean, that is a moral statement. Just you're here with other people who are asking the same kinds of questions. You're here because of a holy discontent with the way things are in the church, with a burning in my bones, as Eugene would say. I view practicing the way as kind of an R&D department for the church at large. Like R&M is to kind of try out and test and explore and experiment all sorts of new models of church, information and community architecture and then offer them back to you. But we're not a church. Very clear on that. We exist to serve you, to serve your church, your community, your people. And we are praying for pastors and churches to partner with who sense a kind of kind of call to function in a local church as a living laboratory for the way of Jesus in post-Christian culture. Working on the integration of formation into the church itself, not theorists. We have plenty of those, but practitioners. Now this idea of church as a living laboratory may sound appealing to those of you who are kind of on the front edge of things and are drawn to the creative side of pastoral leadership. But as you either know or will soon discover formation is not a church-crowed strategy. I'm very sorry to tell you. During our five year run at Bridgetown, we had people move here from, literally this is not an exaggeration, had people move here from all over the country just to be a part of it. And Portland's like not the best place to move the last few years, just in case you've read the news. But we've also had a lot of people move on. It's a kind of pruning strategy. Long term, it's a strategy for health and growth and life, but short term, it is a painful cutting away. But man, we are at a generational moment where we cannot think short-term any longer. We cannot. We have to think long-term. You know, you think about the monastic orders and if you hang out with me, I will talk about monks way too much, which is my psychosis, but there are around 1 million monks and nuns in orders in the Catholic Church, okay? 800,000 women, 200,000 men. But there are 1.26 billion Catholics, not Christians, just Catholics. That means the monastic orders make up less than 0.01% of the Catholic Church, and even less of the Church of Jesus. Yet think about their influence. Think about the tens of hundreds of millions of people following along with pray as you go in the Jesuits every morning. You know, 25-year-old mom and your church reads a Psalm to begin her day with God, and then if she has a minute before John, he is screaming too loud. She just reads it a second time, a little slower, and prayerfully. She may not realize it, but she's practicing lecdiodovina from 6th century Benedictine spirituality. Now not at 3 a.m. with the other monks chanting Gregorian, whatever. It's a diluted form, all right? But it's something there. You all know your church history. There were all sorts of reformations before and during and after the reformation. But they didn't split off from the Catholic Church, nor did Luther intend to. They started orders, tribes, mostly of pastors or priests who were moved by a holy discontent to shun the compromising complicity of most pastors with culture at large and the power of the age and political stuff, and to live out a deeper surrender to Jesus and a greater discipleship. This is the call because it's always been the call. It says, "Old is Matthew, chapter 28." I chose Matthew 28 to read before the session because a decade ago, this was the textual genesis of what is now practicing the way. I had an epiphany moment once while teaching this, which is not happening to me regularly, I promise. I'm not, I'm charismatic, but not that charismatic, you know? But I was teaching this and I got to that line teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you and it hit me like a ton of bricks. I don't do that. And I fancy myself a teacher. I teach people what Jesus has commanded them, not how to obey what Jesus has commanded them. And my friends, that's not the same thing. In business parlance, it's the difference between the what and the how. It's one thing to teach people Jesus' sex ethic. It's another thing to sit with a 24-year-old gay man in your church and walk him into a life of discipleship, or a 14-year-old boy struggling with porn or pornography addiction and walk him or her into holiness. It's one thing to say, "Jesus commands you not to worry." How's that working for you guys? It's another thing to teach and train people how to become a non-anxious presence. He was living with a genuine trust in the love and the providence of the Father. Orberg that you will hear from tonight who is just a gift and a sage and a deeply godly man has said to me that formation is kind of like golf. Any golfers in the room? Yeah. I thought in a room of pastors there would be a lot more golfers. Okay, wait a break, this stereotype. I hate golf. I tried at one point and I thought it was so tedious and frustrating and I thought if I'm going to pay money to go outside, I want something to relieve my stress, not exacerbate it. But, apparently it's a thing. A lot of people like golf. But John used this great analogy. He said, "The easy part about golf is getting the right ideas into your head. A vision of the perfect swing, the perfect game, the perfect strategy." Like, you watch some YouTube videos, are you watching on TV or whatever. The hard part that takes not a month or two or three but decades or a life is getting that vision that's in your mind's eye of the perfect swing, the perfect shot, all of that into your body, into your muscle memory so that when that moment of truth comes, the right shot, the right thing, the right move, it just without even thinking about it, it just naturally comes out of you. In the same way, it doesn't take that long to exegy and get your head around the sermon on the mount or even the New Testament's spiritual and ethical and communal vision. But to get that from your mind into your body and to what neuroscientists call the automatic responses of your body and to the memory that you carry in your nervous system, well, that's a lifetime of discipleship and beyond. Now how do we do this? How do we move from teaching people what Jesus commanded them to teaching people how to obey what Jesus commanded them? Or put another way, how do we reintegrate discipleship and formation into the fabric of our church? Or put still another way, what do we need to change in our church, in our leadership, in our pastoral culture, in our own life to turn this vision into a reality, in our own body, much less in the people that we shepherd and serve? Well, as I see it, there are five shifts that need to happen in how we as pastors approach the church and approach our serving of the church. With the rest of our time, let me just suss them out. The first is from salvation as transaction to salvation as transformation. As I said, since at least World War II, or possibly much earlier, the gospel has been preached in such a way that you can quote, get saved without becoming an apprentice of Jesus of Nazareth. This goes, of course, to our understanding, or I would argue, our misunderstanding of the gospel and of salvation itself. In evangelicalism, the gospel has been summarized along the lines of this is how this is what I kind of would hear growing up. You are a sinner going to hell. God loves you and sent his son Jesus to die in the cross for your sins. If you believe in him, you can go to heaven when you die. For those of you from the reformed tradition, it's similar, but a bit different. Here's one summary from Dr. Gary Bersier's at Western across the street. God is perfectly, God is a perfectly just and holy God. You have fallen short of His glory. You cannot possibly justify yourself or earn your way back to God. The God has justified you himself on the cross, hallelujah. Now while everything in those two summaries, best as I can tell is technically true. There are all sorts of problems with those two formulations of the gospel. Namely, they sound absolutely nothing like the gospel that Jesus preached. Listen to Mark's summary, Mark as in the writer of the gospel of Mark. Just to clarify, it's a little bit of an authority on how to define the gospel. Listen to the writer of the gospel of Mark's definition of the gospel. The time has come. The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe the gospel. The other problem is that neither of those formulations, which agree, I don't take issue with at a theological level. And neither of those formulations of the gospel require you to become a disciple of Jesus in order to experience salvation. You know, Willard used to say that if people hear your preaching of the gospel and do not immediately respond by asking, "How do I apprentice under Jesus?" Then you're not actually preaching the gospel. You're preaching something else. Let me give you a little plug for Orpberg's book, "Eternity is Now in Session," which is out at the table. He writes about how there's all sorts. I'm just going to quote you for most of the morning if that's OK. He writes about how there's all sorts of talk about the problem of consumerism in the Western Church. Is that a problem for you? Yes, that's a rhetorical question. It's a clarify. That is a problem for you. But few pastors want to admit that there is a direct link between the consumerism and the inner church and the way that the gospel has actually been preached in our church. And he has this great line about how if our preaching of the gospel is just harping on how it's not about what you do, it's about what Jesus has done for you, which sounds so beautiful and you do not read that in the New Testament. Does that mean the idea isn't biblically sound, but you do not read that formulation anywhere in the New Testament? You definitely don't read that in Jesus. You don't even get close to that in Jesus. That formulation, quote Orpberg, "can create consumers of Jesus merit rather than disciples of Jesus way." But when you read the New Testament or the church fathers or some of the best thinkers, sages, streams, contemplatives, theologians of the church for thousands of years and you compare and contrast how they understood salvation with how we understood salvation, it is dramatic. For example, Paul writes about salvation in past, present, and future tense as do all of the church fathers and mothers. Unless if I'm missing something, I don't think you would ever hear Paul ask, "when did you get saved?" My point is for them salvation was not just a transaction, it was also a transformation. It was not just a change in legal status, it was the healing of the soul. It was not just pardon, it was adoption. Here's Ignatius, not Ignatius of Loyola and the Jesuits, but Ignatius of Antioch, who was likely a disciple of the Apostle John before he was martyred in 108 AD. He writes this, just, I just want to give this as an example of how one of the church fathers is defining salvation. We have also as a physician, capital P, the Lord our God. Jesus the Christ, the only begotten Son and Word. Before time began, but who afterwards became also man of Mary the Virgin, he was in a mortal body, being life, he became subject to corruption, that he might free our souls from death and corruption and heal them, and might restore them to health when they were diseased with ungodliness and wicked lusts. That's not how a salvation was explained to me when I was growing up. And again, I don't mean that I probably sound more angsty than I actually am, or maybe I don't. Maybe that's just honesty. But he and many others called Jesus the Doctor of the Soul, or some have argued that another, they didn't speak English, obviously, another translation is the divine therapist. They understood salvation to be a kind of healing and growth and formation of the soul into a person of love all through deepening union with the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. All I'm trying to say is that for them, formation wasn't something that happened after salvation, it was salvation. This is a view of salvation that I think, and I offer to you in somewhat genuine humility, we desperately need to get back to, not just in our preaching and our teaching, but in our own life with God. We'll return to John Mark's teaching in a few moments, but before we do, we thought this would be a perfect place to pause so we can digest what we've heard so far. And to do that with me is Bethany Allen, pastor at Bridgetown Church, Bethany, it is so good to be with you. I'm so happy I get to be with you too, Brian. Always love it. It's always a good time. It is. It's always fun. It's always, I just love partnering with you in any way that we can. And I learn so much from you. I'm so grateful for who you are as a pastor and as a follower of Jesus. We were both in the room when this conversation happened, and I remember the collective sense of something being named, that we were longing to be named, but I'm also really aware of the difference in just a few years of the cultural moment that was happening from this place of, you know, where those are a couple years after COVID, and there was a people were walking away from the church, or at least lazily not coming back. And that was clearly an experience we had in our culture. To the point where we're now, where that's changed so dramatically, there's a leaning in. Yeah. And I'm just remembering that even as I hear his words. Yeah, it's like we were talking about the time, a sturdying of the decline of church. But right now, even as we hear it in this moment, we are talking about sturdying the curiosity and the hunger for a return to church, which really changes so much of how we're thinking and dreaming about the future of even what God's calling us to be and to do as both pastors and in our churches. So it's profound to me that it was just three years ago, and yet I viscerally can feel the difference. It's actually interesting because what I was experiencing listening to this again is I felt like the hunger in the room, shared by this group of leaders and pastors, has gone out, not to say it was the spilling out over it. But now there's just this broader hunger, leaning people in, and whether they're wanting the same things, there is a passion, a desperation, a longing, or curiosity, and, you know, as you said in a beautiful way. For more than just to do good and be religious or have a spiritual experience, but to actually let their real and everyday life be formed in a certain way. That longing for these pastors is now for this broader, as John Mark said, for formation not to be something that happens after salvation, but that it is salvation at sense. Yeah, I mean, I think it's, it's so interesting because even, even as you say that, and even as I heard John Mark's hit again, I was like, oh, it's so interesting. The hunger, which, which again, I think we've said hunger 16 times, but the hunger in the room was so much for this genuine, authentic, really spirit and powered. Yeah, a formative work in the lives of individuals. And it's no less true now except that the threshold, at least for pastors, at least as I'm thinking about it, is connected to the authenticity of the message we proclaim. Like the hunger we're seeing people bring into the church is more, is this real? Is this what you say it is? And to John Mark's point, the, you know, the answer won't be salvation is just this presentation of information that you digest. It's actually got to be a transformative reality for it to have credibility with those who are hungry and seeking. Even think about the name of this podcast, this conversation that we get to have, this contemplative pastor idea. And, you know, there's so many definitions of what contemplative is, the long love you look at the real is a common one. But when I think about what it means to be contemplative, it's not a disposition or a personality trait or a preference, it's that you actually sink deep enough into the depth of our real lives that we discover a real living God there. And I think of my, one of my mentors and pastors who always use this image of like a, you can, you can go so fast like a stone over the top of the waters that you never actually sink beneath the surface into depth. And being a contemplative pastor isn't meaning you're a retreat every day or retreat every week. It means that there's a slowing attention to what's happening in your own life so that not so you can teach from it from the front necessarily, so that you can actually have the experience of that transformation, the long depth of formation with Jesus. And that's messier because it means your real life has to be something that emerges out of that slow space, emerges out of your own messiness. We have to be way more comfortable with messiness in our lives, in other people's lives, if this is the way of pastoring, we're moving towards. Because the illusion of control is gone, the illusion that it happens quickly is gone, the illusion that we can just talk our way out of it or talk other people out of it or into it whatever way you think about it. It's going to have to change or shift or reprioritize. Does that make sense? Yeah, for sure. And it's challenging even to say that because to your point, it seems the invitation of the moment. And even this invitation to be a contemplative pastor, one who is immersed in the presence and person of God for the purpose of stewarding the person in the presence of God amongst his people, that conceptually is very different than even how we were thinking about things three years ago in the sense that ideas were kind of leading the way. Yeah, so it's clear for us that there is a rediscovery, a new learning place that to be a pastor that takes this seriously will require us to grow in new ways, to lead in new ways. And one of the gifts of the next section of this teaching is Jean-Marc gives us some "how's" not just about implementing it in our churches, but about how we can think through this in our own life and leadership in deeper ways. Secondly, from information to formation, Eikeli's heel of most discipleship models in the West, at least, is similar to kind of most post-enlightenment education models. They fall prey to Cartesian thinking, Cartesian as in Rene de Cart, the philosopher, who said, "I think, therefore, I am." He called human beings "rest cagatans" in Latin or "thinking things," cue the Benjamin Franklin quip, the chief end of the body, is to carry the brain around. In this model of human change, like a computer, and this model, by the way, systemic in all of Western culture, arguably all of secular culture, not just Christian. In this model, all you have to do is get the right information into the brain, just get the right data into the computer, and out will come the right behavior. Hence, if I had to articulate the theory of change that I grew up in, it would be something like this. And this was never set at an explicit value, and if it was, they would have said, "We don't believe that. This is what I am bived." Information plus inspiration plus willpower equals change. Information, sermons, biblical theology, doctrine, thinking God's thoughts after him, thinking the right things about God. Plus inspiration, like there's a strong piety, kind of strane, any evangelicalism, you have to get it into your heart, ask to touch the heart, ask to go beyond your brain, and to your heart, beautiful, I agree with that. Plus willpower, meaning now, no, go, don't be anxious this week. Now, go stop, lusting. Now, go forgive your father. Just go do it everybody. Information plus inspiration plus willpower equals change. How's that working for you? in the charismatic tradition or the Pentecostal stream of the Church, which I love and I spent the last decade in and around, it's different. I would argue it's more like encounter plus emotion plus willpower equals change. And the problem is that not that those two formulas are bad, it's that they are just so woefully complete for anything beyond early-level change. They work really well at the beginning of your spiritual journey. But when you're a 42-year-old middle-aged man living through a really chosen life crisis who thankfully has a really good therapist but that's a whole other sermon, they're just not that helpful. Not because they are bad because they are insufficient. If you have yet to read, you are what you love by Jamie K. Smith, Neetutes. So have you read that? What a book. I love his claim, you can't think your way to Christ's likeness because we're not a brain on legs. We are a human, a whole person, a soul. So our model of discipleship has to be holistic. It has to penetrate our mind. Yes, I'm happy to let that stand as the portal to our soul, but also our emotions and our body and the automatic responses, good and evil in our body and the memory that we carry in our nervous system from our earliest days of infancy and the way our brain is wired for attachment in our social world and the culture and our life habit architecture and so much more. This is why we avoid the language of the spiritual disciplines and prefer the language of practices because most people misunderstand the word spiritual as you all know to mean non-material as opposed to how it's used by Paul and the New Testament writers where it seems to mean animated by the spirit of Jesus. Hence Paul writes about in Corinthian spiritual bodies and he doesn't mean non-material bodies. That doesn't make sense. He means bodies that in the future are animated by the spirit of God. But the disciplines or the practices are actually how we get the non-material ideas of Jesus into the very material bodies of our souls. After all in biblical theology or in what has been called a theology of the body, we don't have a body, we are a body. Maybe that's an overstatement, but our body is a part of who we are. Our discipleship must form us at the deepest level of our body, of our soul, of our social world, of all that we are. Our worship is from formation as an optional aside to the driving motivation of every church. Formation or again discipleship, I would argue, you are free, of course you are free to disagree with us, you are free to push back. But I would argue it is not a thing in the offering of the church of Jesus, it is the thing. It is the through line. Here's Paul in Galatians chapter 4, verse 19. You all know it, my dear children, for whom I am again in the pains of childbirth until Christ is formed in you. Paul sees his role as that of a mother, to labor until Christ is formed in the church of Jesus. That is his tell us, his end goal, same with Ephesians, read it. This is where I would argue the missional movement went wrong and continues to fall short, where it would argue that mission is the driving aim of the church. My take on that is not so much that it is a bad idea but that it is cart before the horse, that mission and again that is not biblical language but it is a very biblical idea, is the byproduct of formation or discipleship. In the four gospels, Jesus first called the disciples to come and be with him and follow him and apprentice under him and live as a student or learner of him. And then after a period of time he sent them out. First it was come, then it was go. On the flip side, this is where the formation movement I think has gone wrong and continues to fall short. The point of formation isn't to get lost in an introverted wellness spirituality. Tyler remember said that coming into British down, it is like I feel like the greatest threat to British town is wellness. That like Sabbath will be there with like mindfulness in the yoga practice and really good organic green tea that is fair trade and awesome in a cool branding and design. Rather than as how do I die to self and deepen my surrender to life in the kingdom. Robert Mahalind, you not read invitation to a journey, what a magisterial book. His definition of spiritual formation is "the process of being formed into the image of Christ for the sake of others." If you've read that he just goes off and on and on about how it is for the sake of others. It is to become a person of love and love is not just nice feelings toward the universe, the universe is so freaking easy to love. My teenage kids are a bit of a struggle to love. To love people, real people, in real time to move out into the world, in love and all of that means in the Christian definition of the word "justice", "shalom", "community", "generosity", so much more. We have to see the primary call of a pastor. What is event production, or Christian TED-Doc production, or social activism, or community engagement, or educational or executive leadership, not that any of those things are bad, but they are all subsumed under the primary call of the formation of a community of people into what Scott McKnight calls "crystall formity" into Christ's likeness. Part of that formation will come all the other stuff that we want and we know Jesus wants for us and our people. Number four is the shift from part of the church to the whole. If you have ever read a book on formation, the odds are very high that, and I hope I don't upset people here, but that it was written by an older, white, introverted, intellectual. And I don't necessarily mean that as a criticism, that's close enough to my reality that I quite enjoy it. But that's not close enough to my kids' reality, and sure not close enough to the New Testament's vision of every tribe and tongue and nation around the table. Ephesians chapter 2, one, new humanity that defied the principalities and powers. I watch my kids who are all teenagers now and all of their Gen Z friends. They are multi-ethnic, not by decision or intention, but just by the reality of the world they are growing up in. It's beautiful. It's beyond beautiful. It's difficult. It's messy. It's hard. It's beautiful. But the formation movement, for it to continue. If we are to take the baton and carry it forward, it has to move out of the corner where it started. In the English-speaking kind of Western Protestant stream of the church, it has to move. Here's a few examples. From boomers and a few Gen X to millennials, Gen Z and beyond. From empty nesters with time for retreat to young parents with two-year-old spilling milk on their Bible during Lectio Divina. From introverted intellectuals like myself or wannabe to all sorts of personality types. From the highly educated to the not that educated. From book-based to a digital age. From conservative Christian culture to secular post-Christian culture. From white majority to the full diversity and beauty of the kingdom of God. Not to pass the D.I. test and not get called out on Instagram. But because Jesus died to bring life to a new humanity. Of Jew plus Gentile. To every tribe and tongue in nation. To bring about the multi-ethnic people of God, doing life together around a table in defiance of the principalities and powers that have kept entire people groups in oppression and division. And because a sign of maturity in community is moving from affinity to diversity. And there's no better way to do that than to let go of your preferences and move toward love. My point is we have to carry this baton to new realities full of great joy. Finally, from self to community. A valid critique of the spiritual formation movement thus far is that like so many things, it has been derasinated by the radical individualist of the West. And so it's constantly in danger as all good things are of devolving into a Christianized version of secular self-actualization. And so it has to go from something that you do alone to something we do in community. I love this from Joseph Hellerman, Professor from Biola. If you've not read his book, "When the Church was a Family Best Book of Everett in Community," he writes this, "Spiritual formation occurs primarily in the context of community. People who remain connected with their brothers and sisters in the local church almost invariably grow in self-understanding, and they mature in their ability to relate in healthy ways to God and to their fellow human beings." This is especially the case for those courageous Christians who stick it out through the often messy process of interpersonal discord and conflict resolution. Long-term interpersonal relationships are the crucible of genuine progress in the Christian life. People who stay also grow, people who leave do not grow. It is a simple but profound biblical reality that we both grow and thrive together or we do not grow much at all. Now, the danger with framing these sessions in five shifts is that we have to go beyond, as I said, aspirational ideas into the messy world of far from perfect but still workable practices or models. A decade ago, we embarked over that now on a three-year reading and research project and traveled around and interviewed all sorts of really smart people to try to figure out how to integrate all that we were learning about formation into our church. I got the chance to sit down with a lot of kind of leaders in the formation world and I was shocked at how many of them said what you want to do cannot be done, don't even try it. I literally had so many people say, "Don't even try it, it will mess up your church, it will do damage, just find some spiritual directors." Like, for 2,000 people, I can't even find one for me. That is still Orthodox. Seriously, that's not a bad idea. It's not a workable solution. I remember we sat around and we said, "Well, most people are saying this can't be done and if we try, we'll do more harm than good." But I thought, "You know what, none of them have actually done it. They haven't tried and failed. So why don't we try and fail? And if we fail, at least we can go down and swing and, you know, and so we gave ourself to it. I think this is why a lot of pastors settle for just working kind of willered quotes into their sermons, but not messing with how they do church. I sound a little bit feisty, I've been on sabbatical and I don't know, I'm less godly or something, I don't know. I just would come back to that Marshall McCluein, and he's a philosopher of media from Canada, his saying, "The medium is the message." And his point was that where and how you say something is just as important as what you say. He argued, for example, that TV could never communicate Christian religion. Because the medium is the message. So we decided we would rather try to integrate formation into our church and fail than just take somebody else's word that it can't be done. And what we came up with was V1, of practicing the way of Bridgetown, and what we're doing next, I'll happy to chat with you about this afternoon is V2, just kind of all the mistakes, trial and error. We did so many things wrong, but all that we've been learning over the last decade, and this time not made just for Bridgetown, but for you, for the church at large. And basically our first proposal that Tyler will walk you into in depth tomorrow morning is a rule of life. You know, the early church had not one, but two rules. They had the rule of faith and the rule of life. The rule of faith was a statement, a belief about theology and doctrine. It was philosophical. It was conceptual, it was beautiful. The rule of life, read, you know, the Didekay or something like that, a very early iteration was pragmatic and specific and messy. It was a commitment to apprentice under Jesus in the warp and wolf of everyday life. The modern church still, for the most part, has a rule of faith, though it's usually called a statement of faith or a doctrinal statement, but very few churches still have a rule of life. This tells us so much about what's transpired over the last two millennia in the Western Church. What's going wrong and what needs to get set right? The search for a rule of life for the modern era, world with smartphones and Wi-Fi, political polarization, and radical individualism, and pastors who talk about Barack Obama is the holy grail of our time and the great call of our generation. But here's what I want to say to end. We're not calling you to sign up for our thing. We are inviting you, on all of you online, into, I guess what I would call, a learn, not even a tribe, a learning community. Our intention is to kind of stay together and come together in person and however else, and come back together and learn from and with one another to share notes from one living laboratory to another liver laboratory. To get around the table, how are you doing it? How are you doing it? What problems are you facing? You're trying that model. What's the pros and cons of that? And to sort this thing out together. Change has to start somewhere. And we can't keep waiting around for somebody else to do it. Because it's not happening. Why not start here? Why not start now? Why not you? Why not us? Well, I'm not a sermon, because it's not a sermon on formation if you don't hit the 10 willard quote point. I was once asked, how do you become a saint? And I was sitting with a guy who did his PhD on Willard. And he said, you know, I think that if Willard had been Catholic, he would have been sainted. I think that's what he was. He was a holy one. John would know better than others. And he was once asked, how do you become a saint? And apparently what he said was, by doing the next right thing. You know, it's really easy to think about all that we can't do. Because of our small staff or no staff, or our church's history, or it's too young, or it's too old, or it's too creative, or it's too traditional, or our culture's complexity, or our emotional state, I get it. And we do. And what can we stop doing? You know, there's a dual danger to any pastor's conference. On one hand, either you come and get overwhelmed by the comparison that we just never fully shake in our humanity, or the idealism of a kind of utopian church, or we get all fired up in full of energy and go home like we're roaring to go in three weeks later, we're just like, I need Sabbath. Same old, same old. Neither is helpful. This is very slow work. Because all the best stuff in life is really slow. What's the line above all, trust in the slow work of God? Your ideas mature gradually, let them grow with undue haste. Who knows what this new spirit forming in you will be? [Music] Wow, what a way to end an already full conversation. I'm just left in this moment. My heart and mind going to hear in John Mark ends this talk with this call to this new era where it feels like pastors don't have to be experts. I love that invitation. Like in a moment when it feels like as a pastor, I have to have the answer. I have to be the expert. I have to be the one that people look to and to say I don't know feels costly. I hear right now that we don't have to be experts. We get to be explorers working in a lab, working in the context of our real lives and our real churches. That feels like such a relief. Yeah, I mean, permission is a understatement. There's an element of like, oh, there's permission to receive that from another pastor. It's like, okay, I don't have to be the expert. And at the same time, I feel like that is a real challenge. I think about how often in our jobs and positions, whether we'd be willing to admit it or not, we feel like we have to be the expert in the room. And the cost of being an explorer is a real shift for pastors that have to make. And I'm speaking for myself. Like to move from the place of going, I have the answer. This is where we're going to. I don't have the answer. And I don't even know if this is going to work. I mean, that does something for the heart of a pastor, the heart of a leader. It's a requirement of humility that will probably feel humiliating. So even in this great, I mean, not to be a downer. I really feel like we took, I took us down a notch. But there's this invitation of like, yeah, get to be an explorer. But do I actually believe that and can I embrace that? I think that's what I'm holding is, yeah, I want that. I'd love for that to be true. And I've got staff who are answering to me. And I've got a church that's asking questions. So I don't know. I think there is a, this invitation is prophetic in so many ways. There's a deep call, you know, to really consider what that might mean and how that might transform not only us, but our churches as we yield to it. Well, and that takes seriously the fact that there is no replicable model that works in every context with every people with every history. Like every church is as complex. I mean, it's a family in some degree, right? Regardless of size. So we carry all of our brokennesses, all of our limitations, all of our preferences, and then we're just supposed to be the experts of this people like we were the experts of those people or whatever. It doesn't make sense. Yeah. And and so I'm I'm so stirred by that because now I get to be a student of my own soul in the invitation of the Holy Spirit and a student of the messiness of the life of our church and my job then is to study them and say Holy Spirit, what are you doing with these people? In this moment, not what do you do with people in a moment, but what do you do with these people in this moment? Yeah. And I mean, I personally, I'm in a, I mean, I'm in a very different context than you are. You know, we came into our church canopy in Costa Mesa a couple years ago and we came in a hard season of this church to help guide them through a transition, a struggle. And we ended up just falling in love with this church in this community and staying and helping them kind of replant and it's been the greatest gift, but I'm learning so much about their history, the people, the moment, the wounding, but also like the way God is stirring renewal and healing and what it has meant for me as a pastor is I've shown up. If I pretended like I had the answer, it would have, it would have never worked. Yeah. Just because of the place they were in. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think, I mean, bless you because that takes, I mean, we've got to say it, that takes a lot of humility to be able to do that and to enter into a space like that and to lead the way you have it's not instinctual for us as pastors to, to do that. I think in some ways it's like, maybe we've got these good ideas. Let's just execute. And yeah, I mean, I think even at Bridgetown, I think oftentimes, there's a lot of assumption, you know, about who we are and how we function and how we have definitive direction. And that's just not true because, because very much to your point. You know, the, the, the. This church is filled with real people who carry real fears and longings and aches and needs that continually shift. And there's not one metric or formula that fits. You know, their desired need in a specific season. So I think as much as we have tried to build, you know, healthy infrastructure. The truth is, so much of what's been required of us is to. To lean in and to say, what is the actual need of the people in the moment and what are we willing? You know, it's, we've said this for years. We are church that loves to build the plane while we're flying it. And I think it's one of our greatest strengths and one of our greatest weaknesses. You know, just has to be said. But in many ways, it's, it echoes the heartbeat of the refrain of what you're talking about. Like we were a church has been willing to say this worked or this didn't work in light of the need of our people. And we've done that more times than we can then I could probably name to you on this podcast. And I think that's been. Both the discipline and challenge of leadership here. And it's also been one of to your point one of the best things that we've got going for us in this context. I think it's interesting because you would think, okay, here's the vision series where we fleshed out the next five years of what we're going to do rather than building the plan as you talk about it. But what you did do that I think a lot of us can learn from and what I'm doing and learning from in this season is we've named the clear goal that we want to form people who live easily and naturally in the kingdom of God. And that will take different shape, but that is our goal. And I feel like if you can clarify that not with a strategy or a five point vision plan, but just that being the thing, then it gives permission to adjust you right to have safe to fail experiments that we're going to try this and we're going to try this and to learn as we go not just build as we go. And that alone naming that shift moves formation from the peripheral to the center because at any point something else can occupy what you're focusing on. And it also gives you permission to have slower relational smaller spaces to do those explorations where those people's lives can come to the surface and help direct. That's been one of the greatest gifts of coming into this really this small church that is replanting is we've kind of get to come back to the basics and that's harder. Yeah, I it's a bigger challenge for other churches. And I feel like I've gotten to have my hands in those smaller relational settings and learn let my let the people teach me what's needed and not bring them a plan. Yeah, and that's been powerful for me as a pastor. If humiliating and humbling for powerful. It's so real. Yeah, it makes me think about to how you know if if that's a posture we're going to take if there is an invitation, you know, back to John Marks point if there's this invitation to be explored. Then it really will be and you you've said this and not said it directly but there really will be a temperance or a pacing in our past or leadership that looks more like what is my next step rather than what are the next 22 steps. And I hear that in your story. I hear that in your frame of like man, that's really that's really how this goes and I think you know we're literally I mean, you know, you know, some degree, Bridgetown. We do plan. We're very we're five years out in casting vision going, okay, here's what we're going to go. We think this is what God's calling us to and there has to be within that. A pacing that allows us to pivot if and when the spirit's calling us to pivot depending on the needs of our people. So what would you invite our listeners who've heard this talk have heard us exploring from our experiences. What would be the first thing that you want to leave with them? You know, I think what I would encourage us you and I but also the listeners to consider is what what is maybe just one thing that after you've listened to this teaching and even listen to this podcast. What is one thing that God might be speaking to you about that you need to do now? Not later, not, you know, well, that was a good idea. I'll come back and revisit that and then take some notes and then see again. But I don't know. I just wonder if there's some who have been listening and they have they just know what God is asking them to do. For that listener and for us, I would just the invitation I think is to say take that now and do something with it. I was just talking to a woman in my office today and she said, you know, the fastest way to see God work is to obey Him fast. And it was simple, but just deep encouragement. But I just wonder for the listeners now if there's if there's a clear invitation from the spirit, what to do? A next step, just one next step. Oh, I love that invitation. I'm even I'm hearing it. I'm probably or the other side of this coin where I hear a teaching like that. And I the temptation for me is to look at the 10 amazing points and the history and the call and to get stirred and to actually be overwhelmed by I don't know how to go from here to there. And I don't have that one step that you just mentioned. So for me, I just want to even make space to for those who already have that sense to follow in what Bethany just said. What I want to do is to invite you to trust that the thing stirring in you will settle by the grace of the Holy Spirit. And we're just going to invite a moment to still to settle and for the Holy Spirit to trust that in the anxiety, in the worry, in the mind that's that's stirred or overwhelmed to slow enough to say, Lord, what do you want me to take away? What will you keep in my heart and mind as I leave this conversation today? So let's just begin by just trying to keep yourself into a place of stillness yet again. And just invite, give consent to the Holy Spirit. Holy Spirit will you meet me now and will you speak to me in love. [Music] [Music]