Why We Say "Formation"

Over the coming months you're going to hear a word from us that may be new to you, and that you probably haven't heard much in church before. We don't say we're doing discipleship, and we don't say we're doing Christian education. We say we're after formation. That isn't branding, and it isn't a swipe at anyone else. It's a deliberate return to something the church has known for most of its history and largely forgot in the last half-century.

An Ancient Word

Paul told the Galatians he was in the pains of childbirth again until Christ was formed in them. That verb matters. The early church did not assume a person became a Christian simply by being informed. It assumed a person became a Christian the way a person becomes a craftsman — slowly, intentionally, often painfully, in the company of others, and always alongside someone further along. New believers entered the catechumenate, a structured season of instruction and testing that often ran two or three years before a person was allowed to be baptized, learning not just what Christians believe but how Christians eat, pray, forgive, handle money, and treat enemies. When the desert fathers and mothers went out to Egypt in the fourth century, they carried that same assumption into the wilderness: the human heart is malleable, it is being shaped by something whether we choose it or not, and the only question is: by what are we being formed? Every stream that followed — Benedict's rule, the Ignatian exercises, the long tradition of spiritual direction — took for granted that Christian maturity was a work of years, formed by practices, sustained by community, and guided by people who had walked the road.

Forty Years of Programs

Somewhere in the second half of the twentieth century, the American church quietly swapped that apprenticeship for a curriculum. “Discipleship” became a thing you signed up for: a workbook, a six-week class, a Tuesday night study, a folder you completed but then graduated from. The instincts behind it were good ones — get people into Scripture, get them into a group, give them something concrete to do. But the underlying model shifted from apprenticeship to information transfer, but we started measuring the wrong things. Attendance. Giving. Volunteer hours. Bible content retained. We assumed that if someone knew more, they would become more, and we built enormous machinery on that assumption. In 2007, Willow Creek — one of the churches that had built that machinery best — published the REVEAL study and admitted that participation in their programs simply wasn't producing the spiritual growth they had expected. A lot of us have spent the years since then trying to be honest about the same gap.

We have produced a generation of Christians who can define grace and cannot forgive their brother.

The Recovery

The good news is that the recovery has been underway for a while now, and it has mostly been a work of remembering. Richard Foster reintroduced the disciplines to Protestants who thought they were Catholic property. Dallas Willard spent thirty years arguing, patiently and against the current, that grace is opposed to earning but not to effort, and that Jesus intended to be followed as an apprentice follows a master — not merely believed in. Ruth Haley Barton has done the hard work of applying this to leaders, insisting that the soul of a pastor is not an optional add-on to the work of a church. John Mark Comer has carried it to a younger generation that is exhausted by hurry, distraction, and formation-by-algorithm, and has made “rule of life” a phrase ordinary people use again. What all of them are doing, in different registers, is pointing back past the program era to the desert — and past the desert to Jesus, who spent three years walking around with twelve people rather than handing them a syllabus.

Why This Is Our Path at NLC

So here is our conviction: you are being formed right now, whether or not anyone is paying attention to it. Your phone is forming you. Your calendar is forming you. Your family of origin, your job, your anxieties, and your habits are all forming you, and they are doing it seven days a week without asking permission. The question in front of NLC is not whether we will be formed. It's whether we will be intentional about it, or whether we will keep running programs and hoping.

Choosing formation means a few specific things for us. It means we're apprentices of Jesus before we're students of the Bible — we still want people deep in Scripture, but as a means of being changed rather than as an end in itself. It means practices, not just content: silence, fasting, Sabbath, generosity, confession, hospitality. It means a rule of life, so that discipleship shows up on Tuesday morning and not just Sunday morning. It means small, honest community, because no one is formed alone and no one is formed while performing. And it means a much longer time horizon than we're comfortable with.

That last part is the cost, and we want to name it up front. Formation is slower than programming. It is harder to measure and harder to advertise. You cannot finish it, which means we cannot hand you a certificate. What we can offer is the thing the church offered for its first fifteen hundred years — a community, a set of practices, some people further down the road, and the patient expectation that over years, Christ will be formed in you.

That's the path we're walking, slowly, intentionally, and for the long haul.