What Is Spiritual Formation? (And Why It's Not What You Think)

What Is Spiritual Formation?

For a long time, without really realizing it, I approached God transactionally.

If I did the right things...

if I prayed enough...

if I read my Bible enough...

if I behaved the right way...

then God would be pleased with me.

And, somewhere underneath that, there was also this assumption that if I was good, only good things would happen to me.

And if something bad happened, then maybe I had done something wrong.

But over time, that understanding of God started to fall apart until I learned about spiritual formation.

Hi, I’m Felicity Roelofse.

I’m a doctoral candidate at Melbourne School of Theology, where I specialize in spiritual formation.

I’m also a pastor at a local church here in Melbourne, Australia, and I’ve been involved in ministry for more than ten years.

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Today, I want to explain what spiritual formation actually is.

Where it came from.

Whether it’s biblical.

And, most importantly, what it actually looks like in the life of an ordinary Christian.

So first, we need to distinguish between two related terms:

spiritual theology

and

spiritual formation.

Spiritual theology is essentially the theological study of the Christian spiritual life.

John Coe describes formal spiritual theology as dealing with both our theological understanding of sanctification...

and the experience of the Holy Spirit in the life of the believer.

So spiritual theology asks questions like:

• What does it actually mean to have a personal relationship with God?

• How does the Holy Spirit transform a person?

• How do spiritual disciplines fit into that transformation?

• How do Christians actually become spiritually mature?

• And how does He form the body of Christ collectively?

If spiritual theology is the study of the Christian spiritual life...

spiritual formation is the practice of it.

It is the living-out of those theological ideas.

It is the process through which the Holy Spirit forms us increasingly into the likeness of Jesus.

And for me, that has had very practical consequences.

It has increased my sense of peace, as I feel restful with God and within myself.

It has deepened my understanding of grace and removed my feelings of shame and self-hatred.

It has grown my spiritual discernment so I can hear from God more.

It has made me more compassionate to others as I have received God’s compassion.

It has made me less judgmental as I recognize I am also a broken person and I am less rigid in rules.

And, ultimately, it has helped me learn what it actually means to abide in Christ.

And this matters because eventually almost every Christian hits what some spiritual writers call the wall.

At some point, the version of your spiritual life that worked before...

stops working.

Maybe something traumatic happens.

Maybe somebody dies.

Maybe you experience a major disappointment.

Maybe you pray for something for years and nothing seems to happen.

Maybe people begin challenging your faith and you realize you don’t have answers to questions you thought you had settled.

Maybe you simply reach a point where prayer feels dry.

You open your Bible and feel nothing.

You worship and feel nothing.

You do all the things that used to make you feel close to God...

and suddenly they don’t.

Christian spiritual writers have described experiences like this in different ways.

John of the Cross famously wrote about the dark night of the soul.

Sometimes God feels absent.

Sometimes the strategies that used to work for us stop working.

I remember going through a season of spiritual dryness myself.

And my immediate reaction was to start Googling things like:

“How do I get out of a spiritual dry season?”

Because I was treating spiritual dryness exactly the way I treated everything else.

There must be a technique.

There must be five steps.

There must be something I can do to make this stop.

But you have to go through it.

And the more important question isn’t:

“How do I get out of this?”

It is:

“God, what are You forming in me through this?”

That is a very different question.

One of the reasons I think spiritual formation is so important is that Christians can become extremely good at accumulating what I would call the content of faith.

We know Scripture. We listen to sermons. We read books. We sing worship songs. We know the right answers. And all of that matters.

I am absolutely not arguing that Christian doctrine or biblical knowledge is unimportant.

The problem comes when the content never makes its way into the deepest parts of us. Because I can intellectually believe that God is in control… and still live every day dominated by anxiety.

I can preach about grace...and still secretly believe God only loves me when I perform well.

I can believe that every human being is made in the image of God...and still be unbelievably judgmental.

I can know that I’m supposed to forgive someone...and still find myself replaying what they did to me five years later.

So there is the content of faith. And then there is the practice of faith. Actually living it. And somewhere between those two is what we could call the process of growth. How does something move from being an idea I believe… to something that genuinely shapes the way I live?

That is one of the central questions of spiritual formation. It is the difference between simply being a hearer of the Word… and becoming a doer of the Word, as James says.

Now, something else I think is important to understand is that spiritual formation is not some brand-new Christian trend. The terminology might be relatively modern. The ideas absolutely are not.

Christian thinkers have been asking questions about spiritual transformation almost from the beginning of Christianity. The early Church Fathers wrote extensively about becoming like Christ. In the Western Christian tradition, figures like Augustine and Gregory the Great reflected on the spiritual life.

Later, Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross wrote about the movement of the soul toward deeper communion with God.

In Eastern Christianity, you have the idea of theosis — participation in the divine life.

The basic question is:

How does a human being actually become transformed through relationship with God?

During the Reformation, theologians like Martin Luther and John Calvin emphasized important doctrines around grace, faith, and sanctification.

But over time, parts of Protestantism became much more comfortable talking about correct doctrine than talking about the experiential life of God. That does not mean Protestants had no spirituality. Far from it.

The Puritans had an extraordinarily rich devotional tradition. Pietism emphasized heartfelt relationship with God. And during the eighteenth-century revivals, evangelical Christianity strongly emphasized personal conversion and the lived experience of faith. Jonathan Edwards is a fascinating example. As theologian Kyle Strobel has pointed out, Edwards didn't understand spiritual practices simply as techniques for self-improvement. They were means through which believers participated in communion with God. 

Then, in the twentieth century, you begin to see this conversation becoming more explicit within evangelical Christianity. Dietrich Bonhoeffer emphasized that genuine faith produces a transformed life. Later, theologian Richard Lovelace argued that Protestant Christianity had developed what he called a kind of sanctification gap.

Evangelicals had become extremely good at evangelism. We had become very serious about biblical interpretation. But we didn't always have equally developed language for describing what happens after conversion. 

• How does a Christian actually spiritually mature?

• How does someone experience God?

• How does the Holy Spirit do?

By the 1970s and 80s, Dallas Willard and Richard Foster began recovering many of these questions for evangelical audiences from the ancient and Catholic traditions. And since then, writers like Robert Mulholland, Evan Howard, John Coe, Simon Chan, Kyle Strobel, and others have continued developing the field.

So when people hear the phrase “spiritual formation” and assume someone invented it twenty years ago… that’s not true. The underlying Christian conversation is ancient.

But that leads to the obvious question.

Is spiritual formation actually biblical?

Because ultimately, for me, that is what matters. And I would argue that it is deeply biblical.

Think about David. David is described as a man after God's own heart. And yet when you read the Psalms, David's relationship with God is not polished. Sometimes he is worshipping, terrified, angry, confused, asking God why He seems absent.

David does not seem to believe that relationship with God requires pretending to feel something he doesn't feel.

And we see something similar with Job. Job suffers terribly. He questions. He laments. He speaks honestly to God. And yet Scripture makes a point of telling us that Job did not sin by doing this.

Then, of course, we have Jesus Himself. Jesus regularly withdrew from other people in order to pray to the Father. He practiced solitude. He prayed through the night. He lived in constant dependence upon the Father and the Spirit.

And so at the center of Christian spiritual formation is not a technique. It is a relationship.

Jacqueline Lapsey has used the language of divine friendship. Learning to relate to God not simply as an abstract doctrine… or as someone to whom we submit a list of requests… but as the living God with whom we actually have honest communion.

So what does this look like practically?

One of the biggest shifts for me has been moving away from the idea that I am the primary agent of my own sanctification.

A lot of us live as though sanctification works something like this:

I identify what is wrong with me.

I try harder.

I become more disciplined.

I fix it.

And then I become a better Christian.

But that is much closer to moral formation than spiritual formation. (I’ll talk about this in a future video)

Spiritual formation begins with recognizing that the Holy Spirit is the agent of transformation.

I cannot sanctify myself. The spiritual disciplines cannot sanctify me. Prayer cannot sanctify me. Fasting cannot sanctify me. Silence cannot sanctify me. Bible reading cannot sanctify me. 

The Holy Spirit sanctifies me.

The disciplines simply create spaces in which I become more available and attentive to what God is doing.

So the order matters.

It isn't:

Spiritual discipline → I change myself.

It is:

Holy Spirit → spiritual disciplines → formation into the likeness of Christ.

That distinction has massively changed the way I approach spiritual practices.

It has also changed the way I pray. I used to think prayer was primarily about telling God things. Here is what I need. Here is what I want. Here is what I'm worried about. Please fix this. Please help this person. Please change that situation.

And obviously, petition is a completely legitimate part of prayer. But prayer can also be a place where we allow God to reveal what is happening inside of us.

So now, sometimes instead of immediately asking God to change the situation… I might ask:

• “God, why am I reacting this way?”

• “What is going on inside me?”

• “Where is this coming from?”

Or:

• “God, what do You want to reveal in me today?”

• “Search me and know me.”

Or:

• “What is Your will in this situation?”

• “How do You want me to respond?”

John Coe has a phrase I love:

“Prayer is a place to be honest, not good.”

In other words, prayer isn't the place where I perform the spiritually impressive version of Felicity for God. He already knows what's there. Prayer is the place where I can stop pretending. And bring the real thing into His presence.

The anger. The jealousy. The fear. The disappointment. The confusion. Even the things I wish weren't true about me.

Because transformation doesn't happen by hiding those parts of ourselves from God.

It happens as we bring them into relationship with Him.

And over time, this changes you.  You begin to understand grace differently. You become less frantic. You begin to find shelter in God rather than constantly trying to control your circumstances. Your discernment starts to grow. You become more aware of your own motives. You become more compassionate toward the motives and weaknesses of other people. You begin to experience more satisfaction in your relationship with God...

And that, to me, is the heart of spiritual formation. It is not spiritual self-improvement. It is not earning God's approval. It is not importing New Age spirituality into Christianity. And it is not a collection of exotic contemplative practices. 

It is the lifelong process of becoming increasingly formed into the likeness of Jesus through the work of the Holy Spirit.

And in future videos, I want to break this down much further. I've already made a video on three contemplative prayer practices that have personally helped me, so I'll link that here if you want somewhere practical to start.

And if these are the kinds of conversations you want to go deeper into, you can also join my email newsletter below.

That's where I can share things in a little more depth than I sometimes can in a YouTube video.

And I also have Bible study resources linked below if you want something to work through on your own.

But for now, I want to leave you with one question.

When you think about spiritual growth, do you imagine yourself trying harder to become a better Christian...

or trying to become more deeply connected to the Holy Spirit?

Because those can look very similar from the outside. But spiritually, they are two completely different ways of living. Let me know in the comments below. Thanks so much for watching, and I’ll see you in my next video.