The Five Mistakes of Spiritual Formation

This summer I taught two different DMin courses in spiritual formation. As part of those classes, I shared what I have called in my online writing “the five mistakes of spiritual formation.” Naming these mistakes helps us see why so many of our efforts, sincere as they are, struggle to produce the fruit of the Spirit in our lives.

Here are the five mistakes of spiritual formation.

1. The Educational Mistake

The first mistake is treating spiritual formation as an educational problem.

This is the mistake highlighted by James K. A. Smith in Desiring the Kingdom and You Are What You Love. Smith’s work has been widely read, so many will know the basic point. We tend to assume that we are formed into the image of Jesus through knowledge acquisition. If we can just learn enough, understand enough, get our theology right, then transformation will follow.

We see evidence of this everywhere: Sunday school, Bible classes, Bible studies, sermons, Christian books. Beyond that, we see entire systems like Christian homeschooling, private schools, and Christian universities. The defining feature across all of this is making the study of the Bible central.

Now, to be clear, I don’t want to throw any of this under the bus. I work at a Christian university. I write Christian books. I teach a Bible class at my church. There is a lot of good here. And yet, we have to confront the pressing question: Does mastery of biblical and theological knowledge reliably produce the fruit of the Spirit?

Take, for example, the emphasis in some homeschooling circles on instilling a “biblical worldview,” often focused on debates like creation versus evolution. Set the content of that debate aside for now and let’s grant the goal total success. That is to say, imagine students perfectly trained to defend a literal reading of Genesis and able to win every argument when they get to college.

Here’s my question: How does rebutting Charles Darwin make anyone more loving, joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, generous, faithful, gentle, or self-controlled? It doesn’t. Being able to prove Darwin wrong does not make you a more loving human being. And yet, consider how much time and energy gets poured into exactly this kind of effort. There is a deep confusion here about the nature of spiritual formation.

I’ll sometimes press this point with my students in a more provocative way: “Can you be a psychopath and get an A in your Bible classes?” The answer is, of course you can. The issue here is not cognitive. It is affective. A person can know all the right answers and still have a profoundly disordered heart.

Consider the Parable of the Good Samaritan. Everyone knows the story. And no one needs help with the interpretation. Everybody knows the point Jesus is making. And yet, how many of us still struggle to be good neighbors?

The point is obvious. Our struggles with the Parable of the Good Samaritan are not educational or informational. We already know the answers. We can all get an A on the Good Samaritan test. And if that is so, we have to face the obvious conclusion: We cannot teach our way into being more like Jesus.

2. The “WWJD” Mistake

Closely related to the educational mistake is the second mistake. If the first mistake is treating formation as an educational problem, the second is treating it as a decision-making problem.

Call this the “WWJD” mistake, as in “What Would Jesus Do?” Or, as I tell my students, “Being like Jesus isn’t a Trolley Problem.” The Trolley Problem, I expect many of you know, is a classic ethics puzzle that asks you to weigh options and decide upon the right thing to do. The spiritual formation mistake is imagining that following Jesus consists of solving a series of ethical puzzles, or of adopting certain moral or political principles to guide each decision.

To be sure, solid values and good moral reasoning are important. But the mistake is thinking that life is simply a series of moral crossroads, where at each one we pause, ask “What would Jesus do?” and then choose accordingly. In this view, discipleship becomes solving one ethical puzzle after another.

Now, of course, there are moments in life where we face real moral decisions. I’m not denying that. But there are two problems with this way of looking at spiritual formation.

First, life doesn’t slow down to give us time to deliberate. Life comes at us fast. So fast that our responses are often automatic, emotional, and unconscious. When I lose my temper, I’m not standing at a moral crossroads weighing my options and making a bad choice. I am, rather, just reacting. Before I even realize what’s happening, it’s already happened. The horse is out of the barn.

As I tell my students, “The challenge of being like Jesus isn’t about solving a series of ethical puzzles. It’s about being ambushed by a series of emotional triggers.”

Second, when we do arrive at decisive and critical moments, what we do in that moment depends on the kind of person we have already become. You can arrive at that crossroads selfish, scared, and reactive. Or you can arrive at that crossroads loving, steady, and courageous. But that outcome was formed long before you arrived at the consequential moment of choice. In short, the WWJD framework, treating life as a series of ethical puzzles, wholly misses the question of virtue and character.

Virtue is a kind of holy habit, what I call holy automaticity. When life comes at you fast, your first response has to be the right one. Kindness, patience, gentleness, and self-control need to be reflexes. And reflexes are formed through practice.

You want to play guitar? You practice. You want to drive a golf ball straight? You practice. If you want to respond like Jesus instinctively, you have to practice that response over and over again.

Which raises the question: Where are we putting in that kind of practice?

3. The Trickle-Down Mistake

At this point, with the issue of practice, the conversation in my classes usually turns to spiritual disciplines: prayer, fasting, Bible study, worship, Sabbath. All the usual suspects.

Which brings us to the third mistake.

Most of these practices focus on our relationship with God. They are vertical practices. The assumption is that as I grow closer to God, that intimacy will shape how I treat others. I call this the “Trickle-Down Theory” of spiritual formation.

To be clear, once again, I am not denying the importance of these practices. My day is structured around them. These practices matter deeply to me. And they do have an effect on how I live.

But there is a problem here, and that problem is indirectness.

If you want to become kind, you can pray about being more kind. And that, of course, will help. You can also study what the Bible says about kindness. That will help. And yet, these spiritual disciplines are also indirect.

Simply put, if you want to be more kind, why not practice being kind? Directly and interpersonally.

This is where much of our spiritual formation effort goes wrong. We keep directing our energy upward, toward God, and never get around to the horizontal dimension—actually doing the thing we are trying to become. This indirectness assumes that growth in our relationship with God will automatically “trickle down” into how we treat others. We focus on prayer, Bible study, and other spiritual disciplines but rarely turn to directly practice interpersonal virtues like kindness, patience, gentleness, and self-control.

The point here is obvious. If you want kindness to become an automatic response, a holy habit, it has to be practiced. Over and over again. The same is true for patience, gentleness, and self-control. To form the fruit of the Spirit, you have to practice the fruit of the Spirit. And yet, by and large, we don’t.

4. The Liturgy Mistake

A mistake closely related to the Trickle-Down Theory is what I call the “Liturgy Mistake.”

Referring back to the work of James K. A. Smith on desire, liturgies, and spiritual formation, many point to liturgy as the key to spiritual formation. As Smith describes in his books, Christian worship functions as a counter-liturgy to the rival liturgies of consumerism, nationalism, and culture, reorienting our loves toward God and the kingdom.

I love these ideas. I love liturgy. I love the rhythm of the liturgical calendar, structured prayer, silence, Sabbath, Lectio Divina. I geek out on all of it. And I agree that we need practices that shape and direct our loves.

But here is the problem, and it is closely tied to the issue with the Trickle-Down Theory. Liturgy, as Smith envisions it, is mostly tied to church. Liturgy tends to be vertical, aimed at God rather than at human neighbors. And most crucially, liturgy is occasional: a Sunday service, a monthly rhythm, a liturgical season, or a daily practice. Because of this, liturgy alone cannot solve the problem the Trickle-Down Theory describes. Liturgy is too indirect, too intermittent, and too vertical to form the reflexive, relational habits of Christlike love in ordinary, daily life.

5. The Service Mistake

Now, at this point, someone will object. Don’t we have interpersonal practices? What about service?

That brings us to the fifth mistake: assuming that service is practice.

In the spiritual disciplines literature, service is often offered as the “outward” counterpart to the inward disciplines. And again, service is good. Service is vital. Service forms us. But service does not solve the problems we’ve been describing.

For example, many acts of service lack direct, face-to-face interaction. You can rake someone’s yard, organize donations, or work behind the scenes at a soup kitchen. All good things. But in these activities, you can be alone a lot. And even group service projects can lack sustained engagement with the people being served.

Also, service, like liturgy, is occasional. A few hours here and there. Once a month. And while important and meaningful, these service activities do not have enough repetition to form interpersonal habits.

Lastly, service tends to happen within spiritualized contexts. When serving our neighbors, we are on our best behavior. There is a social expectation—this is a service project, after all—to be kind. And for most of us, it’s not hard to be nice for a few hours in a structured volunteer setting.

So, while it’s important to do good work in the world, service itself doesn’t provide us with the regular, situational, and daily practice we need to form interpersonal virtues. The challenges we face in being kind, patient, and gentle tend not to occur when we are engaged in a service project. Rather, we face these challenges at work, at home, and as we go about our daily lives. We face these challenges when we are tired, when we are frustrated, and when we are triggered. These moments are the crucible of spiritual formation.

Service, for all its value, does not typically train our reflexive responses. Consequently, service does not give us the hours of practice needed to form holy automaticity. Service is good. But service is not practice in the ordinary, unremarkable moments of daily life where spiritual formation actually happens.