This is an obvious point, easily made, but it might be the most important contrast on the list.
Specifically, many of the spiritual formation practices within Catholicism/Orthodoxy are communal expectations and experiences. Everyone is doing it together. The practice is embedded in the community. The church is moving as one.
True, this is a bit of an idealization, as people in every Catholic and Orthodox parish might elect to opt out. Still, the experience is collective. The fasting. The holy days of obligation. These are expected of everyone, and they are done together.
This is not the case in low-church Protestantism. Since these practices are being transplanted, being exported from another ecclesial tradition, in low-church Protestant spaces the church is invited to participate in these experiences as individuals feel comfortable and interested. To be sure, many do participate, but the assumption is that you can elect not to. Because, again, the practice is foreign. For example, while my church celebrates Ash Wednesday, people who don't want to receive the imposition of ashes can elect not to. Relatedly, unlike the fasting norms in Catholicism and Orthodoxy, low-church Protestant churches typically do not fast together collectively. You, as an individual, are invited to adopt a fasting practice on your own, but that choice is up to you.
What this means is that, in Protestant spaces, spiritual formation is individualistic. And since people make different sorts of choices, spiritual formation in Protestant spaces is piecemeal and uneven, with people picking and choosing different sorts of practices, or none at all, as they please. Thus, while a church like mine might "celebrate Lent," that celebration isn't collective or cohesive. We're not doing it all together.
And again, this is due to transplant shock. A practice from a communal tradition is being transplanted into soil that has tended to privilege individual conscience over ecclesial authority and communal participation. And as we'll get to later in this series, this optionality regarding spiritual formation in Protestant spaces can actually have negative impacts. Specifically, it can play into the wellness-maxxing and optimizing tendencies found among achievement-oriented types. Instead of experiencing spiritual formation as a community, I select practices and disciplines for myself to optimize my spiritual life. And yet, perhaps the deepest rot at the heart of American Christianity is this very bias toward individualism and optimization. And if so, the way we do spiritual formation in Protestant spaces may actually be malforming us. Spiritual formation becomes a solo effort and an individual achievement rather than a collective experience of the church.
