Christianity Today interviews Richard Foster and Dallas Willard, two major authors affiliated with the Renovaré spiritual renewal movement. They talk about “spiritual formation” as something that’s missing from many churches, and by this they mean taking on the character of Christ.
What do you mean when you use the phrase spiritual formation?
Willard: Spiritual formation is character formation. Everyone gets a spiritual formation. It’s like education. Everyone gets an education; it’s just a matter of which one you get.
Spiritual formation in a Christian tradition answers a specific human question: What kind of person am I going to be? It is the process of establishing the character of Christ in the person. That’s all it is. You are taking on the character of Christ in a process of discipleship to him under the direction of the Holy Spirit and the Word of God. It isn’t anything new, because Christians have been in this business forever. They haven’t always called it spiritual formation, but the term itself goes way back.
Is spiritual formation the same as discipleship?
Willard: Discipleship as a term has lost its content, and this is one reason why it has been moved aside. I’ve tried to redeem the idea of discipleship, and I think it can be done; you have to get it out of the contemporary mode.
There are really three gospels that are heard in our society. One is forgiveness of sins. Another is being faithful to your church: If you take care of your church, it will take care of you. Sometimes it’s called discipleship, but it’s really churchmanship. And another gospel is the social one—Jesus is in favor of liberation, and we should be devoted to that. All of those contain important elements of truth. You can’t dismiss any of them. But to make them central and say that’s what discipleship is just robs discipleship of its connection with transformation of character.
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At this conference, I heard some panelists criticize megachurches. I wonder what your take is on seeker-oriented congregations.
Willard: What they do well is establish a public presence that draws many people under the sound of the gospel. They are led by wonderful people who are under the call of God to do the work they’re doing.
In many seeker-sensitive churches, the focus is on getting people to confess Christ as a basis for going to heaven when they die. I don’t want to diminish the importance of that, because you’re going to be dead a lot longer than you’re alive, so you ought to be ready for that.
But it is possible to lose sight of character transformation as a serious element for the people you’re bringing in. We need to do both of those things.
I think when they talk about character transformation, they’re talking about what we traditionally call sanctification. But I wouldn’t want to oppose that or separate it from “going to heaven” as though they were unrelated.
In traditional Christian theology, “going to heaven” and the transformation of character are two sides of the same coin. When we are adopted as members of the Body of Christ we’re given the gift of the Spirit. And the goal of that indwelling spirit is ultimately to transform us into the kind of people who will be fitted for eternal life in the presence of God.
In The Great Divorce one of the themes that C.S. Lewis develops is that people end up not going to heaven because they don’t want to. They simply haven’t become the kind of people who would be happy in God’s presence. For Lewis, “going to heaven” is intrinsically bound up with the kind of people we are. Not that I think Willard and Foster would deny that, but it’s good to be reminded that “character formation” in the Christian understanding has a goal: that “when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.”
A Thinking Reed 
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