Ben Witherington is the Amos Professor of New Testament for Doctoral Studies at Asbury Theological Seminary and on the doctoral faculty at St. Andrews University in Scotland. Considered by many to be a leading New Testament scholar, Witherington has written over thirty books and six commentaries. For more information, view his faculty profile page or read his blog.
Recently he listed his concerns with contemporary views of spiritual formation:
- Monastic models of piety frankly don’t work for busy normal Christian people. They are not only too demanding, they require too much time away from the very things God in fact most needs them to be committed to doing.
- I have also been disturbed by the individualistic and frankly self-centered nature of much of this literature which ignores that the dominant place where spiritual formation does and should happen, according to the NT itself, is when the body of Christ comes together, not when I go off alone into the woods.
- The connection between spiritual formation and sanctification, or spiritual formation and conversion or spiritual formation and ecclesiology, or spiritual formation and ethics, is too seldom explored. Rather, we get models of spirituality that are disconnected even from religion in general and Christian worship in specific.
- As a Wesleyan person I have also found much of the spiritual formation literature too quietistic, by which I mean, too disconnected from things like works of charity, and even from things like Communion, which Wesley saw as perhaps the major means of grace for all Christians, the major means of spiritual formation.
- The way the Bible has been used in the spiritual formation literature is often painfully wrong. The Bible in itself has lots of ‘spiritual’ content. It does not require a sort of gnostic spiritual reading of the text to get this, and it certainly doesn’t require an anti-historical anti-academic reading to get at this.
- Too much of the spiritual formation literature is indebted to modern psychology with its fixation on human feelings.
So What?
Spiritual formation goes by many names in local churches including discipleship, Christian education, faith formation, spiritual enrichment, and growth groups. It includes scheduled activities and interactions, but is more than the sum of all such offerings. Rather than being understood as an optional programmatic ministry, it should be viewed as a core component of what it means to be a person of faith as experienced through a given community of faith.
- In your church, is spiritual formation a core component of the congregational DNA? If so, how obvious would this be to a newcomer? If not, how do you justify its current placement on the periphery or as one of many options available to those who attend (i.e. your spiritual consumers)?
- Do you agree or disagree with each of the six items on Witherington’s list of concerns? If you were creating a list, what items would you add?