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PreachingToday.com: How do you define spiritual formation?

Kent Carlson: The goal of Christian spiritual formation is to be intentionally transformed in such a way that my instinctive response is the same as Christ's would be if he were living my life.

When you think about the topic of spiritual formation and preaching, what comes to mind?

Kent: The primary goal when preaching about spiritual formation is to cast a vision of what life could be like if we were being formed into the image of Christ. The difficulty is that oftentimes the listeners don't come to church with the same agenda, so you have to learn to meet people where they are and steer them in the right direction.

What are some other challenges to preaching for spiritual formation?

Mike Lueken: Because of the way the Christian subculture has shaped the vast majority of people we preach to, we have a lot to overcome when we start talking about spiritual formation. When we talk about being formed into the person of Christ and describing what it requires to experience transformation in one's own life, we encounter massive barriers that have to be taken down. We've realized there are things people have ingrained in them—ways of thinking, understanding the Christian faith, or reading the Bible—that make preaching about spiritual formation a challenge before we even start.

Kent: There's also a tendency within the Christian world to think of preaching as entertainment, which means people expect to simply sit and have their attention kept by the skills of the speaker. The formational model, on the other hand, requires a great deal from the listeners. We place great emphasis on the listener's coming with some hunger. If people don't come hungry—with some desire for growth—the speaking experience tends to do little for people.

It sounds as though you train your hearers how to engage in the spiritual discipline of hearing the Word taught.

Mike: We have been so persistent in emphasizing spiritual formation from the pulpit that people have come to realize this is who we are as a church. In that sense, I think we do have a large percentage of people who share the responsibility of formation with us.

Kent: We have taught specifically on the importance of listening a time or two. But for the most part, people naturally grasp what's required of them in order to pay attention to a message. A lot of people want to hear simple messages because they believe the Christian life is simple. But I haven't always found that to be true. Whenever I pay careful attention to my own life with God—my own struggles with obedience—the details begin to get pretty complicated. After a while, people pick up on the fact that pursuing spiritual formation will require rigorous engagement with your mind. Transformation requires walking into messy details.

Mike: We regularly reinforce the importance of Jesus' phrase: "He who has ears to hear, let him hear." That saying applies both in terms of how you receive what's being said, and also in terms of the skillful ways in which hearers filter what's being said.

How has your preaching changed as you've begun emphasizing spiritual formation in your church?

Mike: A couple of things have changed. First, we've stopped offering a handful of tips to improve certain areas in a person's life. For example, we found ourselves almost instinctively drifting away from preaching topics like "four ways to make your marriage better," or "five suggestions for improving your parenting." We discovered that addressing who you are and who you are becoming—in other words, your spiritual formation—is crucial regardless of the topic you pick related to husbands, wives, parents, children, or friends.

Once we started to drift away from giving tips and started to place more emphasis on becoming certain kinds of people, our preaching got messier. We got into the gory details of what actually goes on in a person's heart and mind.

Kent: For example, when it comes to marriage relationships, what I see taught most often is some variation of "find out what your needs are as a married person and try to teach yourselves how to meet each other's needs." You take some sort of test and discover you have a core need of attention. It's hard for me to imagine Jesus teaching like that. Obviously it's always good for one spouse to give the other attention, but the crucial question from a spiritual formation standpoint is, What do I do when I want attention and don't get it? In other words, maybe what I need most in my life are not skillful methods of communicating my needs to my spouse, but rather to learn how to think about myself less often. In the end, what is crucial for a good marriage is for the husband and wife to both become more rigorous followers of Christ.

Mike: That's a great example of the change in our preaching. You can imagine Mary and Tom sitting in a church service while Kent's preaching about marriage. Mary's there hoping Tom's listening, and Tom's there hoping Mary's listening, because they want the other one to change. Then they get hit with the message that it's not about the other person changing. Instead, the issue is you need to learn to surrender to God and love and accept your spouse as he or she is. At that point, the dreams people have for their spouse vanishe before their eyes, and they have to answer the question, Do I want this?

When you have multiple churches to choose from, many people will answer that question with their feet by going somewhere else. That's why we should be highly suspicious of the standard indicators of church success. More often than not, churches uncritically embrace numerical growth as a sign of God's blessing. The influence of American culture on the church leads us to believe that faithfulness will always result in more people. Sadly, the concept of faithfulness that results in trouble, struggle, and loss is almost unknown in American churches. Everybody understands that seasons of suffering are prime spiritual formation times for an individual; but that raises the question, Why aren't seasons of suffering in the life of a church seen in the same light?

Some people will object: "Look at the Acts church. Look at how it exploded with growth." We're not saying that growth is bad or wrong, or that attracting more people is inherently evil. But when spiritual formation becomes a central emphasis in your preaching so that everything else flows from it—evangelism, caring for the poor and disenfranchised, and so on—growth has to be rethought. When you get into the details of what it takes from a human perspective to cooperate with the Spirit of God, the question that has to be raised is, How many professing Christians actually want to experience transformation rather than simply attending a nice church that sings the songs they like and has a pastor that is fun to listen to?

PreachingToday.com: If your preaching wasn't previously about spiritual formation, what would you say it was about?

In our sermon preparation and preaching we attempt to expose whether someone really wants to be healed.

Kent Carlson: I wouldn't say our preaching wasn't about spiritual formation. Even before we made the shift, we would do series on spiritual disciplines. But as I said before, I think our preaching had an aspect of entertainment that caused us to ask too often, "Are people enjoying it? Do they smile and shake their heads up and down and bring their friends next week because I'm entertaining?" In other words, now we pay a little less attention to whether or not people like the message.

Mike Lueken: I would agree. It's not so much that we weren't previously interested in spiritual formation; it's just that now we're trying to attain some degree of honesty about the things that drive pastors and the ways in which we define success.

Does traditional homiletic training undermine the goal of spiritual formation in any way?

Mike: When I was going through school, I got the impression that getting people to remember what you said was very important. It was popular at that time for all your main points to start with the same letter, or to say, "Jesus walked on ____" and have everyone say "water," and then write the answer in their bulletin. But I'm not sure that remembering an outline is crucial to spiritual formation.

Maybe the biggest problem, though, is that some people have overemphasized knowing the Bible. Loving and knowing the Scriptures is great, but how much Bible knowledge does the average person need to make progress toward Christlikeness? Maybe it's counterproductive to emphasize knowing the Bible without also emphasizing living it out. We need to emphasize how to apply and incorporate what we already know.

How does listening to sermons fit into the spectrum of spiritual disciplines?

Mike: It is extremely important for a person to regularly gather with others for worship and teaching, but there's no accountability in listening to a sermon. When I listen to a sermon, I decide what I liked, what I didn't, or what I might work on. So much responsibility rests on the shoulders of the listener. If they're hungry and looking for something, listening to a sermon can be a powerful experience. Listening to sermons keeps the vision of who God is and what life with him is like alive in a person's mind. Listening to a sermon as part of a worship experience is a way of being reoriented around the things of God, awakened from our idolatry, and reminded of what is real.

What kind of preaching does and does not lead to spiritual formation? How does this actually affect the way you prepare a message?

Mike: I can tell you from personal experience that the kind of preaching that doesn't contribute to spiritual formation is the sermon prepared as a way to speak to an issue that has annoyed me so much I can't be quiet about it anymore. I preached a message once on worship that I prepared because I was so sick of everybody talking about how they wished worship was this way or that. When I think about who I was while preparing that sermon and what was going on when I delivered it, it wasn't formative for me, and I'm certain it wasn't formative for people who listened.

On the other hand, one passage that has influenced us is the story in John 5 of the paralytic who had been sitting at the well for almost forty years when Jesus came along and said to him, "Do you want to be healed?" From a formational standpoint, that's such a wonderful question. The man had thirty-seven or so years of being formed in his identity as the person who could not walk, who was helpless, and who lived by this pool. If Jesus healed him, he would lose that identity. Maybe he'd rather be the paralytic.

If people say they want to be transformed into the image of Christ, they have to realize that they may have to sacrifice their identity. You must lose your life in order to find it. So in our sermon preparation and preaching we attempt to expose—to the degree we can—whether someone really wants to be healed.

Do you coordinate your preaching with your church's other spiritual disciplines to address the issue of accountability in listening to preaching?

Mike: We have on occasion, but in general we do not. Occasionally we have our small groups discuss questions based on the weekend sermon. There have been times when, through the course of a five or six week series, small group leaders have kept the topic fresh in their group by working through relevant questions. What we have tried to do instead of making the sermon the central thing and building everything off of it is to emphasize spiritual formation and spiritual disciplines, and encourage people to develop a spiritual formation plan for attending to the details of their own lives.

We encourage people to be self-reflective. Instead of asking themselves, How do I stop being angry? we encourage them to ask, Why do I get angry? We've done a ton of work to provide practical ways for people to identify the areas they need to work on, and we touch on those things in our sermons.

Kent Carlson and Mike Lueken are senior pastors of Oak Hills Church in Folsom, California.