What Is Spiritual Formation?

by Bobby Clinton – 15.7.99

Early on in the teaching of this class it was intuitively grasped that students needed more than just cognitive information. They needed to respond to God in terms of the material being taught. We began to try different things to get this response. This included a short worship time. We would often stop and pray together about needs that various students had. We also tried giving input from a devotional standpoint. That is, we taught or reinforced some of the cognitive concepts by using a special input that was designed to move people in the affect (their feelings).

Later as we analyzed how students learn we saw cognitively that they learn in four different domains:

• the cognitive;
• the affect;
• the will;
• the experiential.

The Cognitive deals with concepts and information. The affect has to do with a person's feelings and attitudes about something. The will (this domain is technically called the conative) deals with decisions made about using what is learned. The experiential is the integrative use of cognition, affect, and will so that what is learned is put into the life and habits of the learner.

An Important Concept Emerges—Beingness

In these early years we were learning also about a major concept of the course—the notion that ministry flows out of being. God shapes us in order to use us. The more we studied about beingness the more we were able to pinpoint components of it. We still recognize that we don’t yet have it all—beingness fully defined. But we have definitely identified some very important concepts of it. So when we say,

MINISTRY FLOWS OUT OF BEING.

We are dealing with one of the most important concepts in the whole course. What is beingness? What have we learned about it?

Well, in short, beingness is dominantly who we are and only secondarily what we do. We have added to our original definition of beingness over the years. But we still recognize we have more to learn about it.

We are indicating that beingness is a complex conglomerate of inner life factors. They include at least these important components:

√ • intimacy with God,

√ • conscience,

√ • character,

• personality,

• giftedness,

• destiny,

√ • values drawn from experience, and

• gender influenced perspectives.

Notice the checked components. Spiritual formations dominantly deal with these checked components.

As the course further developed we were able to identify technically three kinds of formations that God shapes over a lifetime: spiritual formation, ministerial formation, and strategic formation. These are defined as follows:

Definition
Spiritual formation is the shaping activity in a leader’s life which is directed toward instilling godly character and developing inner life.

Definition
Ministerial formation is the shaping activity in a leader’s life which is directed toward instilling leadership skills, leadership experience, and developing giftedness for ministry.

Definition
Strategic formation is the shaping activity in a leader’s life which is directed toward having that leader reach full potential and achieve a God-given destiny.

Your reading assignments and lecture inputs dominantly deal with information about the three formations but with much more on ministerial and strategic formation.

As our course on life long development matured, we saw the need to spin off a course that specially dealt with ministerial formation (ML 521 Developing Leadership Giftedness) and one which concentrated on strategic formation ( ML 524 Focused Lives). But in all of our courses we saw the need to give input which dealt with spiritual formation.

Approaches to Spiritual Formation Input

Over the years we have done different spiritual formation series which concentrated on various aspects of course content.

Ø a series on Bible Characters which showed how the concepts of the course could be seen in God’s shaping of important Bible leaders

Ø a topical series which took important concepts and treated them in the Bible

Ø a series on Union Life (one of the crucial elements of experiencing victory in a life) and is part of beingness that focuses on intimacy with God and fruitfulness of character

Ø a series dealing with the effects of deep processing in the life

The series of spiritual formations we are using for this course presentation is a combination that includes topics like deep processing, values like sovereign mindset, an important Bible character demonstrating these things, Paul, and a special look at Union Life and its dominant outward manifestation—joy. The series looks at Paul in the book of Philippians. It is designed to move your heart (and ours). So we hope you will look forward to the spiritual formation time in each unit. Expect God to speak to you through these times. And remember,

God is concerned with your beingness—much more than even your doing.

So enjoy, as you interact with the spiritual formations. Usually there will be a response to a spiritual formation input. Sometimes it will involve a threaded discussion or posting a Journal entry or discussion in a small group chat time. But most of all it is hoped there will be a response in your affective (heart) and your conative (will) learning domains.