The Story & Rationale of the App
While my Western education has taught be to break things down into discreet boxes, the true story of the app (like most real stories) isn’t that simple. I beg your grace as I share the story of the app, which resembles a number of overlapping bubbles of God’s movement. Each little story is its own testimony of God at work. But you’ll notice repeated themes, as sometimes God has to get through to me using multiple angles on the same issue.
Vital Church Ministry and the Problem of Spiritual Formation Pathways
I have served on many discernment teams with Vital Church Ministry, an organization that helps churches in transition, distress, or decline. The discernment teams gather stories, data, and interviews about each church and listen for what the Spirit may be saying to the church to address their most pressing challenges.
After participating in many of these discernment processes, I began to notice a pattern. Churches in transition, distress, or decline often lack healthy spiritual formation pathways for their people. Either the pathways are information-only, or they have no pathways. As a result, these Christians may even be able to articulate Christian beliefs, but in many cases had not grown in Christian character to the point where they could address their church’s challenges, which were often related to unresolved conflict.
Observing the pain and distress of these churches inspired me to develop a spiritual formation pathway that is accessible for the newest believer but continues to challenge those with a depth of Bible knowledge, a pathway that goes beyond information in a relational, Spirit-led, action-oriented way. Every element in the spiritual journey is accessible to anyone’s participation. There is also an expectation that every person is taking actions and reporting back the work of God in their lives.
Andrew Tsou and the Problem of Knowledge Currency in the Church
When I worked at EGC, my colleague, Andrew Tsou, wrote a kind of manifesto that identified a problem in the western Church—the phenomenon of knowledge as a currency. Pastors are paid for their Biblical knowledge, courses are offered to provide knowledge, seminaries are designed around knowledge frameworks, ordination is centered around proving knowledge, and spiritual formation in the churches often begins and ends with information transfer. Andrew did a better job than I can now of laying out the historical reasons for this state of affairs where knowledge can sometimes supersede relationships, mercy and justice, or discernment of the Holy Spirit’s leading.
The result is that even long-time Christians’ lives can sometimes lack the redemptive power of the gospel in their world. They don’t know how to be led by the Spirit, take action according to their faith, or share with others how the gospel has been at work in their lives.
The app seeks to take a stand, not against Biblical knowledge, but against the neglect of relationships, spiritual discernment, and the testimony of the faithful in word and deed. The app is designed to be used with pods, and pods of people grow together in spiritual journeys. The coach of each pod receives training and support for creating an environment conducive to training, growth, and building one another up in the faith. The app also has four opportunities in each conversation to turn intentionally to God in prayer, meditation, thanks, and listening. The app conversations each involve story sharing, both about our spiritual backgrounds and about how God is at work in our lives today. This regular story sharing helps people notice, recall, and bear witness to God’s movement, power, and love.
Church Planting and the Scope of Spiritual Formation
For a church plant, I served on their advisory team (a precursor to a formal elder board). Part of our work together was to design a pathway for spiritual formation for the people in the church plant. To define the scope of the Christian life to grow in, I listed 20 life topics, designed to engage every area of life. I grouped them into areas of ever-widening scope: Connecting with God, Participating in Christian Community, Following Jesus in Society, and Joining God’s Mission in World History.
I wrote the draft of a book with these 20 topics, including relevant Scriptures, meditations, and suggested action steps for each topic. These 20 topics were designed to give a timeless foundation for a life of following Jesus.
In the app, in addition to these 20 topical convos, there are two generic convos. One is an “Any Scripture” convo that lets a pod use the app in conjunction with any Scripture reading they want to do. The other generic convo is the Soul Care Convo, which offers group soul care options for finding hope in God amid specific life circumstances. Pods can choose journeys (series of convo topics). They can return to foundational convo topics whenever they wish. They can do a deep dive into one topic for a time.
My Personal Journey of Knowledge vs. Character
I have an M.Div. with a concentration in spiritual formation and Christian counseling. I have been trained in three schools of spiritual direction. I have been trained in multiple courses in disciple making movements. Yet, my own character is still immature in some key ways. The gap between my knowledge and my character is frustrating, but aligns with the truth that people don’t grow in character by information alone. As a studious introvert, I like being able to learn in the quiet, free from social demands. I usually connect with God best in solitude. But such learning is not all there is to true spiritual formation. I was designed to (eventually) function and thrive as part of a Body, a community of people following Jesus.
For this reason, though it can feel awkward, slow, or tense at times, my spiritual formation needs to be relational, Spirit-led, and action-oriented. The app is designed to facilitate spiritual formation with these elements. The app has many flexible structures, so that those who have a high degree of emotional intelligence have options at their disposal to use as they see fit in their pods, and those who benefit from a more structured tool may use the app accordingly.
The app also includes a photojournal for reviewing our spiritual journeys. As a heady person, I have a good memory for concepts and a foggy memory for events. That means that I can run into discouragement because I forget all the ways God has already worked in my life. The spiritual photojournal lets me review and share God’s action in my life, which builds trust in God and love for others into my outlook on life.
Coaching and the ‘Year of Chair’
One of the most difficult years of ministry for me was when I was the council chair (head elder) for a church at a time when the pastor left. I affectionately refer to that year as “The Year of Chair.” The level of leadership demand was not something I had experienced before. During that year, I had the support of three coaches. Our denomination’s leadership development coach was excellent at drawing out the leadership wisdom that God had implanted in me. The chaplain at the Christian organization where I worked was excellent at providing emotional intelligence, spiritual insight, and shrewd advice where mine was lacking. A pastor of a nearby church kept me grounded in the basics of prayfulness, surrender to Christ, and hope in the gospel. I am forever grateful for their support, which enabled me to function in a leadership role that far outstripped my normal capacities.
The Year of Chair cemented in me the vital importance of coaches in a Christian’s life to enable them to obey in hard things. We are at a moment in history when hard things are all around, and I suspect harder things are coming. The answer is not for each of us to grit our teeth more. We as Christians need to be smart about how we’re following Jesus. One of the smartest things we can do is to identify people who can coach us personally. We also grow as we create space in our lives to be ready to coach others. The app creates a structure for coaching, and a tool for coaches to support each other, so that each Christian doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel in order to participate in being coached and coaching others.
Spiritual Direction and Coaching Towards God
I was trained in three schools of spiritual direction, each of which had a slightly different focus. The first was a two-year cohort focused on the dynamics of prayer life, exploring spiritual practices, and noticing what the Spirit was stirring in both director and directee. The second was a two-year cohort focused on perceptions and emotions in prayer, and how following their thread can reveal something God was doing in our lives. The third was a six month cohort and one-week intensive focused on noticing the spiritual battles at work and discerning gospel-informed vision for how a person’s life might look if those spiritual battles were won by the power of the Holy Spirit.
I was a spiritual director for ten years, and a spiritual directors’ supervisor for two years. My job as a spiritual director was not to provide guidance directly, but to direct people’s attention to the movement of the Spirit in their lives. If I ever suggested a practice, it was an idea for how the person might better listen to God. These suggested practices were merely precursors to the real action steps decided by the person, and the person was always free to alter their practices and actions according to how they felt led by the Spirit.
Spiritual formation is not simply a process of human willpower but a journey of becoming increasingly open to the Spirit’s leading in our lives. One of the chief values of the Whole Life experience of spiritual formation is that it is Spirit-led. The app creates space for practicing spiritual discernment in several ways.
The app offers many meditations on the presence of God that the pod can practice together and share how God may have moved in that time.
Before choosing an action step, the pod spends time in listening prayer for anything the Spirit may bring to mind for the person to do, with guidance on how to determine if what comes to mind is consistent with the Spirit’s character.
The pod spends time in listening prayer before speaking into one anothers’ lives. The Speak Into My Life sections help the people practice listening to the Spirit on behalf of one another.
The practice of capturing backstories and God stories also helps the person learn to notice and remember God’s work in their lives.
In addition, the app includes conversation guides for pods to offer soul care to one another. Pods start by meditating on a passage of Scripture, and then they listen to a person describe a life situation or where they are spiritually. After some silent reflection, the pod can choose from multiple soul care guides with questions to help the person find hope in God in their circumstances.
Harvard Business Review & Emotional Intelligence in Spiritual Formation
A single subsection of a single article upended how I think about spiritual formation. In the article “What Makes a Leader,” an article in the Harvard Business Review collection Emotional Intelligence, in the sidebar section called “Can Emotional Intelligence be Learned?” the authors briefly discuss the neuroscience of emotional intelligence. They contrast the part of the brain that governs emotions, instincts, and motivations—the limbic system—from the area that governs conceptual reasoning and analysis—the neocortex.
The authors’ key insight is that most emotional intelligence training programs target the wrong part of the brain—they limit their focus to teaching concepts, which engages the neocortex. To properly train in emotional intelligence, teachers need to train the limbic system for behavioral growth. To do so, training programs need to include repeated practice, targeted motivation, and personalized feedback.
When I read this, I immediately considered the implications for spiritual formation. If the church primarily attempts to help people grow spiritually by explaining concepts, they are not engaging the part of the brain that is responsible for human motivation and drive.
I started to consider the question, what might emotionally intelligent spiritual formation look like? How might every aspect of shepherding the church be made to engage not only the neocortext but also the limbic system as well?
The Whole Life app attempts to implement a process of spiritual formation that creates space for group motivation, story sharing, action steps, review, and feedback. Group motivation comes from designing the app for pod conversations and a shared commitment to action taking. Motivation also comes from the interest in the exploration of our own and one another’s spiritual journeys and the hope and joy that comes from seeing God at work in concrete ways in our lives. Opportunities for practice and repetition come from action steps, which can also be converted into regular practices within the app. Personalized feedback comes from the practice of sharing God stories after trying actions, from people praying for one another regarding their action steps, from learning from others’ experiences, and from multiple spaces for speaking into one anothers’ lives.
Monuments as Reminders of God’s Action
During the Israelites’ wilderness wandering, multiple times they set up monuments to remind them of how God acted on behalf of their community. In the Israelites’ day, they heaped up rocks as a symbolic reminder. In today’s world, we can remember moments through photos, video, and journaling.
To make our spiritual growth stick, it’s as important today as it was in the Israelites’ day to remember and share about God’s action in our lives and communities. We need these reminders to build our faith for when times are hard, to build a shared identity as fellow children of God, and to grow into people who readily express the goodness of God with others.
For this reason, the app includes a spiritual photojournal, with opportunities to add backstories, situations, God stories, answered prayer, insights, and Scripture cards. All of the app convos include times of story sharing, both as reflection of our journeys up to this point and as review of all that God is doing in our lives.
Even if God’s action in our lives isn’t something we could snap a photo of, we can take a page from the Israelites by using symbolic images of objects or places, along with captions, as reminders of God’s action on our behalf. For that reason, backstories and God stories can have photos from our lives, our past, or even symbolic snapshots from the internet.
Relational and Emotionally Intelligent Spiritual Formation
When spiritual formation is mostly informational and not very relational, you end up with people who are puffed up with knowledge about a faith that hasn’t worked its way into their relationships. The reason authentic spiritual formation is relational include:
People grow best in environment of acceptance and love, which requires others.
People need others to see the Christian life from multiple life stories and experiences to get a fuller picture of the gospel and Jesus’ character.
Because the Christian community is designed to function like parts of a body, with each part having different functions, spiritual formation involves learning to cooperate with people of other gifts, respect others’ strengths, acknowledge our own God-given limitations, and rely on others in various ways.
Human character formation happens in the context of feedback. We each have blindspots that others can help us overcome. At various times we need celebration, encouragement, urging, warning, or correction that comes from an outside perspective.
Shared commitments are an extra resource of energy for trying hard things. When everyone is in something together, and everyone reports back what happened when they tried their action step, there’s extra motivation to persevere.
One of the two greatest commandments Jesus gave us is to love our neighbor. Christian spiritual formation that sidelines relationships is a false religion.
To create a relational experience, the app is designed for pods, not for individual growth alone. The central activity of the app is convos, or conversations. Convos are live—in person or over video. The app guides live conversations, it doesn’t replace them. In the convos, people share their personal stories and practice holy curiosity about how God is at work in each person’s life. The pods pray for one another.
In addition, the Scripture reading is called Relational Bible Reading, which focuses the discussion around what the reading means for our relationship with God and one another. There are multiple opportunities for people to let others in the pod speak into their lives.
The coach is trained to foster an environment of relational joy necessary for spiritual growth. The pod is encouraged to develop a shared identity. A next-level form of spiritual formation involves going beyond sharing about our individual lives to actually doing life together. There are opportunities for the pods to try group action steps together, and there are prompts for the groups to ask how they can support each other in physical, concrete ways.
Exponential Disciple Making
The goal with disciplemaking ministry is to help people connect with Jesus and grow in Christian maturity to the point where they can help others connect with Jesus and grow. As a philosophy, most disciplemaking movements want to involve people in helping others come to Jesus and grow as soon as possible.
Some Christian leaders want to hide their growing edges from those they are leading. Discretion is a virtue, but not to the point of hiding the reality that we are all still growing. Other Christians want to defer to vocational pastors for the spiritual growth of their community.
Because we are all on a spiritual growth journey, we need to all come to terms with the fact that we can and should help people grow while we are still growing. We need to resist the dual temptations to, one the one hand, pretend (or deceive ourselves) that we have everything all put together, or on the other hand, to avoid helping anyone grow because we still have flaws.
The app aims to be a straightforward enough tool that anyone humble and deliberate in following Jesus can help others do the same once they have a foundation in Christian faith and practice. With that in mind, coaches for the app are participant-coaches who have been coached by someone else. Coaches do action steps along with everyone else, share their backstories and God stories, and allow others to pray for them. They also participate in coach pods.
To give the people in the pod full participation as soon as possible, coaches are encouraged to let others choose the Scripture, choose the discussion questions, and discern their own actions steps. The coach is encouraged to let someone else in the pod facilitate the convos as soon as appropriate. The more actively involved people are in decisions and facilitation, the more they can see themselves as someone who can help others grow. Ideally, people in pods go on to form their own pods with others once they and the coach feel they are ready, and the new coach gets ongoing support from a coach pod.
Jesus
Jesus taught his disciples by doing life with some of them. They learned in the doing, with life lessons repeated and reinforced. But even for those who did not travel with Jesus, Jesus taught people by calling them to action. He did not simply give them a body of information. He called them to change how they did their jobs, give up what they were holding onto, and share what they had been given with others.
Jesus also warned his followers about the hypocrisy of the religious leaders, who amassed Biblical knowledge but lacked basic character transformation in loving God wholeheartedly and loving others as much as they loved themselves.
The app helps people organize pods that go on spiritual journeys together of conversations, actions, and story sharing, and ideally, shared action. This is intended to partially replicate the original disciples’ experience, even though pods aren’t necessarily people who live or work together. The app also gives people opportunity to take Spirit-led action and come back and report about all that God did, in the same way the Jesus sent his disciples out two by two to take action and report back. This dynamic is also reflected in the coach pods, where people who are sent out to coach others come back to receive feedback and support in their ministry.
Furthermore, Jesus modelled listening to the Spirit before He took action. He withdrew for prayer and then would return with decisions about what they were to do next. Similarly, the app creates space for people to listen to the Spirit before taking their next action.
Jesus also commanded that his disciples would go into all the world and make disciples of all peoples, teaching them to observe everything he had commanded, even as he would support them until the end. His statement goes beyond “teach them the information I have given you.” Jesus called them to train people in taking action in accordance with the gospel. Beyond telling people what Jesus commands are, obeying this command involves coaching people as they take action, make errors, learn, and grow. It means sharing testimonies of God at work in our lives, fanning into flame other people’s faith. And it means looking to Jesus’ ongoing spiritual presence, support, and guidance as we do so.
While the verse is translated with the word “teaching”, this word can be misleading if our primary concept of teaching is the transfer of informational understanding. Instead, “teaching them to observe my commands” might reasonably be rendered “coaching.”
3DM and Coaching
I took part in a two-year training for building a disciplemaking culture in a church, led by an organization called 3DM. Their philosophy includes mentoring others personally through a process of leading by demonstration, leading by partnering, leading by supporting, and leading by occasional consulting. They clarify that people can mentor others in some areas, even while they need mentoring in other areas of their own life. 3DM values the spiritual gifts and developing in maturity in those gifts. And they value raising up people to be able to mentor others.
Regarding the coach structure for the app, my 3DM experience clarified my convictions that:
A coach is not a brand new Christian. New Christians need time and support to establish a personal relationship with God and ongoing spiritual life or they run the risk of mentoring people in ways that don’t lead them closer to Jesus. They need time to establish their relationship with God, observe other Christians, be mentored, and watch how the coach coaches others. For this reason, the app recommends that at least one person in every pod be an intentional follower of Jesus for at least two years.
A coach is willing to share their own personal backstories, action steps, failures, and God stories. The coach is open about the fact that they are still growing, and they take their spiritual formation seriously. They trust that others can speak insight into their lives. For this reason, coaches of the app are participant-coaches.
A coach is always looking for opportunities to share leadership or delegate to others to allow others to grow in their capacity to coach. A coach looks forward to the day when a person will be able to coach their own pod. For this reason, app coaches are encouraged to give as much decision making and facilitating over to others as soon as is appropriate.
No coach should be alone in their coaching. For this reason, the app offers coach pods, where coaches meet together with a coach’s coach for story sharing, troubleshooting, and further support. The coach’s coach is also available to the coaches for consultation on an as-needed basis.
The Other Half of Church & A Spiritual Growth Environment
The neuroscience of spiritual growth includes environmental factors. People grow spiritually in an environment where they feel open relationally, were they are not in fight-or-flight mode, and they are part of a group they identify with. The Other Half of Church explores this neuroscience and its implications for spiritual formation.
The app coach training incorporates insights from this research, explored more in depth in another blog post, Setting the Tone for Spiritual growth.
