The primary question I hear when I go to conferences, or when people in full-time ministry reach out to me, is “What does spiritual formation look like in the church?”

They often want a simple answer, but there is no simple answer. There are many who will provide a simple answer, to be sure, but it ends up being no more than “here are some practices you should be doing.”

In this sense, one of the main reasons why spiritual formation has not actually helped people minister is that it hasn’t been functioning with a real spiritual theology.

Spiritual theology is the term we use at the Institute for Spiritual Formation, mostly because all of our older terms are either out of date or misunderstood. Terms like Christian ethics, practical theology or experimental divinity used to cover what we call spiritual theology. The problem is that the modern seminary never included a place in the curriculum for this kind of study and expertise.

Our contemporary conversation in spiritual formation emerged out of this neglect. As often happens in church history, we see cyclical movements of renewal because the church has lost something fundamental to its life. The first wave of the spiritual formation movement never even tried to give a holistic account of what needed to happen (that simply isn’t what they were doing), but tried to name all of the things that we have neglected.

It is now our responsibility, downstream from this conversation, to actually do the work to develop a vision of spiritual formation for the life of the church. Instead, we have tended to just republish the same book over and over and over and over again ad nauseam on spiritual practices.

When we advance a vision of spiritual formation divorced from spiritual theology, what we tend to get is overly pragmatic, overly individualized and overly self-funded visions of spiritual growth. They end up looking no different than the life-hacks of the world, with a thin Christian glaze spread over the whole.

Let me say something a bit bold here.

The spiritual formation conversation has reached a height and breadth greater than it ever has since, perhaps, the “Great Awakening.” Because of this, it is in its most dangerous moment. In fact, I would argue that we are at a crossroads, and depending on the path we take, we will either bury the conversation and lose everything gained by it, or we will choose a path that integrates into the church for the true renewal that we need.

If Jonathan Edwards was right, and I think he was, that whenever God is at work we should expect to find Satan at work mimicking and undermining that work, then we need to have a wise, theologically-grounded, and distinctively Christian vision of spiritual formation that can expose false spirituality for what it is (I gave a talk for The Gospel Coalition West Coast Conference on this topic that can be heard here).

What we need is a spiritual theology that helps the church understand the inner-logic of the gospel, and what life in Christ by the Spirit truly looks like. We need more than just discussions about practices; we need a real spiritual theology.

Since Jamin Goggin is now at Talbot heading up our pastoral care and counseling program, we have been cooking up a way to partner our programs for a degree in spiritual formation for the church. It actually turns out that we already have that program, but people don’t tend to know what it is.

But more directly, until now we haven’t been able to provide the level of pastoral and churchly integration that we wanted. Now that Jamin is on faculty, we can do that.

You can read about our vision in the new Talbot Magazine here.

The advantage of having an alum of your program who is also one of your closest friends who you do ministry with and write with, is that you can really integrate well across a curriculum. A curriculum is never just classes of course. The professors who teach those classes end up determining, for good or for bad, what that curriculum actually amounts to.

At the Institute for Spiritual Formation at Talbot School of Theology, we have two MA degrees in spiritual formation, an MDiv, and a DMin program in spiritual formation, along with a Marriage and Family Therapy master's degree with a unique focus on spiritual formation (and, finally, a certificate in spiritual formation).

The focus of all of these programs is on the formation of the soul of the student, not as a side feature of the curriculum, but as its core defining focus. What this means is that rather than focusing narrowly on knowledge and skill only, these programs are aimed at wisdom and love.

For a long time, our most popular degree has been the Master of Arts in Spiritual Formation and Soul Care. This is the degree that focuses on spiritual theology for the sake of becoming a spiritual director, the training of which can be utilized in a wide variety of soul care modalities. Central to this degree is a two-year (four-semester) practicum sequence in spiritual direction.

The other master's degree is called the Master of Arts (Spiritual Formation) because it is part of Talbot’s general Master of Arts degrees. In other words, this degree is more like a master's in New Testament, Old Testament or Theology. It has always been the track that was aimed at folks who wanted to teach spiritual formation in the church or go on to a Ph.D. This is the degree I want to reintroduce to folks.

The heart of our two spiritual formation degrees are identical. In fact, students wouldn’t know the difference between who is in what program, because the two M.A. degrees and the MDiv students take the same core classes before moving on to their various tracks (and for the MDiv, to all of the other classes they take).

What we are now able to do now that Jamin is the main professor for our pastoral care program is to provide a higher degree of integration across our curriculum for our Master of Arts (Spiritual Formation) degree.

So what does this degree provide?

In short, this degree focuses on spiritual theology for the sake of ministry in the church. It includes the full track of spiritual theology courses and the ability to do the full sequence of courses in pastoral care, remembering that the term “pastoral” can refer both to the office and tasks of full-time pastors, but also to those in the church called to other types of relational shepherding.

In my mind, the most important question confronting spiritual formation today is what spiritual formation looks like in the church. To address this well, we need a real spiritual theology that does not neglect the practical features of life in the presence of God with his people. What Jamin brings with 20+ years in pastoral ministry, a background in spiritual formation and soul care, and a Ph.D. in theology is a way to think Christianly about shepherding.

If you or anyone you know is interested in embracing a life dedicated to the Spirit’s work to form you increasingly into the likeness of Jesus for the sake of the church, please check out what we’re doing.

But also, if you never imagined that you would go to seminary, or if you are a professional who simply can’t drop these questions and yet could never imagine going to seminary, just know that many of our students here are in that same boat. The Institute for Spiritual Formation is a highly diverse group of students from various backgrounds and with various purposes who want to devote their life more deeply to Jesus for whatever he will call them into.

Come and study with Jamin and me, along with John Coe, Berry Bishop, David Merrill, and Megen Phillips.

This post and more can be found on Kyle Strobel’s Substack.