When we talk about spiritual formation, the Christian life, or maybe even just growth, we all presuppose a paradigm for what we are talking about. This paradigm might not be explicit, it might not be something we have worked out in detail, but it is probably fueled significantly by subconscious assumptions and experiences.

There is a lot we can say about this, but I primarily want to narrow our sights to this basic issue. When our subconscious presuppositions reign, left unformed by scripture and the presence of God, we often accept a naturalization of the Christian life.

This is why is it important to pause and hold these paradigms open before God. But this can be hard. I have found that many folks are unable to do this. They have put their faith in the paradigm and have assumed that is the same thing as putting their faith in God. To remove this, or to question it, is met with a sometimes vicious response (or, if nothing else, a refusal to be open).

Take the language of discipleship for instance. It would be hard to name all of the ways I have heard this term used. It is the most obvious wax-nose in the church today. For a short list, I have heard discipleship mean: a program doing spiritual practices, a reading group in theology, folks interested in apologetics, people who are serious Christians or people who want to talk about evangelism.

When I have students who prefer the word discipleship, rarely is that word given any actual scriptural meaning. Instead, it is assumed it means following Jesus, but then following Jesus is specified by whatever vision of growth is presupposed by their church or para-church organizations. For many, that means academic growth, whereas for others it is a kind of experience or a special buy-in to the activities of the church.

In a similar sense, I hear folks using the term kingdom. As Scot McKnight has worried about over the years, the kingdom of God quickly came to mean any good thing I do. To further the kingdom easily digresses into a kind of generically moral or social vision for life.

Sometimes, similarly, the Spirit gets used in this same way. We talk about being filled with the Spirit, walking in the Spirit and being empowered by the Spirit, but once again, ones understanding is often governed by implicit (i.e., unspoken or recognized) visions of life.

Now, let me just say, most of this is normal. We are where we are, and that is what it is. It is not all that helpful to judge it, but it is helpful to name it.

Close attention to the Gospels will unveil that the Christian life will always be a life in the presence of God where these very paradigms are being eroded and rebuilt. The work of Jesus is often a work of purification that unravels beliefs we hold while securing and establishing others in their place. The disciples presuppositions about messiah, the kingdom and power are all unravelled and reconstructed with Jesus, and this was not just something for them, but is a fundamental reality of following Jesus.

The problem we have is not typically that we have the wrong paradigms, but that secular visions of life, success and value have infiltrated these paradigms to their core. This has happened to such a major degree, just as the notion of what the messiah must be had in the first century, that anything against this is often rejected out of hand as impossible.

If I can narrow this a bit more, one of the major problems is that we often gravitate towards one paradigm over the others, thinking that we can take a term like discipleship and accept a commonsensical notion of what that must mean, this often says much more about our present cultural and social contexts than it actually does about following Jesus.

Rather, faithfulness requires that we come to Jesus with all we have, even the things he has given us, and hold them open to him and ask, Lord, what of this is really of you? What of this is my attempt to get life on my own terms? What of this is my desire to manage and manipulate you rather than be with you?

As we hold these things open to him, we need to see ways that our paradigms have become overly narrow, or how we have woven into their DNA a pragmatic vision of life and growth that owes more to our present cultural presuppositions than scripture. For instance, when we hear the call of Jesus to follow him, we need to allow him to reshape this vision of life as one in him, and not only with him. The context for following Jesus is no longer Galilee or Jerusalem, but the fact that we are in Christ, and our life is hidden with him in God (Col. 3:2).

The growth we know in Christ is a growth that comes from God, as we grow into him who is our head (Col. 2:19). This means that our vision of life and all of the paradigms that we employ must be constantly held in judgment by Christ and the cruciform way he revealed, and they must make sense for the church as a whole and not for an elite group of folks who have the appropriate time, finances and leisure. Christian spiritual formation needs to be a vision for growth for all, as it is the growth of the people of God in the body of Christ.

Too often we take biblical notions and make them into models that make no sense in light of that the church is, and we end up using them as ways to critique the church. To allow scripture to judge our notions of following Jesus, we need a robust understanding of the church as the body of Christ, never to be replaced by models of human growth often individualistic that owes more to modern pragmatism than a vision of the ruling and reigning Lord of the cross.

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