How can leaders help their ministries discern the ways the world shapes us? One helpful perspective is to conceive spiritual formation as a process that includes counter-formation.

From the sons of Issachar “who understood the times” to David’s service of “God’s purpose in his own generation” and Paul’s study of Athens’ idols, the Bible affirms leaders who exegete not just Scripture, but also their mission fields, with a desire to act as a bridge between them. Timothy Keller argued that,

“In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said, ‘You heard it said’ before he said, ‘I say unto you’ (Matthew 5:21-48). He did this not only to teach the truth, but also to do so in contrast to what the authorities of the day were saying. Our instruction needs to follow the same pattern. We need catechesis as well as counter-catechesis, using biblical doctrine to both deconstruct the beliefs of culture and answer questions of the human heart that culture’s narratives cannot.”¹

When the gospel is announced faithfully but in a way that doesn’t challenge the world’s spiritual formation, Christians might inhabit religious spheres but not sufficiently bring the gospel to bear to the rest of their lives. Collectively, churches might become too identified with cultural trends or too remote from the wider society to gain a hearing – and both extremes fail to bring actual transformation. As Lesslie Newbigin put it in The Gospel in a Pluralist Society,

“Christian theology ... can fail by failing to understand and take seriously the world in which it is set, so that the gospel is not heard but remains incomprehensible because the Church has sought security in its own past instead of risking its life in a deep involvement with the world. It can fail, on the other hand, by allowing the world to dictate the issues and the terms of the meeting. The result then is that the world is not challenged at its depth but rather absorbs and domesticates the gospel and uses it to sacralize its own purposes... True contextualization accords to the gospel its rightful primacy, its power to penetrate every culture and to speak within each culture, in its own speech and symbol, the word which is both No and Yes, both judgment and grace.”²

To think in practical terms: how can you practice counter-formation formation in your next sermon or Bible study? A teaching on the parable of the Good Samaritan and the need to love our neighbors might sound familiar and unengaging for many, for instance.

But if you contrast the Christian love ethic to another perspective – such as Sigmund Freud’s maxim “Love your neighbor as your neighbor loves you” – the contrast will intrigue your listeners, raise thoughtful questions, and help the beauty of Jesus’s teaching shine even brighter.³

René Breuel, evangelical pastor and author.

Notes

¹ Timothy Keller, How to Reach the West Again: Six Essential Elements of a Missional Encounter (New York: Redeemer City to City, 2020).

² Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), ps.152, 154.

³ Freud continues, “If I love someone, he must deserve it in some way… He deserves it only if he is so like me in important ways that I can love myself in him; and he deserves it if he is so much more perfect than myself that I can love my ideal of my own self in him.” Sigmund Freud, as quoted in Armand M. Nicholi, Jr., The Question of God: C. S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life (New York: Free Press, 2002), p. 175.

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