The Difference Between Information and Formation
And Why Your Discipleship Program Confuses Them
The people in your church might be able to ace a theology quiz and still be formed more by Amazon Prime than by the gospel.
Think about your last discipleship initiative, whatever and whenever that was. Your small groups worked through “the book.” It was an awesome book! Everyone loved it. People showed up, discussed the questions, maybe even made some commitments. You could tell they genuinely learned something by the time it was over. They had new information. They could articulate new ideas. That’s every professor’s dream.
But did anything actually change?
Monday through Saturday, they dealt with the same anxieties. They demonstrated the same consumer habits. They exhibited the same instinctive reactions to conflict, money, and politics. Your curriculum was good. The teaching was faithful to your doctrines. So, what went wrong? (I ask myself that question every time I read course papers and grade final exams. And that’s all you need to know about me as a professor!)
Here’s what I think happens in our discipleship programs: We confused information with formation.
Many churches and denominations treat spiritual growth like a transfer of content. We give our people more Bible studies. More sermon series. More curriculum. The assumption is that if we can just get the right information into people’s heads, transformation will follow. But it doesn’t. Not reliably, at least. Almost assuredly not deeply. And I’d be shocked if every pastor reading this stack didn’t already know it.
It’s discouraging.
[On a side note, I’m learning a lot about neurodivergence lately. It’s a discouraging condition to have, even if you’re able to view it from its strengths. What I’m reading, and observing, is that when we’re able to label our conditions, some of the discouragement fades. That’s what I’m hoping to do here with the discouragement we sometimes feel around theological formation.]
Here’s the insight I want to offer: Formation is not about what people know. It’s about what people inhabit. It’s about the patterns of meaning that shape how they instinctively respond to the world before they even think about it (something like what Charles Taylor called “social imaginaries” or Pierre Bourdieu called “the habitus”). We make sense of everything — including Jesus — through the concepts and habits we’ve already absorbed from our culture, our families, our screens, our daily rhythms. Those patterns run deep, and your six-week study isn’t going to override those lifelong habits.
I want to help you diagnose your situation. Here’s a question to start with: When your congregants feel afraid, what do they reach for first? When they feel politically threatened? When they face financial pressure? If their instinctive responses look identical to their neighbors who have never set foot in a church, then that tells us something. It tells us a lot. The information we provided didn’t form them. But something else did.
What we “believe” is revealed less by what propositions we affirm than by how we instinctively respond. This was one of John Wesley’s insights.
The early church didn’t produce transformed communities because they had better content. They produced transformed communities because they inhabited a different way of life together — different patterns, different rhythms, different instincts about money, power, enemies, and the poor. That was Paul’s point in 1 Corinthians 1-3. The gospel was something they lived inside of. What is it that we live inside of today? Because I don’t think it’s the gospel, and I include myself in that.
So, if your discipleship programs are producing people who can articulate the faith, but whose daily lives are indistinguishable from the culture around them, then the problem isn’t your content. The problem is that we’ve been treating formation like it’s an information problem when it’s something far different.
What if the most formative thing happening in your congregation this week has nothing to do with Sunday morning?