PreachingToday.com: How did the topic of spiritual formation become important to you?

Skye Jethani: I attended a secular university with a large Christian ministry that was action focused. It was about impact, outreach, and events. As I got into leadership, I had an interesting experience with a guy a couple of years older than me who had been a mentor of mine. I ran into him on campus when I was a junior, and he'd been graduated for a year or two. I had a conversation with him in which he broke down in tears and said his spiritual life had been in absolute ruin since he left college. He said his involvement in our campus group and the events and activities around him were what had buoyed his faith, but the moment he got out of school and didn't have that support structure, he had no deep, internal communion with God or a self-generating faith.

That was a big wake up call for me. I realized I could easily get caught up in believing that all the pizzazz around me constituted my spiritual life, while failing to pay attention to the interior world. That was where the need for spiritual formation first hit me, and that carried on through seminary and into the ministry, where it's so easy to get caught up in all the external elements that they become a substitute for an internal communion with Christ.

Has your preaching changed as you've grown in your understanding of spiritual formation?

My main goal on Sunday morning is no longer that people retain the information I'm presenting—that they would store it away in their brain as a reservoir of facts or truths or principles. My goal is now more toward inspiration. I want to inspire people toward a certain kind of life.

In your understanding of spiritual formation, what inspires people to grow?

Stories are enormously inspiring; and not just biblical stories, but testimonies of people living or dead whose lives have been shaped in a way that reflects the life God is inviting us to. What does not tend to inspire people is giving them lots of concrete to-do's. Often I'll limit application to one thing, and I won't even make it a to-do. I'll just say, "Here's an idea," or "Here's something that occurred to me when God was working on this issue in my life." That approach bothers some people because they've been taught you have to give concrete application so people know what to do. But I'm more concerned with whether they have caught a vision and whether they intend to apply it in their lives.

That's why preaching needs to be integrated with the whole ministry of the church community. If we're speaking about a particular issue over time, presenting a vision for what that looks like in God's kingdom, people have a variety of ways in which they can acknowledge their intention to follow through on the vision. It's not a cookie cutter process.

Is vision, as you're using the word, synonymous with promise—the promises of Scripture—or does it refer to something else?

Vision is imagining your life fully immersed in God's kingdom, or imagining how Jesus would be living your life. For example, we preached a series last January about poverty. We tried to lift up God's character and his compassion for the poor, and consider what our lives would look like if we had God's character regarding the poor.

We all have a vision that's driving us—and often one that has been given to us by the world. When you can identify what that is in your community, it becomes the enemy; it becomes what you are trying to deconstruct in people. Paul would write an epistle knowing what a certain community was up against, and he would present a vision that counteracted it. Most of his epistles are vision at the beginning, and then the latter part of the letter is where he gets to the meat. Children, submit to your parents; wives, husbands, slaves—all those application points come at the end. The vision is at the front.

What has captured people's imaginations in our contemporary setting is the vision of our consumer culture. That's what drives how most people live. So what we need to do is offer an alternative vision for their life, which means deconstructing what people have currently bought into. When it came to the issue of poverty and money, we highlighted the sinister nature of what most of us believe about money and identified where those notions come from in our culture. Then we lifted up the vision of what money looks like in God's kingdom.

Until you have a vision, you can't choose it, which is what we call intention. Until you've chosen to follow the vision, you're not going to employ the means to actually get there. In other words, we put the cart before the horse in highly pragmatic preaching. So the vision of my life lived in God's kingdom is very important. Vision makes it possible to imagine life without lust, or to imagine being so generous that you would give away your most prized possessions, or to imagine living with such peace that you could handle the most traumatic events of life without losing your balance.

So vision is another word for theology.

It is, but it becomes vision when it captures your imagination. Until that vision captures your imagination, you're not going to live that kind of life. You're going to live the life your culture calls you to live. When I preach on Sunday morning, I feel I'm battling the culture for the imaginations of these people. Of course the Holy Spirit is the one doing the battling, but my responsibility is to present a vision of life in God's kingdom that they're not getting anywhere else.

And you cast that vision by telling stories?

Yes, the word "imagine" comes up a lot. It may include giving time for people to reflect or even stopping in the middle of a sermon to have people write down on a piece of paper what their lives would look like. I encourage people to come up with concrete ways of applying the vision to their lives, because I can't do that. I can give examples from my life, but I want them to think about the vision in their lives.

What would you recommend for pastors who haven't thought about preaching for spiritual formation in this way before?

First, there's nothing wrong with pragmatics and giving people concrete application, but we often divorce preaching from the rest of the church and think everything has to happen from the pulpit. I think a much healthier approach would be to use pulpit ministry—and every other ministry of the church—for what it's best at. If I present vision from the pulpit, I want a means to fulfill that vision to come in somewhere, such as a small group or a support group. Pastors need to think through the role preaching plays in their church's whole ministry of spiritual formation. Don't isolate preaching from what's going on in the rest of the ministry. When we try to accomplish everything through the sermon, we often cram too much into it or focus on something it's not as effective at addressing. I don't think preaching is best at getting down to those concrete pieces of people's lives. It's much more effective at inspiring a vision.

Second, we pastors try to be too entertaining. We're really concerned about whether people like our preaching. That focus leads some pastors to take surveys in their church to find out what people want to hear about: marriage, kids, work, finances. Then they present sermons that target those felt needs. That's not inherently wrong, but my desire is not merely to give people what they want, but to transform what they want. If people have been primarily formed by the culture around us, what they want is probably not what they should want. Imagination and vision helps people want what they didn't previously want. It's quite beautiful when John and Peter enter the temple, and the beggar's there asking for money. Peter says, "I don't have gold or silver, but what I do have I'll give to you. Stand up and walk, in the name of Jesus." He didn't give the guy what he wanted; he gave the guy what he needed.

PreachingToday.com: Compare a traditional homiletical approach to Philippians 4:19—"My God will supply all your needs according to his glorious riches in Christ Jesus"—with an approach emphasizing spiritual formation.

Skye Jethani: The traditional approach would be to focus on God's promise to supply all our material needs. But the spiritual formation component in this passage is worry. We live in a society that keeps us scared about finances and security, so that we feel we always have to accumulate more. Jesus tells us not to worry about tomorrow; God will take care of it.

If I were preaching this passage, I would try to paint a picture of a life without worry. I would ask, "What would your life look like if you didn't worry?" That gets back to the character of God himself, which is Jesus' point in the Sermon on the Mount: If God clothes the fields and takes care of the birds, surely he will take care of you, too. The issue is our perception of God. If our imaginations are consumed with God's character, we're not going to worry, but if our imaginations are consumed with what the culture is telling us, we're going to worry constantly.

At the end of the sermon, I would invite people to think about applying the godly vision to their circumstances by deciding what spiritual disciplines might help them reject the worldly vision. What things trigger worry for you? If it's the news, stop watching it for a season. In other words, the application of that passage may have nothing to do with money. Instead, application may focus on answering the question, "How do I deconstruct worry in my life?"

How does your sermon preparation differ from someone who expects to find "how tos" in the text?

Let's consider the Epistles, for example. The key is interpreting any part of an epistle in its context. When Paul lists concrete application ideas in the latter chapters of his letters, he alludes to the foundational theology he establishes at the beginning of the epistle. In 1 Corinthians 7, for example, Paul offers multiple applications about staying as you are: If you're single, don't get married. If you're uncircumcised, stay uncircumcised. If you're a slave, stay a slave. The principle he's teaching is that the external circumstances of your life are not ultimately important. They don't necessarily have a spiritual impact on who you are.

I know some people who are very committed to preaching verse by verse through a book, and I think that's a wonderful way to preach vision. But if you're going through an epistle verse by verse, you may spend months in the final chapters. In every sermon, you have to remind people of the vision the book is addressing. We can preach with a microscope and get so into the detail that we lose the vision, or we can preach metanarrative all the time and never offer application. Both extremes are problematic. But in our culture that wants the pragmatic—give me three alliterated application points so I can go home—we tend to preach with a microscope. Our responsibility is to have the whole vision in mind, from metanarrative to the microscopic, and know at what altitude we are presenting each Sunday.

How do you understand the role of preaching in the overall goal of spiritual formation?

We try to play to the strengths of each of the church's ministries. Preaching has its role. Relationships have their role. Serving has its role. Private disciplines have their roles. We've realized that if somebody comes to worship, attends a small group, and is serving somewhere, they're probably hearing between three and five different messages a week. That's overwhelming.

Our responsibility is to have the whole vision in mind, from metanarrative to the microscopic, and know at what altitude we are presenting each Sunday.

There are seasons when we make sure all our teaching is focused on one thing. We did that with a series about poverty. The preaching cast the vision. We presented the means to fulfilling that vision downstairs in one large adult class. We addressed the question, "How do we apply this in our circumstances?" which gave people concrete ways to apply the principles in their lives. The third component was small groups. Small groups were where people's intention was made clear. In small groups, people cut to the chase and asked themselves, Am I actually going to choose this? What are the obstacles in my life? Vision, intention, and means were all focused on one area of spiritual growth, and we tried to fit the component of spiritual formation with the proper venue for that component.

Do you find that is working well?

Yeah. Over the past couple of years, we've tried it at different seasons. At Advent, for example, we preach a vision of service—of giving ourselves away to others. We stop all of our classes and convert the church building into booths where families and small groups can do service projects that impact missionaries, people in our neighborhoods, and the poor. We are always deciding where people are best able get the vision, where are they going to get the means, and where are they going to make their intention known.

Evangelistic preaching has operated this way for hundreds of years on a much more compact scale. The preacher gets up and presents a vision—either a vision of going to heaven or a vision of going to hell. Then he calls you to make your choice, and the means by which you make that choice is to raise your hand or say a prayer or come forward to the altar. This kind of preaching may have over-simplified the gospel, but it did get the three movements right: vision, intention, and means. We need to think this way about formative preaching as well.

How do you facilitate intention?

I like it to be a physical element in a worship service. If we're talking about money, then getting at their intention may mean providing an opportunity to give. I once preached on spiritual friendship and relationship. Then I invited people to talk to a spouse or friend about what they're going to do this week to connect more meaningfully with somebody they want to grow in a relationship with. So I'll give them an application idea or a point, but quite often it's difficult to get people to acknowledge intention in a worship service.

Another way to do it is to plan an event to reinforce intention. For example, if I preach a number of messages presenting a vision for a life without anger, I might offer a retreat the following month, during which we focus on the issue of anger and the disciplines for rooting it out of our lives. Their intention is expressed by signing up for the retreat, and the means will be presented at the retreat.

Close us with a vision for preaching as spiritual formation.

When you examine the gospels, you find that most of Jesus' preaching was vision casting. So if we really want to preach like Jesus, we need to learn how to preach vision. That means we need a ministry that's structured to handle the means. We'll be limited in what we can accomplish as long as we depend on preaching alone.

Skye Jethani is an author, speaker, consultant, and ordained minister. He also serves as the co-host of the popular Holy Post Podcast.