Pray.
Read your Bible.
Go to church—twice on Sundays.
And don’t sin. Be sure not to sin.
These were my devotions (as they were called).
I was raised independent Bible Church baptist. So we didn’t do that “spiritual discipline” crap. Only the Catholics did that stuff while trying to “earn their salvation”—so I was told.
But the simplicity of these “devotions” served me well.
Until they didn’t—going into college.
Spiritual Disciples Helped For A While…
I felt spiritually dry, stuck, in need of a jumpstart.
That’s when I encountered the spiritual disciplines through the work of Richard Foster and Dallas Willard (who didn’t seem to be Catholics—so I gave them a chance).
I learned about different ways of reading the Bible. Different ways of praying. Different activities that didn’t even seem spiritual, like simplicity and solitude and submission.
I even got a couple Anglican rosaries and dabbled with praying the hours (I loved the rosaries…but hated praying the hours).
Discovering this wider tradition of spiritual disciplines was a revelation and a relief.
I no longer had to cut my own path with God, each day, alone. Now an ancient way stretched before me that I could walk with others.
Spiritual Growth Stalled and Two Realizations
After many years zealously practicing spiritual disciplines, two realizations emerged.
First, it seemed many of my friends either resisted them or could not engage with them. They were not experiencing transformation like I had.
Second, these practices didn’t fix everything in my own life. I still struggled with sin. I would often go through the motions. And I fell into a new legalism just as my spiritual maturity plateaued.
Why had growth stalled out?
I soon found others wondering the same things.
Why do some benefit from spiritual disciplines while others flounder?
Why do some embrace them wholeheartedly while others just shrug them off?
And why does the fruit of these disciplines begin to fade?
And that’s when I fell into a group, thanks to my wife, who were looking at how neuroscience connects to spiritual growth.
Learning the Neuroscience of Spiritual Growth
Of course I’m leaving out quite a bit of my spiritual journey (and all the things I had to deconstruct and reconstruct in faith).
But what I began learning is that our spiritual growth is connected to our relational (and neurological) training, capacity, and connections (or lack of).
Jim Wilder’s new book, Renovated: God, Dallas Willard and the Church That Transforms, sums up what I’ve been learning over the last ten years.
So I’m going to use it to outline what has been helpful for me.
Thinking With God, not About God
Wilder’s book recommends three main shifts in how we understand the process of spiritual formation. The first is a shift from thinking about God to thinking with God.
A. W. Tozer famously said that “what comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.”
Yet Wilder, leaning on what we know about the brain, argues that thinking about God is too slow of a mental process to actively transform our lives. He (with many others) calls it a “slow-track” mental process that can only focus on one thing at a time. Thoughts that develop on this slower track appear in our minds too late to inform actions in real time.
This slow-track process is great when there is time to pause and reflect on complex problems. It’s less helpful, however, amid the stress, fear, and disappointment of everyday life. As Wilder observes, our slow-track thinking focuses “our attention just in time to see our sinful reactions,” but not in time to follow Jesus at the speed of life.
A better alternative, Wilder argues, is thinking with God, which utilizes “fast-track” mental processes that can focus on (and react to) multiple things at once.
Have you ever reacted to a dangerous situation without thinking? Have you ever responded to someone in a way you regret? This is your fast-track brain at work. Wilder explains that our fast-track brain “produces a reaction to our circumstances before we have a chance to consider how we would rather react.”
These instantaneous reactions will probably go awry if our fast-track brain has been trained the wrong way. But they can be useful if it has been trained in a good way. A fast-track mind trained according to God’s will is able to think with God in the midst of real-time interactions.
Thinking with God is like how a sports team wordlessly works together to achieve its goal. Or how a jazz band spontaneously flows together. When a team or a band practices together—stopping and starting over again until everything is flowing smoothly—this is like thinking about God (slow-track). The game or the performance is like thinking with God (fast-track).
Relational Capacities
But the difference between thinking about God and thinking with God is more than just the difference between practice time and game time. We might be tempted to assume that a shift toward thinking with God would focus on our actions more than our thoughts. And in a certain sense, programs of spiritual formation do tend to emphasize our practices more than our underlying beliefs.
But even spiritual practice only gets us part of the way toward spiritual maturity, because true spiritual transformation requires a change in our fast-track brain. And changing our fast-track brain is connected to growing our relational skills and capacities.
As Wilder explains, our spiritual maturity is directly related to our relational maturity. And unfortunately, most spiritual disciplines do not focus directly on growing relational capacity. They aren’t meant to do that.
However, since God is a Trinity, and therefore relational, it makes sense that our relational capacity would be connected to our spiritual maturity.
Relational skills (like shared gratitude, calming the body when stressed, understanding nonverbal cues, and practicing emotional attunement) grow through relational exercises. And when our relational skills and capacities grow, so does our ability to connect to our relational God.
When we reach a spiritual wall or plateau, we often either double down on our spiritual practices or cast them aside.
But brain science tell us that the better answer is working to grow our relational skills as a means of growing our relational and spiritual capacity.
From Me to We
The third shift Wilder describes is from a form of discipleship and spiritual formation rooted in me to one rooted in we.
From our first cries to our final breaths, the necessity of being attached to someone—first to our parents and then to a larger group—means that my sense of “me” is always built upon an established sense of “we.” Our semi-automatic reactions to life are marked indelibly by the people we spend the most time with, the group we identify with.
At the most basic level of our brains, we become like the ones we love.
Growing up we all receive a fast-track pattern (or a “program file,” as Wilder calls it) that tells us how “my people” act in a given situation (for good or bad). And because this program file is buried in our fast-track brain, it is incredibly hard to override when we are tired, stressed, afraid, or angry.
Because of this, Wilder argues that true transformation comes through changing our understanding of who “my people” are and how they act. As he writes, transforming our character “depends on becoming attached by love, joy, and peace to a new people.” And this is why discipleship is fundamentally a we, rather than me, activity.
By ourselves, it is nearly impossible to change the assumptions of our fast-track brain and the actions that flow out of them. Instead, our character changes in and through community as a process of trial and error, which involves learning how the people of God act in various situations.
We first see how more mature disciples behave in the crucibles of everyday life. Then we imitate their reactions as best we can. And eventually we spontaneously act in a way that witnesses to our identification with a new people—the people of God.
Spiritual practices done alone will not change our character. They certainly will help—up to a point.
But relational skills grown in community will lead to lasting transformation.
The Goal: Transformed in Christ
The goal of all spiritual formation is being conformed to the image of Christ (Rom. 8:29), who was fully human as well as fully divine. So it only makes sense that a deep understanding of our humanity—including our brains—should inform that process.
From devotions, to spiritual disciplines, to relational practices, these are what I’m still growing in and through, in order to be conformed to Christ.
So you don’t miss any neuroscience and faith posts please subscribe to my newsletter (here or above in the sidebar) and/or follow Being With: On Neuroscience, Spiritual Formation, and Faith.
Resources:
If you are looking for a spiritual director or coach focusing on embodied practices for spiritual formation, I’m kinda marriage to a pretty great one. You can connect with Cyd here.
For basics on the brain, see this series on 7 and half Lesson on the Brain, or check out the Being With podcast on neuroscience, spiritual formation, and faith.