Spiritual Formation for Leaders

The pastor was running a 1,400-person church on three hours of sleep, one good meal a day, and a marriage that had become a calendar invitation.

He had built the thing from ninety people over seven years. He was on three podcasts that quarter. His staff loved him. His board was thrilled. His Sunday messages were the best of his life.

He was also, by his own quiet admission in my office, dying inside. Not metaphorically. He had spent the previous six months googling symptoms he was afraid to name to his doctor. He was preaching about intimacy with God while his actual prayer life had become a liturgical performance he got through on his way to the next meeting.

The church was growing. The pastor was hollow. Nobody around him could see it because the numbers were good and his Sunday presence was still strong. But he knew. And the thing he could not figure out was how someone who had given his life to formation in principle could have neglected it so completely in practice.

This is not a rare story. This is, in my experience, the most common leadership failure mode in the American church and the American nonprofit sector. And it has almost nothing to do with whether the leader believes formation matters. They all do. The failure is downstream of something else.

What formation is, and what it isn't

Spiritual formation is the process by which the interior of a person becomes more like the character of Christ. That's the old definition, and it's the right one. Dallas Willard said it most simply: formation is about who you are when nobody is watching and you are not performing.

It is not a self-improvement practice. Self-improvement is about becoming a better version of the self you already are. Formation is about that self being gradually remade from the inside by a slow, patient, sometimes painful process you do not control.

It is not a productivity enhancer. The temptation in leadership contexts is to treat formation as the thing that lets you lead more effectively. That framing sells books and fills conferences and it is also basically backwards. Formation is what shapes who you are before leadership is a question. When it works, it produces leaders who can hold weight without being crushed by it. But if you do it for that reason, you have already pointed the practice at yourself instead of at God, and the formation will not take. Ruth Haley Barton has been writing about this for twenty years and it is still the thing most leaders miss.

It is also not a secret. The practices are old. The people who have been formed by them over centuries did not have better resources than you have. They had the same Psalms. The same silence. The same Communion. The same slow, uncomfortable, deeply unglamorous disciplines that do their work whether you feel anything or not.

The Protestant problem

Most of the serious contemporary writing on spiritual formation comes out of traditions Protestants are cautious about. The Ignatian Exercises. The Rule of Benedict. Contemplative prayer lineages that run through Thomas Merton and Thomas Keating. Lectio Divina. The Jesus Prayer.

If you grew up evangelical, the vocabulary of all of this can feel like a threshold you are not sure you want to cross. It sounds Catholic. It sounds Orthodox. It sounds like you are about to violate something you can't quite articulate.

I have watched a generation of Protestant leaders solve this problem in the same way, by finding the bridge voices. Henri Nouwen. Richard Foster. Dallas Willard. Eugene Peterson. Ruth Haley Barton. More recently John Mark Comer and Ronald Rolheiser and Tish Harrison Warren. These writers take the formation practices of the older traditions and translate them into Protestant vocabulary without losing what made them load-bearing.

If you are Protestant and starting on formation, that's the set. Comer's The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry is the easiest on-ramp. Nouwen's The Way of the Heart is the deepest hundred pages on solitude, silence, and prayer you will read. Ruth Haley Barton's Sacred Rhythms is the practical rule-of-life book written by someone who did the work in her own leadership. Start with one. Read it twice.

Why leaders stop doing formation even when they believe in it

Here is the pattern that ran my pastor friend into the ground, and it is structural, not personal.

Formation practices run on a different timescale than the leadership demands that are crowding them out. Prayer is slow. Silence is slow. Sitting with scripture is slow. Community that actually knows you is slow. Every one of those practices has a half-life longer than the email thread you are ignoring to do them.

Meanwhile, the leadership demands are fast. The staff question. The board text. The sermon prep. The donor meeting. The Sunday service. The podcast interview. Every one of those moves on a timescale measured in hours.

Most leaders attempt to resolve this by fitting formation into the fast schedule. A Bible app notification. A devotional during the commute. A prayer on the way into the meeting. Those things are not nothing, but they are not formation. They are formation-adjacent. They make the leader feel they are doing the practice without subjecting them to the actual slowness of it, which is where the actual work happens.

The slowness is not incidental. It is the practice. Anything you do quickly does not form you. Formation requires time you don't feel you have. If you are not willing to give the practices time that feels costly, the formation will not take.

I am going to say the uncomfortable version. Most leaders who neglect formation are not doing so because they do not believe in it. They are doing so because the math of their current life says they cannot afford it, and they are running on hope that the deficit will not catch up. It always catches up. Usually about eighteen months before they thought it would.

The hollowness the pastor described was the arrival of that math. Not a spiritual crisis. A formation deficit compounding to the point of visible breakdown.

The same pattern shows up in secular leadership too, which is why I argued in The Pattern That Wouldn't Stop that formation isn't a ministry-only concern. The vocabulary differs. The deficit doesn't.

What actually changes when formation starts to take

Three things, in my experience, and only three.

The leader's reactivity decreases. Not because they are suppressing emotion. Because the interior has more room to hold difficult things without spilling them out. This is the first visible signal that formation is doing its work. The staff notice before the leader does.

The leader's decision-making slows down in the moments that need slowing and speeds up in the moments that need speeding. Formation produces a different relationship with time. Urgency stops being the default frame. Presence becomes the default frame. Most decisions that feel urgent in a formed leader's life are not actually urgent. Most decisions that matter most can be sat with until they clarify.

The leader's hunger shifts. This one is harder to describe, but it is the most important. The thing that was driving the leader — the need to be seen, the need to produce, the need to prove something that was set in motion twenty years before they ever had a title — quiets. Not disappears. Quiets. What takes its place is a harder thing to name, but people who have been around formed leaders know it when they see it. Something like gravity without heaviness. Attention without need.

None of this happens fast. Most of it happens on a ten-year timescale, in the middle of ordinary life, through practices that feel pointless for the first two years. The pastor I mentioned at the start started a twenty-minute daily silent prayer practice and a weekly half-day silent retreat after our conversation. He told me six months in that he was mostly bored and occasionally irritated by it. He told me fourteen months in that something had shifted and he could not yet describe what. At two years he described it to me. He said his wife noticed before he did. He said his staff stopped flinching around him. He said his prayer life had gone from performed to present.

That is what formation looks like when it is working. It does not look like a breakthrough. It looks like slow subtraction of the things that were not you.

Where this leaves the leader reading this

If you are reading this and the pastor's story felt too close, there is one small move I would offer, and it is not dramatic.

Block twenty minutes tomorrow. Not for prayer specifically. For silence. No phone. No book. No agenda. Sit with what is actually there, underneath the noise of your week, and notice what rises. You do not have to do anything with it. You do not have to interpret it. You have to be present to it.

That twenty minutes is the practice. Do it again the next day. And the day after. For a month. If it feels dry, that is normal. If it feels pointless, that is normal. If you find yourself resisting it in ways that surprise you, that is the formation starting to do its work. The resistance is data.

Formation Before the Work is the longer version of why this order matters. The argument there is that formation is not a practice layered on top of leadership. It is the foundation that decides whether leadership will hold weight or collapse when pressure arrives.

The practice is not complicated. The practice is just slow, and slowness is the thing most leaders are not willing to give. The leaders who are willing, who let the practices work on them over years, become the people their communities needed them to be all along. Not immediately. Not dramatically. But reliably, over time, in a way that could not have been generated any other way.

That's what formation is. It is not a tool. It is not a productivity practice. It is not a credential.

It is the work underneath the work. And it is the one thing almost nobody is willing to give enough time to for it to actually do what it does.