Formation Is Relational

A reflection from the Center for Christianity and Public Life Fellowship 

It is one of the great joys of my life that the places I find myself are full of people with deep convictions about the future of Christianity, and even more so about the way we get there. 

Through my work with Future of Faith, I spend time with people making decisions in the faith space and influencing current and future generations. I sit in rooms with scholars, strategists, and thought leaders, and I walk alongside practitioners who are doing the real work of ministry and service every day. These are leaders building institutions, creating new models, and investing deeply in the communities around them. 

Because of that, I have long felt confident that the ecosystem of Christian leadership still carries extraordinary energy and hope. In a cultural moment often focused on institutional decline, I regularly encounter people who are building something meaningful, faithful, and life-giving. 

What I did not fully recognize until recently was how much of my perspective had been shaped inside that ecosystem. 

The Center for Christianity and Public Life Fellowship introduced me to a room that was both familiar and entirely new. Around the table were leaders working in racial reconciliation, criminal justice reform, artificial intelligence, journalism, politics, higher education, and nonprofit leadership, just to name a few. Some came from explicitly ministry-focused roles, while others worked in spaces where faith shapes their motivations even if it is not the explicit language of their work. 

Yet there was a common thread among us: a shared desire to contribute to the common good, animated in some way by the moral imagination of Christian faith. 

The gathering itself was remarkable. Conversations were thoughtful, deeply personal, and often vulnerable. People asked serious questions of one another. Meals stretched into long discussions. There were moments of laughter, disagreement, curiosity, and reflection. 

But what struck me most was the posture of the room. 

Despite our differences in background, politics, vocation, and theological tradition, the space was marked by a kind of attentiveness that felt rare. People listened carefully. They asked follow-up questions. They held one another’s stories with respect. There was an atmosphere of curiosity and trust that made genuine dialogue possible. 

Over time, I began to recognize something familiar unfolding. 

The room was practicing something very close to what we call Sacred Listening. 

In my work, Sacred Listening is a framework for cultivating intentional spaces where people feel seen, heard, and understood. It involves creating the conditions where meaningful questions can be asked, stories can be shared honestly, and communities can begin to discern what faithful action looks like together. 

What I realized during the fellowship is that Sacred Listening reflects something deeper about how people are formed. 

Formation is relational. 

For many of us, Christian formation has often been framed primarily through teaching, doctrine, or programmatic discipleship. These elements matter deeply. Yet Scripture and the history of Christian practice suggest that formation rarely happens through information alone. Much of the ministry of Jesus unfolded through shared life rather than formal instruction: walking with people, eating meals together, asking questions, listening to stories, and forming communities through relationships. 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer captured this dynamic in his reflections on Christian community when he wrote that “the first service that one owes to others in the fellowship consists in listening to them.”¹ Listening, for Bonhoeffer, is not simply a communication skill. It is an act of service that creates the relational conditions where genuine community can grow. 

Contemporary thinkers on formation have echoed this insight. Philosopher James K. A. Smith argues that human beings are shaped less by the ideas they hold than by the practices and environments that shape their loves and imaginations.² Formation occurs through habits, relationships, and shared life, and through the ways communities learn to attend to one another and to God together. 

What I witnessed during the fellowship reflected exactly this kind of formative environment. 

Before anyone could collaborate on projects or imagine new initiatives together, we first had to become a community capable of hearing one another. The work of listening, of paying attention to stories, questions, and perspectives, created the relational foundation necessary for meaningful collaboration. 

Only after that relational groundwork began to form did deeper conversations about shared action emerge. 

Sociologist James Davison Hunter has argued that social change rarely emerges from ideas alone. Instead, transformation occurs through networks of relationships and institutions that cultivate shared vision and coordinated action.³ The fellowship reminded me how true this is in practice. What made the room powerful was not simply the expertise gathered there. It was the relational trust that allowed people to begin imagining the future together. 

In a moment when many institutions feel pressure to move quickly toward strategy and solutions, it can be tempting to treat relationships as a preliminary step rather than a central practice. Yet what I experienced during the fellowship reminded me that relationships are not merely the starting point of meaningful work. 

They are the environment in which meaningful work becomes possible. 

Listening allows people to encounter one another as whole human beings rather than as positions or roles. It opens space for curiosity across difference. It reveals unexpected areas of shared concern and possibility. Over time, it cultivates the trust necessary for communities to discern how they might act together for the common good. 

In that sense, listening functions in several ways at once. 

It is a theological practice grounded in the belief that every person bears the image of God. It is a practical method for understanding the needs and realities of the communities we serve. And it is a formative practice that shapes the kinds of relationships through which transformation becomes possible. 

The fellowship reminded me that before movements begin, communities must first learn how to hear one another. 

In a fragmented public landscape, the simple discipline of listening may be one of the most powerful contributions Christian leaders can offer. 

Formation, after all, is relational. 

Footnotes 

1. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, trans. John W. Doberstein (New York: HarperOne, 1954), 97. 

2. James K. A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2016). 

3. James Davison Hunter, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).