Confessing or Practicing the Way?

A gospel-centered perspective on the spiritual formation movement

After my Cage-Stage Comerism article, I had several conversations with people who find themselves primarily in either the gospel-centered movement (wave 3) or the spiritual formation movement (wave 4). I found all of these conversations to be challenging and beneficial. In every conversation I had, there were points of agreement, disagreement, and things I needed to continue to think through.

My goal with that article wasn’t to pretend that I have all the answers, but to start a conversation in the hopes that these two movements can find ways to build bridges with each other and hopefully begin to integrate more than they are today. Sometimes, that looks like expressing appreciation, and sometimes that means articulating points of disagreement.

In that spirit, I’ve invited friends from both groups to write from their perspectives on this conversation. I respect these folks for their thoughtfulness and faithfulness, even if I don’t always see it exactly the same way.

I hope you find this article from Caleb Wait helpful, challenging, and insightful. While you’re at it, Caleb is the Director of Content at Sola Media and he just launched his own newsletter, Psychodogma. I’m positive it will be well worth the subscription.

— Ian Harber

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Somewhere during the rise of new media, stories of pastoral failure and abuse, Donald Trump, COVID, and the polarization that followed, the New Calvinist movement of the early 2000s and 2010s seemed to lose its fervor and optimism. My personal story is wrapped up in New Calvinism, now more often referred to as the gospel-centered movement. I started attending a church plant in 2009 when I was still in high school and it was the first place I remember ever hearing that salvation is a gift to which I contribute nothing and receive by faith alone.

I served in this church for 8 years. It is the church where I was baptized and it’s where I met my wife. I am abundantly grateful for it. While I find myself in a more confessional tradition now, many have become disaffected by the gospel-centered movement. Some have deconstructed their faith, some have turned in their skinny jeans for Geneva gowns and the Reformed confessions (as I have), still others have encountered something different. Enter Spiritual Formation. What Trevin Wax has tentatively called the Fourth Wave of evangelicalism.

People who spend a lot of time online might point to a renewed political focus, whether the Christian Nationalists on the right or the social justice advocates on the left. But the best place to look for the next wave is churchgoing college students. As I travel around to various churches and interact with leaders in different denominations, what stands out is a renewed emphasis on spiritual formation [emphasis mine]—an allegiance to Jesus as Lord of all of life that requires a total reworking of personal habits and spiritual disciplines.

Simply put, spiritual formation is a movement and model for Christian discipleship. The movement itself is not, as Wax noted, “especially new. It’s a popularized and renewed vision of Dallas Willard’s work on discipleship, combined with an A. W. Tozer–tinged evangelical mysticism….” The most popular figure spearheading this new wave of spiritual formation is John Mark Comer, a pastor who ministered in Portland, Oregon for over 20 years. 

Adding to Trevin’s work, my friend Ian Harber wrote a thoughtful piece on his experience in both third and fourth-wave evangelicalism, where he also referenced Comer’s growing influence: “John Mark Comer is just about the only Christian author many young people read anymore,” Harber writes, “His books and sermons are gaining Lewis or Keller-like popularity among Millennial and Gen Z Christians.” 

Wax has also referred to the gospel-centered movement as the third-wave of evangelicalism. But there seems to be some tension between the third and fourth waves. Comer and his style of spiritual formation is appealing to many exiting the gospel-centered camp because, as Wax put it, “​​they’re looking to incorporate more rules and rituals—more spiritual structure—in their walk of faith.” In Harber’s piece, he argues that, “These camps should be building relationships and working together, not side-eyeing, jabbing, and ignoring each other.” 

While I share Ian’s hope of greater familial partnership between third and fourth-wave evangelicalism, I believe some self-evaluation is needed by both movements. In my estimation, both are fairly unmoored from historical protestant traditions. If they want to work together and integrate, they will need to acquaint themselves with resources outside of their subcultures.

Caricatures in the Background

In order to do this, we should first look at how those in the fourth-wave/spiritual formation camp see themselves as distinct from the gospel-centered camp. To be clear, I am approaching this as a Reformed Presbyterian, so my sympathies lie closer with a gospel-centered emphasis.

In a January 2024 interview with Outreach Magazine, John Mark Comer, the figure who is being widely read and followed by young Christian’s on college campuses, said, 

“[There has been] a misunderstanding of the gospel since at least WWII, if not way before it. In North America, and far beyond, the gospel has been preached in such a way that you could become a Christian without becoming an apprentice of Jesus. Even today, most gospel presentations sound very different from Jesus’ in the Gospel of Mark 1, “Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” Or Peter in Acts 2, or Paul throughout the book of Acts. There are similarities, but it’s almost like a different gospel.” 

Here is Comer speaking with Jefferson Bethke and Jon Tyson on The Art of Teachings podcast, 

“[T]ragically, many people have been in American churches for decades and have never really been well taught in a robust kingdom view of the gospel. Like, one of the really sad things I hear a lot is, people will come up to me in particular when I travel and say, ‘hey, I've been listening to your teaching around discipleship, apprenticeship to Jesus, formation, whatever—I've been a Christian for 20 years, 25 years, 35 years, I have never heard anybody talk about this before.’”

Here is one last example from a sermon of Comer’s in 2021, Preaching The Gospel pt1 / What is the Gospel:

“I regularly get asked, John Mark, why don't you preach the gospel? And that, I'm happy to admit that's a weakness in my preaching. But when I press on people, what most people mean by that is, why don't you preach a Calvinistic view of the atonement? Or why don't you end your sermons with an appeal to put your hand up and go to heaven when you die? But my understanding of the gospel is anytime I preach Jesus, anytime I announce anything about Jesus, his birth, his death, his incarnation, his teachings, his miracles, his parables, his resurrection, his ascension to the right hand of the Father, the coming of the Holy Spirit, the great tradition of discipleship thousands of years old. In his name, I am preaching the gospel of Jesus. And if you search for some of the most popular summaries of the gospel in the American church, such as what Dr. Gerry Breshears calls the ‘John 3:16 Gospel,’ which is basically, ‘you're a sinner going to hell, but Jesus died on the cross for your sins so that you can go to heaven when you die,’ if you search for that in the gospel in front of you, you are hard pressed to find anything remotely close to that in any of the four gospels of Jesus.” 

So, what is Comer’s problem with the gospel-centered movement? It’s not quite clear whether Comer’s comments have in mind evangelicals like D. L. Moody or New Calvinists—he seems to make inferences to both. 

What we can learn from these quotes is that for Comer and other spiritual formation leaders, “gospel-centered” seems to translate to something like eternal fire insurance.

Three things can be said about this:

1. Comer is rightly critiquing a subculture within evangelicalism. This is the problem when two movements within low-church evangelicalism get into an argument because Comer’s caricature of what it means to be “gospel-centered” is only accurate of a few low-church New Calvinists. There might be some examples of this in the larger Reformed tradition, but they should know better. To be clear, many New Calvinist churches don’t merely make the gospel only about the forgiveness of sins, but there are others who match Comer’s critique. My theory is that with the rise of new media, low-church evangelical leaders and pastors tend to accumulate a significant amount of their theological categories via podcasts, YouTube, tweets, etc. Their diet is not systematic theologies, let alone primary sources in church history. It is listening to popular figures online.
   
   However, teachers such as Tim Keller distilled primary sources. Keller’s Kellerisms came out of a deeper diet of primary and historical texts—he read Bavinck and Calvin and Augustine taught his grandkids the Westminster Shorter Catechism. But if your diet has no deeper texts and is only made up of Kellerisms, or David Plattisms, or John Piperisms that are spoon-fed to you through new media, and if you are merely listening to a slew of popular teachers outside of their ecclesial contexts, you are mistaking the ability to parrot a phrase with an understanding of a text or doctrine. When I arrived at seminary, I quickly realized that my theological concepts were largely garnered from a superficial consumption of media, and I’m sure if I tried to articulate the gospel at 21, I would have sounded like the kind of person Comer is critiquing. There is a subculture within evangelicalism that is guilty of Comer’s critique, but this can’t be said of the entire gospel-centered movement.

2. Comer’s rhetoric tends to create false dichotomies. While Comer is not a fire-breathing figure, he still makes some significant claims. One of the reasons he gives for writing his book and starting his nonprofit on spiritual formation is because he believes there is a “crisis of discipleship in evangelicalism” and that discipleship, or what he calls “apprenticeship under Jesus,” is “central to the gospel.” He sees spiritual formation as closing the gap between profession and devotion.
   
   A lot can be said about this. But if you are feeling even slightly disaffected where you’re at, and someone who is becoming one of the most influential voices for younger evangelicals tells you that you might have a misunderstanding of the gospel that has been prominent “since at least WWII,” and that if you are not going deeper into your apprenticeship to Jesus that you are missing out on something that is “central to the gospel,” you are being primed to become a “cage-stage Comerist.” If you feel that there is a chink in your armor and nothing in your current community is helping fill it, Comer’s message is for you.

3. Comer is appealing to a certain class and audience. Comer is a popular figure, not an academic. He went to seminary, but he is not talking to academics. He knows who his primary audience is, “millennials or Gen Z in metropolitan or urban areas” and anyone “interfacing with an iPhone, secularism, progressivism and our political climate.” This is who he is talking to and this is why he can make broad-brushed statements about history and movements and not worry about getting tangled in the details, even when what he says is inaccurate. Again, from his interview with Outreach, he further elaborates on the flaws he sees in how many evangelicals define “the gospel,” saying,
   
   “Another huge piece would be the way that the Protestant Reformation was so tied to the Enlightenment. It adopted some of the assumptions of the Enlightenment uncritically. That’s the danger of culture: We don’t critically question certain things that we just assume to be true. One of those assumptions was Cartesian thinking that information transfer is the way to change. Almost all evangelical discipleship is built on the assumption that as a person’s knowledge of the Bible increases, their spiritual maturity will increase with it.”

This is not true. The Reformers did not “adopt some of the assumptions of the Enlightenment uncritically,” and they did not assume Cartesian philosophy into how they understood transformation, and any connection between evangelical piety and practice today and the Reformers is tenuous, at best. However, these broad-brush statements are not uncommon in popular evangelicalism—just listen to conservative megachurch pastors try to talk about postmodernism. 

In other words, Comer and other fourth-wave figures are not talking to Humanities students and theology nerds. They are talking to the young and the creative—the barista and content marketer whose engagement with history and ideas is in the orbit of Malcolm Gladwell. The problem with Comer’s comments is that there is a conflation between Protestantism generally and a subculture within modern American evangelicalism, and most of his audience won’t be equipped to be able to untangle those kinds of distinctions.

If fourth-wave leaders were more familiar with the history and traditions within Protestantism, some of these claims would no doubt be more tempered and their criticisms would sound less like strawmen.  

Humility and Understanding, Not Silver Bullets

Something that younger followers may not understand when listening to and reading Comer and Co. is that their understanding of the gospel is predicated on the work of Matthew Bates, Scot McKnight, N.T. Wright, and Dallas Willard. These are respectable scholars, but they all share an idiosyncratic view of what the gospel is. That doesn’t mean their view is wrong, but it does mean it is a particular view that is contested by other scholars. The King Jesus Gospel, Salvation by Allegiance Alone, Gospel Allegiance, and How God Became King are the titles of works from this group of scholars, each of which criticizes how evangelicals and protestants tend to think about salvation, justification, and the gospel. 

As Bates wrote in his 2020 summary of this debate over the definition of the gospel, he “critically engaged with MacArthur, Piper, Sproul, Greg Gilbert, Matt Chandler, and others concerning the gospel, faith, grace, and works…”. These scholars have also been criticized for conflating subcultures within evangelicalism with entire Protestant traditions. If you are not familiar with this kerfuffle in evangelical scholarship and publishing from 10-15 years ago, you might not realize that categories from this debate are presumed to be fact in Comer’s teaching. 

There’s no need to rehash this debate, but if you are curious about it, I would encourage you to listen to this 2020 episode of the Mere Fidelity podcast and read this critical review of McKnight’s The King Jesus Gospel by Michael Horton. 

For those who might be on the verge of becoming cage-stage Comerists, you might hear his work and be tempted to think that you’ve been duped into believing a truncated version of the gospel. While that may be true, depending on your church background, you might be going from one idiosyncratic view to another. 

Even though I do not agree with this group’s definition of the gospel, my point is not to criticize them. My point is that if we are looking for the right movement or figure to come along and show us “the way,” we may be setting ourselves up for further disappointment. 

As counter-intuitive as it may be, our goal should not be to find the teacher or movement who has it all figured out, especially if we feel that we are in a place of disaffection and disillusionment. As we look out at the church and its different traditions, our goal should be to soberly evaluate them and to consider their distinctives fair-mindedly. 

We should seek humility and understanding, not silver bullets.

A Fifth Wave?

While I have offered various criticisms of the spiritual formation movement, I am confident that the average Christian can listen to Comer and other voices in this movement and learn and grow from them. As Ian Harber pointed out, this group of pastors and teachers have been some of the best resources for those going through deconstruction. 

I have friends in Portland involved in these churches who first heard about Jesus under teachers like Comer. I am thankful for their witness and ministry. Likewise, I am thankful for the gospel-centered movement, the group which I first heard the gospel through.

My challenge to the spiritual formation camp and the gospel-centered camp is to thoroughly and patiently engage with the texts and the memory of the church. Only by doing so can we find helpful distinctions and untangle unhelpful caricatures about each other. 

Once the third and fourth-wave movements of evangelicalism can understand each other as well as the historical background they emerge out of, I imagine that the kind of integration Harber is advocating for will be more natural and fruitful. And who knows, maybe that integration will create the fifth-wave of evangelicalism.

Until then there are a lot of conversations to have, relationships to build, and old texts to read.

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I’ve written a book about deconstruction. It’s called Walking Through Deconstruction: How To Be A Companion In A Crisis Of Faith. It’s deeply personal, but it’s not a memoir. It’s an attempt to serve the church; to help the church understand what deconstruction is, what causes it, and how to walk with people who are experiencing it.