Hello all! I haven’t done a more personal post in a while, and so I wanted to give you all an update. But first, an invitation:

On Tuesday, July 28th at 7:30 p.m., we are doing another live event at Biola University. If you are in the area, we would love to have you come to this event, where I will give a talk on the future of spiritual formation. There will also be dessert and a kind of open house where you can come and see the Institute for Spiritual Formation and chat with me and my colleagues and others who are wrestling through these things.

for free, and please let anyone you think would be interested know. I appreciate the help since we’re a bit behind on letting people know!

One of the things that has been really great over the past year and a half on Substack has been the opportunity to meet some of you in person. Just this last week I had the chance to sit down with two of you and it was such a rich and encouraging time. In my role as the director of ISF, I hope to host events that bring that world and this one together.

These open house events are something I am cultivating because one aspect of my own calling, as I have discerned it, is that I am supposed to be a spiritual theologian for the sake of the church. These events are opportunities to bring in folks from the church, the community and sometimes the broader academy who are not in places where they can have these sorts of conversations.

So these open houses give us space to ask questions like:

  • What is the history of spiritual formation and why do we talk about it the way we do?

  • What does spiritual formation look like in the church?

  • Why does my mind wander when I pray, or why did I used to feel excited about my faith but now everything feels dry?

If you remember, in the Fall we held our first one of these, and Rich Villodas and I talked about our differences in background and church tradition, as well as the vast areas of likeness and encouragement we find in one another. It was a really rich time (you see what I did there).

We have decided to keep these events in-person only, and to keep them free, because we want to cultivate places where we can come together to discuss these things face to face. I’m so sorry if you cannot make it, but if you can’t,

As I’ve been hinting (and sometimes doing more than hinting) on Substack, I think the spiritual formation conversation is at its most important and vulnerable place. I think the decisions we made today will impact whether or not this is even a discussion in twenty years, or if the past 40 years will be another renewal movement in the history of the church that fails to make lasting change in the church itself.

Unfortunately, the Christian tradition is full of examples of this. My hope is to name why and to point a path forward.

But this is a conversation for anyone interested in spiritual formation even if you are brand new to this discussion or have been a part of it for a while.

Even though I’ll be giving a talk, my hope is not to just leave you with more information. Rather, my hope is that we prayerfully consider what the Lord is calling us to as we seek to walk in the Spirit and trust that Christ truly is our righteousness. My hope is that folks will leave encouraged and uplifted and that all will have a chance to meet folks who share these same interests.

Ongoing, I am looking for ways to bring what we do at Talbot into the church and to individuals seeking answers to the questions of their faith. One of my goals for these events is to hear from folks about ways we can do that better, as well as to introduce you to things we are already providing.

I also hope that I get to meet some of you in person!

On a more personal note, including a prayer request, I have been pondering my life and calling a lot these days after my first year as the director of ISF. This year was a bit overwhelming for several reasons, some good and some bad.

It is profoundly unusual for me to have two books coming out in the same year, but that was mostly because one was about 5 years overdue! haha. Later this year, as you probably know by now, a long-term project is coming out on the doctrine of sanctification.

In particular, I hope to help the church and academy understand how the doctrine of sanctification guides and governs spiritual formation, even though those terms are not synonymous. That last sentence will be provocative for some of you, but don’t worry, I’ll be posting more on that soon.

The book is on sale .

I have been struggling to figure out how to juggle my new administrative role, which has brought with it a lot of extra pressures and time, which has been quite taxing. The biggest question for me right now is how do I figure out how to write, which I believe to be my primary calling, in light of the other roles I have.

The really bad (or at least difficult realities) this past year have been some weird health issues. For about 6 months, I was having severe back spasms daily, sometimes so bad that I was getting out of bed and immediately hitting the ground (I’ve been in physical therapy for a while now that has been helpful), and I’ve been navigating a relatively new list — a very long list — of allergies. I often tell people I am allergic to everything, and in the short term it has limited my travel (I am allergic to a lot of food). I am the guy that when I go to a new allergist they always come in looking at my chart and say, “Whoa! We get one of you every now and again.”

What is weird about being allergic to food is that it is a kind of social disability. I never want to eat in someone’s home because I don’t want to dictate what they can make and how they can make it. Travel is hard because I often can’t find places safe for me to eat. When I travel, I feel a bit like I’m on high alert because if I eat the wrong thing I might derail the entire trip.

As with the chronic pain I’ve known my whole life, I have a strange relationship with these sorts of things. There are aspects where I know this is a gift. Like Paul’s thorn in the flesh, I have learned that I am not my own, and that God’s power is found in my weakness, and I can see the ways the Lord has used it. I feel the weakness part these days immensely. But other times I feel so tired and defeated with it all.

It is truly humbling to leave a lecture and have almost no voice left (my environmental allergies are to blame for that one) and then have trouble walking up stairs. All of that hit a particular low point in January when I was driving home and someone turned in front of me as I was entering an intersection at 45 miles per hour. I tried to avoid the accident but it was impossible and my car was totaled (along with a good amount of my progress in physical therapy!).

Thankfully I’m feeling much more encouraged these days. But there are still many questions I have about navigating these sorts of things along with how I understand my calling.

So if you think of me, your prayers are appreciated for wisdom and patience in all of this.

. But if you can’t make it, and you send it to someone who can, have them come and tell me! I would love to meet you via proxy!

Some Other Updates:

In case you are interested in some new stuff I have out these days online, here are some things I’ve been up to:

  • I had a great discussion on the nature of virtue with Myles Werntz focusing on the nature of infusion. .

  • talking about being with God in the desert.

  • I was on Pilgrim Radio talking about humility and the desert, or . Lots of desert stuff these days!

  • I rarely do radio, preferring podcasts, but Chris Brooks asked me to come back on his show to talk about When God Seems Distant. What he didn’t tell me beforehand was how much it spoke into the current moment of his life. We ended up having a really wonderful discussion of what it means to walk with God.

  • I was also on with my colleagues Sean McDowell and Scott Rae on the Think Biblically podcast. I always have a good time with them and they ask some really great questions. .

  • I also wrote an article for The Gospel Coalition on “The Missing Reformed Doctrine of Spiritual Formation” .

As you can probably tell, one side-effect of writing a book is that the next 6 months is pretty full! I enjoy these conversations a lot though and they actually really help me think through how to communicate the message of my writing.

In terms of writing, I am currently neck-deep in writing three books(!). One of the books is going to be massive, or else be split into two, and is something I’ve been slowly chipping away at for the past decade. I hit the point where I could really start getting momentum on it and it has been really personally enriching, but it is still very far from being complete (by way of reference, I think When God Seems Distant ended up being about 50,000 words, while this manuscript is currently over 130,000 words!). That book is too far off to start talking about but I’m really excited for it.

The other two are closer to being done, but I don’t think either will be done any time soon. I’m inheriting a new class this Fall that I’ve never taught before and developing a new class is the thing that takes more time than anything else I do. From beginning to end, developing a new class can be a 3-5 year task, because it requires that I entirely change my research agenda.

That isn’t always true for professors, but it is one of the gifts and difficulties of being a spiritual theologian. I don’t get handed classes that I normally would as a theologian (Theology 1 and 2, or a class on the doctrine of the atonement, etc.). Instead, I get handed classes that seek to integrate all of these things with theological psychology, what we know of human formation and psychology in general, as well as speaking into the lived-reality of life with God.

All of our classes at ISF are meant to be personally and existentially meaningful and engaging because we want the class to be a kind of training in walking with Jesus. But we want to do so in a way that does not lose the depth of what the Christian tradition offers, and so I’ve already been prepping for the past several years as I’m writing on virtue formation, infusion and sanctification.

This has been such a wonderful gift to me to teach in, but it is also an incredibly arduous task. It has led me into some really rich research that has truly been life-changing for me, but, as I’ve noted, it is hard to know how to balance it all because the academy is no longer set up for this kind of work.

The two books that are front and center for me right now, that I have been thinking through and wrestling over for the past couple of years now, are on the doctrine of sanctification (again!) and the nature of love. There was much more to say on sanctification than I could include in the intro book coming out in October, and so this one is a bit more of an academic book. The book on love has been a labor of love, and I’m so excited about it, but right now I don’t have any time to attend to it.