For much of the modern era, spiritual formation has been imagined primarily as a process of information transfer. The assumption has often been that if individuals acquire the right beliefs, doctrines, values, and practices, transformation will naturally follow. Formation, in this paradigm, is largely retrospective. It looks backward toward established truths, inherited traditions, and accumulated knowledge. The task of educators, pastors, and spiritual directors becomes one of transmitting what is already known.
While information undoubtedly matters, this modernist understanding of formation is increasingly inadequate for the complexity, uncertainty, and rapid change that characterize contemporary life.
What if spiritual formation is not primarily about transmitting information from the past, but about cultivating faithful participation in emerging futures?
What if spiritual formation is better understood as a futuring discipline?
Beyond Information Transfer
The modern university emerged during an era deeply shaped by Enlightenment assumptions. Knowledge was viewed as objective, stable, and transferable. Learning meant acquiring increasingly accurate representations of reality. The educated person became the one who possessed the most information.
Christian education often adopted similar assumptions. Faith formation became associated with doctrinal mastery, biblical literacy, moral instruction, or the accumulation of spiritual knowledge. Growth was measured by what one knew.
Yet human beings are not transformed primarily by information.
We know far more than we practice.
Most of us already know the importance of forgiveness, generosity, humility, justice, prayer, rest, and love. Our challenge is rarely a lack of information. Rather, the challenge is becoming the kinds of people capable of embodying these realities in uncertain and often conflicting circumstances.
Formation is not merely about knowing differently. It is about becoming differently.
The Future Shapes the Present
Futures studies offers a helpful corrective.
One of the central insights of futures thinking is that human beings are influenced not only by the past but also by their images of the future. Anticipated futures exert influence on present behavior. People organize their lives around what they imagine is possible, desirable, or inevitable.
In futures theory, this dynamic is often described as the “pull of the future.”
Compelling visions of what might be draw individuals and communities toward new forms of action. The future is not simply something that happens to us. It participates in shaping who we become.
The Christian tradition has long understood this reality, even if it has not always used futures language. The biblical virtue of hope is fundamentally future-oriented. Hope is not optimism. Nor is it prediction. Hope is the capacity to live now in light of a future that has not yet fully arrived.
The prophets envisioned a world where swords become plowshares. Jesus proclaimed the coming Kin-dom of God. The early church organized itself around the conviction that another world was already breaking into history. Christian communities have always been animated by images of futures that differ from present realities.
In this sense, spiritual formation has always been a futuring discipline.
Formation Through Imagination
If information shapes what we know, imagination shapes what we can become.
Walter Brueggemann argues that the prophetic task is fundamentally one of nurturing alternative imagination. Oppressive systems maintain themselves not merely through force but through limiting people’s capacity to imagine alternatives. Liberation begins when new possibilities become visible.
Similarly, spiritual formation involves cultivating the capacity to perceive realities that are not yet fully manifest.
The Beatitudes invite disciples to imagine a world where the poor are blessed, the hungry are filled, and the excluded belong. The Lord’s Prayer teaches us to orient our lives toward a future where God’s will is done on earth as it is in heaven. The Eucharist rehearses a future feast of reconciliation. Baptism initiates believers into a new social imagination.
These are not merely beliefs to be understood. They are futures to be inhabited.
Spiritual practices function less as mechanisms for acquiring information and more as technologies of anticipation. They train communities to live toward futures that are not yet fully visible.
Formation as Participatory Futuring
This understanding shifts the purpose of formation.
Rather than preparing individuals to preserve inherited systems, formation becomes the cultivation of people capable of participating faithfully in the emergence of God’s preferred future.
Such participation invites far more than certainty.
It invites openness.
More than mastery.
It invites discernment.
More than control.
It invites presence.
The goal is not to produce individuals who possess all the answers but communities capable of listening deeply, sensing emerging possibilities, and responding faithfully to the invitations of the Spirit.
This posture resonates with what futures scholars describe as anticipatory capacity—the ability to perceive signals of change, imagine alternative possibilities, and act creatively amid uncertainty.
Spiritual formation develops similar capacities. Through prayer, contemplation, worship, hospitality, service, and communal discernment, individuals learn to attend to realities that transcend immediate circumstances. They become more capable of living into futures shaped by love rather than fear, abundance rather than scarcity, and reconciliation rather than domination.
Faith, Hope, & Love as Temporal Practices
The apostle Paul offers an intriguing temporal framework when he writes that “faith, hope, and love abide.”
These three virtues correspond remarkably well to the temporal dimensions of human existence.
Faith remembers.
It receives and interprets the gifts, wounds, traditions, and stories that have shaped us. Faith helps us engage the weight of history.
Hope imagines.
It perceives possibilities beyond present constraints and responds to the pull of the future.
Love embodies.
It acts in the present. Love becomes the bridge between remembered pasts and anticipated futures.
Together, faith, hope, and love form a spiritual futures triangle. They enable communities to honor the past without becoming captive to it, engage the present without becoming overwhelmed by it, and move toward the future without attempting to control it.
The Future as Gift
Perhaps the most significant distinction between secular futuring and Christian formation lies here.
Many contemporary futures approaches remain focused on prediction, strategy, or control. The future is treated as an object to be managed.
Christian spirituality offers a different posture.
The future is ultimately received as gift.
The task is not to engineer God’s future but to participate faithfully in its unfolding. Spiritual formation becomes the ongoing work of preparing ourselves and our communities to recognize and cooperate with the surprising movement of the Spirit.
In this sense, formation is less like filling a container and more like cultivating a garden.
We do not create the future.
We prepare the soil.
We nurture conditions where life may emerge.
We practice faithfulness in the present while remaining open to possibilities we cannot yet fully see.
Spiritual formation, then, is not merely the transmission of information from the past.
It is the cultivation of people capable of inhabiting God’s future before it fully arrives.
And perhaps that has always been the work of discipleship.
Peace, dwight
