Since Formation launched, we've talked about giving our listeners the chance to have their questions answered by John. This is that episode. No guest this time, just John and Creative Director, Jackson, working through the questions you sent in when you left a review, on everything from predestination to spiritual abuse to what AI is doing to his own attention span.

Want your question answered for the next one? Leave us a review for a chance to ask John anything about spiritual formation or life with God. To enter, follow the podcast, leave your review, take a screenshot of it, and email it over with your question to [email protected]. One question per person; screenshot required.

WHAT THIS CONVERSATION EXPLORES

• How John reconciles predestination in Romans and Ephesians with passages that affirm God's desire for all to be saved
• Why God's omniscience doesn't mean God always chooses to know everything, and what that has to do with honoring our agency
• What historic Christian writers understood about the unconscious mind long before Freud made it popular
• Why the language of "spiritual formation" replaced "Christian education," and what that shift says about how people actually change
• The anxiety John has noticed in himself as AI makes more and more instantly possible
• What spiritual abuse actually looks like, and the difference between confession as a healthy spiritual practice and confession used as a tool of coercion
• How to keep trusting God when you can't control what happens to the people you love most
• John's advice for Christians who feel politically alienated from their own church
• Why John believes the local church and parachurch ministries cannot survive without each other
• A first look at John's next book, on living beyond a culture of contempt

RESOURCES MENTIONED

• Dynamics of Spiritual Formation, Richard Lovelace
• Dopamine Nation, Dr. Anna Lembke
• The Body Keeps the Score, Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
• Agnes Sanford
• Leanne Payne
• Tyler VanderWeele and the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard
• Joni and Friends
• Become New

Formation is a podcast that explores the science and soul of spiritual formation. Each episode brings together the ancient wisdom of the contemplative tradition and the best of modern research. John Ortberg sits down with some of the most rigorous and honest thinkers working at the intersection of faith and human flourishing for extended, unhurried conversations about how we are being shaped. New episodes every other week, wherever you listen to podcasts.

Follow Formation at formationpodcast.com and @formationjohn.

Formation is produced by Become New, a community dedicated to helping you grow spiritually, one day at a time. Subscribe for daily teaching from John Ortberg at becomenew.com/subscribe.

Would you do us a favor? Make sure you're following the podcast. (It helps the show reach more people.)

About the Guest

Kara Powell leads the Fuller Youth Institute as its Executive Director, where for more than twenty years her team has tracked how young people are changing across three generational cohorts, from Millennials to Gen Z to Gen Alpha. She holds a PhD in Practical Theology and has helped shape some of the most widely used research on the next generation.

AMA Opportunity

Leave us a review for a chance to ask John a question on an upcoming episode. To enter, follow the podcast, leave your review, take a screenshot of it, and email it over with your question to [email protected]. One question per person, screenshot required.

What This Conversation Explores

• What has mostly stayed the same about young people across two decades of research, and what's vastly different
• What Gen Alpha needs from adults, and how their faith formation is taking shape
• Whether the data points to a genuine revival among young people, or something more nuanced
• Screen time and what it’s doing to our kids
• Whether teens today take fewer risks than past generations
• What kind of intergenerational relationships Gen Alpha is actually looking for and how they’re a benefit to all
• How to have more formative conversations with the young people in your life (and the scripts to get you there)
• What it's like to study faith formation for a living, and how it has shaped Kara's own spiritual life
• Whether some of the anxiety adults feel about this generation is really about the adults' own viewpoints 
• How Kara is being formed personally 

Resources Mentioned

• Fuller Youth Institute: fulleryouthinstitute.org/subscribe
• The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt
• Growing Young — Fuller Youth Institute
• Future Focused Church — Fuller Youth Institute
• Free Gen Alpha report — fulleryouthinstitute.org
• Like Dew Your Youth by Eugene Peterson
• Chap Clark — the 5-to-1 ratio
• Dallas Willard
• Dietrich Bonhoeffer — the "chief sinner" idea
• Dave Wang, Fuller Theological Seminary

About Formation

Formation is a podcast that explores the science and soul of spiritual formation. Each episode brings together the ancient wisdom of the contemplative tradition and the best of modern research. John Ortberg sits down with some of the most rigorous and honest thinkers working at the intersection of faith and human flourishing for extended, unhurried conversations about how we are being shaped. New episodes every other week, wherever you listen to podcasts.

Connect with Formation

formationpodcast.com
 @formationjohn

Formation is produced by Become New, a community dedicated to helping you grow spiritually, one day at a time. Subscribe for daily teaching from John Ortberg at becomenew.com/subscribe.

Would you do us a favor? Make sure you're following the podcast. (It helps the show reach more people.)

In this episode of Formation, John Ortberg sits down with Carey Nieuwhof to talk leadership, fame, faith, and what it means for the church to stay human as the world turns synthetic.

Carey Nieuwhof has spent the last decade in a chair few people occupy: hundreds of conversations a year with pastors, CEOs, authors, and public thinkers, watching up close what success does to a person's character. In this conversation with John Ortberg, recorded in the redwoods of Northern California, that vantage point turns into something more personal, a wide-ranging talk about leadership, fame, faith, and the strange new terrain of artificial intelligence.

The two friends trade stories before they trade ideas: a Wendell Berry "fan email" that turned out to be an AI scam, the surreal experience of gifting Scott Galloway a Bible after an emotional conversation about faith, and what it was like for Carey to sit across from Tim Keller weeks before the world shut down in 2020. From there the conversation opens into Carey's real preoccupations: why dogmatism is usually fear in disguise, why nobody at the top actually has it figured out, and why he worries that platforms now grow faster than character can keep up.

The back half is Carey's sharpest territory: the book he's been living inside for two years, on AI and the church. He lays out both the utopian and the dystopian cases, from cured diseases to a possible "white-collar bloodbath," and lands on a single, disarming thesis. As the world becomes more synthetic, the church's job gets simpler, not harder. It has to become more human. Along the way, he and John wrestle with AI companionship, AI grief, and what happens to resurrection, prayer, and preaching when a chatbot never has a bad day and never runs out of answers.

Resources Mentioned

• Leadership Is an Art by Max De Pree
• Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
• Range by David Epstein
• The Algebra of Wealth by Scott Galloway
• Tides of Mind by David Gelernter
• If Anyone Builds This, Everyone Dies (on artificial superintelligence risk)
• Her (2013, dir. Spike Jonze), the AI-companionship film Carey calls prescient
• Sermon Central, the sermon-sharing platform discussed in the context of AI-era plagiarism

About Carey Nieuwhof
Carey Nieuwhof is a former lawyer and pastor who now hosts one of the most-downloaded leadership podcasts for church leaders, with over 800 episodes and 40 million-plus downloads. He is writing a forthcoming book on AI and the church.

Formation is hosted by John Ortberg. New episodes at https://www.formationpodcast.com

Would you do us a favor? Make sure you're following the podcast. (It helps the show reach more people.)

Joni Eareckson Tada became a quadriplegic at seventeen after a diving accident that severed her spinal cord. In the nearly six decades since, she has written dozens of books, founded a global disability ministry, survived two bouts of cancer, and woken up every single morning asking Jesus to get her through the day.

This is a conversation about what it means to receive suffering with both hands: the anger, the prayers that didn't get answered the way she hoped, the agony, and what gets faithfully built through it all.

About the Guest

Joni Eareckson Tada became a quadriplegic at seventeen after a diving accident that severed her spinal cord. In the decades since, she has become one of the most recognized voices on suffering, disability, and faith in the world. She is the founder and CEO of Joni and Friends, a global ministry serving people with disabilities in over 100 countries. Her memoir, Joni, has sold more than five million copies. She is an artist, author, and speaker who has shared platforms with Billy Graham and appeared on programs from the Today Show to venues around the world. She and her husband, Ken, live in California.

AMA Opportunity:

Enter for a chance to ask John a question on an upcoming episode. All you need to do is follow the podcast, leave a review, take a screenshot, and email it with your question to [email protected]. One question per person; screenshot required.

What This Conversation Explores

• The diving accident, the hospital room, and the slow realization that nothing was going to change
• What it took to move from wanting to die to learning to give thanks
• A 17-year-old boy with a Bible and a verse from 1 Thessalonians and how he changed everything
• How a passage in Mark 1 reframed what Jesus actually came to do
• What Joni discovered about sin that she couldn't have learned on her feet
• The prayer she prayed three months before her accident and what she makes of it now
• What the cross has to do with finding God in suffering
• Joni and Friends: wheelchairs, Bibles, and changing the disability culture of entire countries
• Disability ministry as disability discipleship
• Two bouts with cancer, a radiation machine named after Jael, and what it means to press into Christ
• What to say to someone who is in pain right now

Resources Mentioned

• Joni — Joni Eareckson Tada
• Joni and Friends — joniandfriends.org
• Wheels for the World — Joni and Friends wheelchair delivery program
• Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies We Tell Ourselves — Kate Bowler
• William Law — quote on receiving suffering with both hands
• Dorothy Sayers — on God wrenching good from evil
• Dallas Willard — on the heart, behavior, and the Sermon on the Mount
• 2 Corinthians 4:8, Philippians 4:13, 1 Kings 19 — Scripture discussed

About Formation

Formation is a podcast that explores the science and soul of spiritual formation. Each episode brings together the ancient wisdom of the contemplative tradition and the best of modern research. John Ortberg sits down with some of the most rigorous and honest thinkers working at the intersection of faith and human flourishing for extended, unhurried conversations about how we are being shaped. New episodes every other week, wherever you listen to podcasts.

Connect with Formation

• Website: formationpodcast.com
• Follow John: @formationjohn
• Write to us: [email protected]

Formation is produced by Become New, a community dedicated to helping you grow spiritually, one day at a time. Subscribe for daily teaching from John Ortberg at becomenew.com/subscribe.

Would you do us a favor? Make sure you're following the podcast. (It helps the show reach more people.)

What does it take to find peace in a culture engineered for distraction? In this episode of Formation, John Ortberg sits down with a Silicon Valley pastor whose pursuit of attention, rest, and spiritual formation was interrupted by a panic attack — and reshaped by an ancient prayer practice, the problem with multitasking, and the rise of AI.

Jay Kim is a pastor, author, and podcaster who serves at WestGate Church in the heart of Silicon Valley. He's thought deeply about what it means to pursue spiritual formation in one of the most distracted, driven, and technologically saturated cultures in the world. And a few years ago, sitting in his car in a strip-mall parking lot after dropping his kids at school, a panic attack made all of that very personal.

That moment became an invitation to stop striving, to examine his life more honestly, and to rediscover an ancient practice that has become one of the most formative disciplines of his days. It's the heart of his latest book, The Pace of Peace, and the heart of this conversation.

A note for listeners: this episode includes a personal account of a panic attack and references to anxiety and mental health. If you're struggling, please reach out to someone you trust or a mental health professional.


Also in This Episode

• Why the word "multitasking" was coined to sell mainframe computers
• How the engineers building today's most advanced AI openly admit they don't actually know how it works
• Why the ancient church called distraction demonic and why a Silicon Valley pastor thinks they were right


A Few Lines Worth Sitting With

• "There is no multitasking human."
• "I do not have my finger very accurately on the pulse of my inner life most of the time."
• "Peace actually ushers you into the fray."

About Jay Kim

Jay Y. Kim is the lead pastor of WestGate Church in Silicon Valley, a Fuller Seminary graduate, and the author of Analog Church (winner of The Gospel Coalition's First-Time Author Award), Analog Christian, Listen, Listen, Speak, and his latest, The Pace of Peace — the book at the heart of this conversation. He hosts the Digital Examen podcast and co-hosts the ReGeneration Podcast. He has pastored for over 20 years, all in the Bay Area, and lives with his wife Jenny and their two young children.


Resources Mentioned

• Domestic Monastery — Ronald Rolheiser
• Soul Feast — Marjorie Thompson
• Letters by a Modern Mystic — Frank Laubach
• Against the Machine — Paul Kingsnorth
• Jonathan Haidt — research on social media and adolescent mental health
• Gloria Mark — neuroscience research on multitasking and attention
• Curt Thompson — work on shame and confession
• Steve Cuss — Managing Leadership Anxiety and writing on pastoral anxiety
• Rankin Wilbourne — Broom Tree ministry for pastors in difficulty
• The Daily Examen — Ignatian spirituality
• The hedonic treadmill — concept from Brickman & Campbell (1971)


About Formation

Formation is a podcast that explores the science and soul of spiritual formation. Each episode brings together the ancient wisdom of the contemplative tradition and the best of modern research. John Ortberg sits down with some of the most rigorous and honest thinkers working at the intersection of faith and human flourishing for extended, unhurried conversations about how we are being shaped. New episodes every other week, wherever you listen to podcasts.

Connect with Formation

www.formationpodcast.com/subscribe
@formationjohn

If this conversation gave you something to think about, we'd be grateful if you shared it with someone else who thinks intentionally about the things that matter most.

What does it mean to treat people as ends in themselves rather than instruments to get things done? Gary Hamel joins John for a conversation about work, dignity, and the quiet crisis inside most organizations. One of the world's most influential business thinkers, Gary has spent decades asking why so few workplaces actually unleash the people inside them, and what it would look like if they did. This is a conversation about agency, meaning, and why the biblical vision of every human being made to reign with God has profound implications for how we build institutions.

About Gary Hamel

Gary Hamel is one of the world's most influential and iconoclastic business thinkers. He has worked with leading companies across the globe and is a dynamic and sought-after management speaker. Hamel has been on the faculty of the London Business School for more than 30 years and is the director of the Management Lab.

AMA Opportunity

Leave us a review ahead of our launch for a chance to ask John a question on an upcoming episode. Here's how: follow the podcast, leave a review, take a screenshot, and email it with your question to editors@formationpodcast.com. We'll answer selected questions in a future episode. One question per person; screenshot required.

What this Conversation Explores

• Why most organizations treat people as semi-programmable robots and what we stand to lose if we don't change that 
• The only three reasons someone actually needs to be managed, and why none of them require layers of hierarchy to solve
• What a 16,000-person Dutch healthcare company with almost no managers can teach us about trust, accountability, and human potential
• The biblical vision of dominion and kingdom, and why John argues it is the deepest possible framework for thinking about work and dignity
• Why the question is not how to outperform your peers but how to outperform expectations, and what that shift does to a person over time
• The four force multipliers Gary has observed in ordinary people who do extraordinary things: courage, contrarianism, community, and compassion
• Dallas Willard's vision of job discipleship, and what it looks like to do your work together with Jesus rather than merely alongside him
• How Gary thinks about faith, suffering, and the preponderance of evidence for belief in a world that has grown increasingly nihilistic

Resources Mentioned

• The Death of Common Sense — Philip K. Howard
• The Utopia of Rules — David Graeber
• Man's Search for Meaning — Viktor Frankl
• The Management Lab — mlabgroup.com

Connect with Gary Hamel

Website: garyhamel.com

About Formation

Formation is a podcast that explores the science and soul of spiritual formation. Each episode brings together the ancient wisdom of the contemplative tradition and the best of modern research. John Ortberg sits down with some of the most rigorous and honest thinkers working at the intersection of faith and human flourishing for extended, unhurried conversations about how we are being shaped. New episodes every other week, wherever you listen to podcasts.

Connect with Formation

Website: formationpodcast.com
Newsletter: formationpodcast.com/subscribe
Socials: @formationjohn

If this conversation gave you something to sit with, we would be grateful if you shared it with someone else who thinks intentionally about the things that matter most.

Formation is produced by Become New, a community dedicated to helping you grow spiritually, one day at a time. Subscribe for daily teaching from John Ortberg at becomenew.com/subscribe.

What does it look like to follow Jesus when the culture insists that everything depends on the next election? Michael Wear joins John for a conversation about politics, allegiance, and the slow work of keeping ultimate things ultimate. A former White House staffer who came to faith as a teenager in a Wegmans grocery store, Michael has spent his career arguing that Christian knowledge is not just privately meaningful but publicly useful, and that the church has handed political parties a power that was never theirs to hold. This is a conversation about anger, constituency, and why the word of God does not change every four years.

AMA Opportunity:

Leave us a review ahead of our launch for a chance to ask John a question on an upcoming episode. Follow the podcast, leave a review, take a screenshot, and email it with your question to [email protected]. One question per person; screenshot required.

About Michael Wear:

Michael Wear is the founder, president, and CEO of the Center for Christianity and Public Life, an organization he built around a 30-year vision to contend for the credibility of Christian resources for the public good. He previously served in the Obama White House, where as a young staffer he helped move the issue of human trafficking onto the president's agenda after connecting a senior advisor to the 60,000 students who had gathered at the Passion Conference in Atlanta to worship and give. He is also the author of Reclaiming Hope (2017). Michael came to faith as a teenager, shaped significantly by his sister's conversion and a conversation on the Romans road in the middle of a grocery store. He has said that coming to faith immediately raised a question for him: if this is true, what does it mean for the whole of life?

What this Conversation Explores:

• What Michael means by "Christian knowledge" and why he insists it is publicly available, not merely privately held
• Why Dallas Willard believed politics has a unique capacity to create a pseudo-reality, and what Christians lose when they forget it
• The danger of going to politics to get spiritual needs met, and what it feels like when the results of an election shift the color of the sky
• What MLK's famous quote about the law gets right and how both the left and the right misuse it
• Why Christians should not be so quick to desire a constituency, and what it means to remember who sent them
• Anger in political life: when it is signal, when it becomes sin, and the question every Christian should ask before indulging it
• How politics is actually a healthy arena for spiritual formation, and why the person who cannot be kind in a political disagreement should ask where else they are rationalizing their way out

Resources Mentioned:

• Reclaiming Hope — Michael Wear
• Exuberance: The Passion for Life — Kay Redfield Jamison
• Center for Christianity and Public Life — ccpubliclife.org

About Formation:
Formation is a podcast that explores the science and soul of spiritual formation. Each episode brings together the ancient wisdom of the contemplative tradition and the best of modern research. John Ortberg sits down with some of the most rigorous and honest thinkers working at the intersection of faith and human flourishing for extended, unhurried conversations about how we are being shaped. New episodes every other week, wherever you listen to podcasts.

Connect with Formation:
Website: www.formationpodcast.com
Newsletter: www.formationpodcast.com/subscribe
Socials: @formationjohn

If this conversation gave you something to think about, we'd be grateful if you shared it with someone else who thinks intentionally about the things that matter most.

Formation is produced by Become New, a community dedicated to helping you grow spiritually, one day at a time. Subscribe for daily teaching from John Ortberg at becomenew.com/subscribe.

What does it take to do hard things for a long time without being broken by them? Gary Haugen is the founder and CEO of International Justice Mission, a global organization that protects the poor from violence throughout the developing world. He joins John for a conversation about evil, the human capacity for violence, and why the people most serious about changing the world may be the ones most in need of spiritual formation.

AMA Opportunity:

Leave us a review ahead of our launch for a chance to ask John a question on an upcoming episode. Follow the podcast, leave a review, take a screenshot, and email it with your question to [email protected]. One question per person; screenshot required.

About Gary Haugen:

Gary Haugen is the founder and CEO of International Justice Mission, which has secured the release of nearly 50,000 people from violence and forced labor across more than 30 countries. Before founding IJM, he directed the United Nations' genocide investigation in Rwanda in 1994. He is the author of The Locust Effect and Good News About Injustice.

What this Conversation Explores:

• What Gary witnessed in Rwanda and what it revealed about the human capacity for evil and the reality of a fallen nature
• The four conditions that open ordinary people to violence, and what this means for how we understand sin and formation
• How IJM became a community of spiritual formation and what that looks like in an organization of 1,500 people
• The practice Gary calls "prayerless striving" and the daily rhythms IJM built to resist it
• What Dallas Willard's work on humility and careful reflection has meant for Gary's own formation

Resources Mentioned:

• The Locust Effect — Gary Haugen
• Good News About Injustice — Gary Haugen
• Renovation of the Heart — Dallas Willard
• Ordinary Men — Christopher Browning
• Explaining Hitler — Ron Rosenbaum
• International Justice Mission — ijm.org

About Formation:

Formation is a podcast that explores the science and soul of spiritual formation. Each episode brings together the ancient wisdom of the contemplative tradition and the best of modern research. John Ortberg sits down with some of the most rigorous and honest thinkers working at the intersection of faith and human flourishing for extended, unhurried conversations about how we are being shaped. New episodes every other week, wherever you listen to podcasts.

Connect with Formation:

Website: formationpodcast.com
Newsletter: formationpodcast.com/subscribe
Socials: @formationjohn

If this conversation gave you something to think about, we'd be grateful if you shared it with someone else who thinks intentionally about the things that matter most.

The conversation doesn't have to stop here.

Formation is produced by Become New, a community dedicated to helping you grow spiritually, one day at a time. Subscribe for daily teaching from John Ortberg at becomenew.com/subscribe.

What do we do with a God who commands violence, permits slavery, and seems to change his mind? Tremper Longman III — one of the most prolific and trusted Old Testament scholars of his generation — joins John for a conversation about the parts of Scripture that trouble us most, and why sitting with that trouble might be more formative than explaining it away. 

AMA Opportunity:

Leave us a review ahead of our launch for a chance to ask John a question on an upcoming episode. Here's how: follow the podcast, leave a review, take a screenshot, and email it with your question to [email protected]. We'll answer selected questions in a future episode. One question per person; screenshot required.

About Tremper Longman III:

Tremper Longman III is Distinguished Scholar and Professor Emeritus of Biblical Studies at Westmont College, and one of the most widely read Old Testament scholars in the evangelical world. He holds a PhD from Yale University and has written or edited more than 35 books — on Genesis, the Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs, and the theology of God as warrior, among much else. He has served as a consultant on major Bible translation projects and scholarly initiatives including BioLogos, which explores the relationship between science and faith. 

What this conversation explores:

• Why the New Testament is nearly incomprehensible without the Old, and what we lose by skipping the first two-thirds of the story
• How genre shapes the way we read Genesis: what it means that it is history, and what it doesn't mean, and why Augustine and Origen were already asking these questions long before Darwin
• The five phases of God as divine warrior from the conquest narratives through the cross to the final judgment, and why that arc matters for how we hold the violence in Joshua
• What honest scholarship looks like when the text still troubles you: Tremper names what he cannot yet resolve about the commanded destruction of women and children, without flinching and without fixing it
• How the Psalms of lament (and Psalm 77 in particular)  gave Tremper language for his own seasons of grief, confusion, and anger toward God
• What the Old Testament actually says about Israel, chosenness, and the current conflict in the Middle East and why "Israel right or wrong" is a hermeneutical error

Resources Mentioned:

• Confronting Old Testament Controversies — Tremper Longman III
• Breaking the Idols of Your Heart — Dan Allender & Tremper Longman III
• Bold Love — Dan Allender & Tremper Longman III
• Cry of the Soul — Dan Allender & Tremper Longman III
• Is God a Moral Monster? — Paul Copan
• Jacob I Loved — Joel Kaminsky
• The Late Great Planet Earth — Hal Lindsey
• The Story of God Bible Commentary Series — Tremper Longman III & Scot McKnight
• Texts in Context: The Old Testament (forthcoming) — Tremper Longman III
• The Book of Job

About Formation:

Formation is a podcast produced by Become New that explores the science and soul of spiritual formation.  John Ortberg sits down with some of the most rigorous and honest thinkers working at the intersection of faith and human flourishing for extended, unhurried conversations about how we are being shaped. New episodes every other week, wherever you listen to podcasts.

Connect with Formation:

Website: [www.formationpodcast.com]

Newsletter: [www.formationpodcast.com/subscribe]

Socials: [@formationjohn]

The conversation doesn't have to stop here. Formation is produced by Become New, a community dedicated to helping you grow spiritually... one day at a time. Subscribe for daily teaching from John Ortberg at becomenew.com/subscribe.

What does it mean to know God, not as a doctrine held, but as a presence inhabited? Tyler Staton joins John for the first conversation in Formation's history: an unhurried exploration of how the Holy Spirit forms us, why prayer is less about technique than attention, and what it looks like to discover God not only in the sanctuary but in the chaos of a basketball sideline, a marriage, and a cancer diagnosis. This is a conversation about the ancient and the empirical, and how sometimes we may look for formation in all the wrong places.

AMA Opportunity

Leave us a review ahead of our launch for a chance to ask John a question on an upcoming episode. Here's how: follow the podcast, leave a review, take a screenshot, and email it with your question to [email protected]. We'll answer selected questions in a future episode. One question per person; screenshot required.

About Tyler Staton:

Tyler Staton is the lead pastor of Bridgetown Church in Portland, Oregon, and the national director of 24-7 Prayer USA. He is the author of two books — Praying Like Monks, Living Like Fools and The Familiar Stranger — both of which take seriously the gap between what Christians say they believe about God and what they actually experience in daily life. Tyler studied at Southeastern University and has spent much of his ministry in New York and Portland, two cities that have sharpened his theology as much as any classroom. 

What this conversation explores:

• Why the Holy Spirit is the most neglected and most contested person of the Trinity and what a more integrated pneumatology might actually look like in ordinary life
• Dallas Willard's "golden triangle" of spiritual formation: practices, movements of the Spirit, and suffering, and why removing any one of the three is detrimental 
• The difference between discernment and miracle-seeking, and why Tyler believes the deeper invitation of the Spirit is often hidden inside what we're most eager to escape
• What it means to "find yourself in the story" — Tyler's practice of praying through Scripture in seasons of doubt, loss, and confusion
• How family life and marriage in particular function as formation's most honest classroom

Resources mentioned:

• Praying Like Monks, Living Like Fools — Tyler Staton
• The Familiar Stranger — Tyler Staton
• Renovation of the Heart — Dallas Willard
• Fresh Air: The Holy Spirit for an Inspired and Empowered Life — Jack Levison
• Miracles — C.S. Lewis
• Ministry and the Miraculous — Lewis Smedes
• The Protestant Spiritual Formation Movement — Todd Keesler
• The Examen

Connect with Tyler Staton:

Website: bridgetown.church
Instagram: @tylerstaton
Praying Like Monks, Living Like Fools, available wherever books are sold
The Familiar Stranger, available wherever books are sold

About Formation:

Formation is a podcast produced by Become New that explores the science and soul of spiritual formation. Each episode brings together the ancient wisdom of the contemplative tradition and the best of modern research. New episodes every other week, wherever you listen to podcasts.

Connect with Formation:
Website: [www.formationpodcast.com]
Newsletter: [www.formationpodcast.com/subscribe]
Socials: [@formationjohn]

The conversation doesn't have to stop here. Formation is produced by Become New, a community dedicated to helping you grow spiritually... one day at a time. Subscribe for daily teaching from John Ortberg at becomenew.com/subscribe.