What is Christian Formation?
Christian formation is the ongoing process by which a person is shaped, at every level of their being, into the likeness of Jesus Christ. It is not simply the acquisition of religious knowledge: the memorisation of Bible verses, the learning of doctrine, the accumulation of correct beliefs. It is something deeper and more comprehensive: the gradual reordering of desires, habits, imagination, and relationship, so that a person comes to live, think, and feel in ways increasingly consonant with the character and way of Jesus.
The term draws on a rich theological tradition. The apostle Paul, writing to the Galatian church, describes himself as again "in the pains of childbirth until Christ is formed in you" (Galatians 4:19), using the Greek word morphōthē, from morphē, meaning form or shape. Formation, in this sense, is not a course or programme. It is a birth process, organic, relational, sometimes painful, always personal. Paul uses similarly embodied language in Romans 12:2, calling for the metamorphōsis of the mind — a word that implies a thorough inner transformation, not merely a surface modification of behaviour.
In the context of children and young people, Christian formation names the intentional work of parents, teachers, and church leaders to create the conditions, relational, environmental, liturgical, and developmental, in which children can genuinely encounter God, develop a living faith, and be shaped by it from the inside out. It is distinct from religious instruction (though it includes it), from behaviour management dressed in Christian language, and from mere attendance at Christian activities. Formation happens when faith becomes not just what a child knows or does, but who they are becoming.
The Childscape places Christian formation within its broader Mind-Body-Spirit framework not as a separate religious layer, but as the integrating dimension: the lens through which the whole child's development is understood in relation to God, self, others, and creation. Formation that ignores the body, dismisses the mind, or bypasses emotional reality is incomplete formation. True Christian formation engages the whole child.
Origins & History
The concept of deliberate spiritual formation is as old as Israel. The Shema of Deuteronomy 6: "Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God, the LORD is one" — is immediately followed by a formation mandate: "These commandments are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up." The vision here is not of a formal religious education class, but of life-embedded, relationship-saturated, rhythmically repeated formation. The Hebrew word translated "impress" is shanan, to sharpen, to incise, implying that faith is meant to be inscribed through repeated practice, not simply announced once and remembered.
The early church inherited and expanded this vision. By the second and third centuries, the catechumenate had developed as a structured multi-year process of formation for new converts, combining instruction, communal practice, fasting, exorcism, and the gradual deepening of relationship with God and the Christian community. The concern was always formational, not merely informational: by the time a catechumen was baptised, the expectation was that their life had been fundamentally reordered.
The great figures of the patristic era — Origen, Augustine, Chrysostom — wrote extensively on the formation of children and youth. Augustine's Confessions (c. 397 AD) remains one of the most psychologically sophisticated accounts of spiritual formation ever written, tracing the way desire, habit, and will are shaped over a lifetime through encounter with God. His famous phrase, inquietum est cor nostrum, donec requiescat in te (our heart is restless, until it rests in thee), is itself a formation insight: the human person is constitutively oriented toward God, and formation is the work of aligning that orientation with its true telos.
The Reformation and subsequent centuries brought significant developments. John Calvin's Institutes emphasised the formative role of the Word and sacraments within the gathered community. The Wesleyan tradition in the eighteenth century developed the "means of grace": a disciplined set of practices (scripture, prayer, fasting, community, service) understood as channels through which God forms the believer over time. This tradition strongly influenced later thinking about spiritual disciplines.
The modern recovery of formation language in Protestant Christianity owes much to Dallas Willard, whose 1988 book The Spirit of the Disciplines argued that spiritual transformation is not automatic; it requires intentional training, or what Willard called "spiritual disciplines." James K. A. Smith, building on Willard and the philosopher Charles Taylor, reframed formation in terms of desire and liturgy in his 2009 work Desiring the Kingdom: we are fundamentally desiring creatures, and formation shapes what we love, not merely what we think. Smith's insight that cultural practices function as "secular liturgies" that form us whether we intend them to or not has been particularly influential in Christian education circles.
The Evidence Base
Empirical research on religious formation in children and adolescents has expanded substantially since the 1990s. While the field is methodologically complex; spiritual development is notoriously difficult to measure. Several important findings have emerged.
The National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR), conducted by Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton beginning in 2001, was the largest and most rigorous study of American religious and spiritual development in adolescence undertaken to that point. Based on over 3,400 interviews with teenagers across faith traditions, the study found that the single most powerful predictor of a teenager's religious faith in adulthood was the religiosity of their parents — not youth group attendance, not camp experiences, not formal religious education, but the lived faith of the home. Smith's follow-up volume Souls in Transition (2009) tracked the same cohort into young adulthood, finding that those who maintained a robust and articulate faith had typically experienced both warm relational faith modelling and substantive theological engagement during adolescence. Thin, moralistic religion — what Smith memorably called "moralistic therapeutic deism" — produced thin, easily abandoned faith.
Developmental psychologist James Fowler's theory of faith development, first presented in Stages of Faith (1981), proposed that faith develops through predictable stages across the lifespan, from the undifferentiated faith of infancy through the mythic-literal faith of middle childhood, the synthetic-conventional faith of adolescence, and toward increasingly self-authored and integrative forms of faith in adulthood. Fowler drew on Piaget's cognitive stages, Erikson's psychosocial development, and Kohlberg's moral development (see Moral Development), arguing that faith development tracks alongside and interacts with these other developmental streams. His framework has been critiqued for over-intellectualising faith and under-weighting community, emotion, and embodied practice, but remains the most comprehensive developmental map of faith across the lifespan.
Research on the neuroscience of spiritual experience has grown significantly. Andrew Newberg's neuroimaging studies, summarised in How God Changes Your Brain (2009), found that sustained spiritual practices such as meditation and contemplative prayer produce measurable changes in prefrontal cortex activity, including increases in the neural correlates of empathy, compassion, and emotional regulation. While these findings require careful theological interpretation, they offer empirical support for the ancient intuition that spiritual practice changes the person who practices.
Studies of parental religious transmission — including work by Vern Bengtson in Families and Faith (2013), based on a 35-year longitudinal study of over 3,500 family members, found that parental warmth was the strongest predictor of religious transmission across generations, stronger even than parental religiosity itself. Authoritarian religious parenting was associated with religious rebellion or disengagement in young adulthood. Formation in warm, secure, non-coercive relationship was consistently associated with the most durable transmission of faith. This finding directly parallels the Attachment Theory literature.
Practical Application
Christian formation of children and young people is not a programme to be delivered; it is a way of being with them over time. The following strategies are drawn from developmental research, formation theology, and the practical wisdom of educators and practitioners working with children ages 5–18.
Make faith visible through daily life, not only Sunday
The Deuteronomic vision of formation is explicitly domestic and rhythmic: faith is talked about on the road, at mealtimes, at bedtime. For children aged 5–10, this means short, concrete, regularly repeated moments of faith in the ordinary flow of life — a prayer before bed that names something real ("Thank you, God, for the hard maths test today"), a simple question at the dinner table ("Where did you notice something beautiful today?"), a moment of wonder at the natural world named as something to do with God. Children in this age range are concrete thinkers (see Developmental Psychology) and do not yet grasp abstraction — faith must be anchored in the tangible, the sensory, and the relational to be real for them.
For adolescents aged 11–18, the challenge shifts. Teenagers are in the process of constructing their own identities (see Identity in Christ) and are developmentally primed to question received beliefs. Formation in this stage is less about imparting faith and more about creating conditions where teenagers can wrestle with faith honestly. This means adults who model intellectual honesty, who name their own doubts, who welcome hard questions, who demonstrate that faith and rigorous thinking are not enemies. Shared practices that adolescents find meaningful (service, music, prayer, justice-focused activism) often carry more formational weight in this stage than formal instruction.
Prioritise relationship as the primary medium of formation
No curriculum, programme, or event forms children as powerfully as a consistent, warm, faith-modelling adult relationship. This is the overwhelming finding of both the research and the tradition. Formation happens most reliably in the space between a child and a trusted adult who loves both the child and God. For younger children, this is primarily parents — Bengtson's research is unambiguous on this point. For adolescents, trusted youth leaders, mentors, and older peers carry increasing weight, as developmental individuation naturally creates some distance from parents. Both spheres of relationship matter and are worth cultivating intentionally.
Use story, symbol, and ritual, not proposition alone
Children aged 5–10 are in what Fowler calls the mythic-literal stage: they think in narrative. Abstract doctrinal propositions pass over their heads; stories enter their hearts. The biblical narrative, told well, with richness and drama and emotional honesty, is profoundly formative for this age group. Ritual, the lighting of candles, the repetition of particular prayers, the physical act of the Eucharist, encodes faith in the body (see Co-Regulation for the regulatory power of rhythmic, predictable practice). For adolescents, who are increasingly capable of abstract thought but equally hungry for authentic experience, the combination of honest story-telling (including the stories of saints, mystics, and believers who have wrestled with doubt) and participatory ritual can be more formative than propositional instruction.
Create space for lament, doubt, and honest emotion
Psalmic spirituality — which constitutes over a third of the Psalter — is predominantly lament and complaint. A formation model that only presents the triumphant, joyful side of faith misrepresents the biblical tradition and implicitly communicates to children experiencing suffering, confusion, or doubt that their experience is outside the scope of faith. Children aged 5–10 can be taught that it is safe to tell God exactly how they feel, and that God can handle anger, sadness, and confusion. Adolescents especially need to encounter a tradition that takes their doubts seriously, that does not demand false certainty, and that holds honest intellectual struggle as a mark of mature faith rather than its absence.
Connect formation to the body and the senses
James K. A. Smith's emphasis on embodied formation is particularly important for children, whose entire developmental experience is mediated through the body. Practices that form the body form the person: kneeling in prayer, participating in the physicality of worship, serving others with their hands, experiencing fasting (appropriately adapted for age). For children with sensory sensitivities or neurodiverse profiles (see Neurodiversity and Sensory Processing), the sensory demands of some traditional worship environments can be barriers to formation rather than pathways, and thoughtful adaptation is an act of theological hospitality, not mere accommodation.
Involve children in the life and service of the community
Formation is not something done to children by adults. It happens through participation in the practices and life of a community. Children who serve alongside adults, who contribute to real community needs, who are treated as genuine members of the body of Christ rather than a separate holding programme, are formed more deeply than those who receive formation passively. This is true across the age range, but particularly important for adolescents whose developmental need for agency and contribution is strong.
A Faith-Informed Perspective
At its deepest level, Christian formation is not a human achievement but a divine activity. The New Testament's most direct statement on the subject comes in Philippians 2:13: "it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfil his good purpose." The Greek word here is energōn — God is the one who is energising, actively at work within the human person. Formation, in the fullest theological sense, is not the outcome of clever programming or careful pedagogy alone: it is the result of cooperation, synergeia, between divine initiative and human responsiveness.
This does not diminish the importance of the practical work described above. Paul, having stated that God is the one who works in us, immediately continues: "Therefore, my dear friends, continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling" (Philippians 2:12). The divine and human activity are not in competition — they are held in tension. God forms; we participate. We create conditions; God fills them. The role of the parent, teacher, or youth leader is not to manufacture spiritual transformation in a child, but to create the relational, environmental, and communal conditions in which God's forming work can take root.
The central image for this in Jesus' teaching is the parable of the sower (Matthew 13). The sower does not control the soil. The sower's work is faithful, generous, indiscriminate scattering — seed cast on hard ground and good soil alike. The formation of good soil — the removal of thorns, the breaking up of hardness, the deepening of receptivity — is the work of long, patient relationship, of co-regulation, of honest community, of lament held and hope sustained. And the seed, once planted in good soil, grows in ways that exceed the sower's understanding: "Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how" (Mark 4:27).
The Greek word for formation used most often in theological literature is paideia — a rich term that encompasses instruction, training, correction, and nurture within a relational context. In Ephesians 6:4, parents are instructed to bring children up "in the paideia and instruction of the Lord" — paideia kyriou. The phrase suggests not merely teaching children about the Lord, but shaping them within the relational apprenticeship the Lord himself models: patient, attentive, corrective, and ultimately loving formation of the whole person over a long span of time.
This is formation at its most beautiful and most demanding: it asks adults — who are themselves in process, themselves being formed — to offer their own imperfect but genuine faith as a living context for the formation of the young. It does not ask for perfection. Augustine's restless heart that finds rest in God is a description of an ongoing journey, not an achieved destination. What it asks for is honest, warm, persistent, whole-person presence, and the trust that the One who began a good work will carry it on to completion (Philippians 1:6).
Further threads worth exploring include the theology of baptism as the definitive formation event that names identity before it is earned; the pneumatology of formation (in what sense is the Holy Spirit the primary agent of formation?); and the eschatological horizon of formation, pointing to the vision in 1 John 3:2, "we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is," as the ultimate telos toward which all Christian formation reaches.
Key Takeaways
- Formation is more than instruction. Christian formation aims at the reordering of desires, habits, and imagination, not merely the transfer of knowledge. A child can pass a Sunday school exam without being formed, and can be profoundly formed without being able to articulate a creed.
- Parental faith is the strongest predictor of durable faith in children. Smith and Denton's National Study of Youth and Religion found that lived parental faith, warm, modelled, and practised at home, outweighs all other formational influences in determining whether faith persists into adulthood.
- Age shapes the form of formation profoundly. Children aged 5–10 are concrete, narrative, and body-embedded thinkers who form faith through story and ritual. Adolescents aged 11–18 require honest intellectual engagement, space to doubt, and participatory agency in community, not passive reception of received belief.
- Formation is relational before it is programmatic. No curriculum replaces a consistent, warm, faith-modelling adult relationship. The medium of Christian formation is fundamentally a person, one who embodies something of the character they are trying to pass on.
- God is the primary agent; adults are the soil-tenders. Formation theology holds that divine initiative and human participation operate together. The task of parents, teachers, and church leaders is not to produce spiritual transformation but to create the relational and communal conditions in which God's forming work can take root.
- Formation engages the whole child. Body, mind, emotion, and spirit are not separable formation targets. Practices that bypass the body, dismiss difficult emotions, or require intellectual shutdown produce partial, brittle faith. Whole-person formation requires whole-person engagement, which is the vision this platform is built around.