How do you transform European hearts?
It’s one thing to tell people about Jesus. It’s another to get them to change the way they live and help them develop the kind of daily practices that, as the late American philosopher Dallas Willard once wrote, “actually lead to the transformation of life.”
That thought drove Michael Stewart Robb, a Munich-based American theologian who wrote a book on Willard, to found the Sanctus Institute in 2017. He wanted something—an infrastructure, an organization—to teach Christians to foster the day-to-day disciplines and practices that shape people spiritually. Today the institute brings together ministers and ministries with an interest in spiritual formation from across the continent.
Evangelicals in other parts of Europe have started exploring and rediscovering ways of connecting with God too. From Methodist band meetings in Bulgaria to urban monks in Paris and Berlin and spiritual retreats in Portugal, missionaries, pastors, and everyday Christians are looking for ways to not only pursue converts but also help people conform to the image of Christ.
According to Willard, who died in 2013, American evangelicals started feeling a pressing need to emphasize discipleship after World War II. Many ministers and Christian leaders felt the Sunday sermon alone, or even the Sunday sermon plus a midweek Bible study, didn’t provide people enough sustenance to really live like Christians. Churches had put too much emphasis on head knowledge and belief, not enough on formation.
Today, ideas about the importance of discipleship are widespread in the United States, Robb said. Americans can easily find books—including titles by Willard and a range of writers including Richard Foster, Henri Nouwen, Richard Rohr, Elizabeth Oldfield, Ruth Haley Barton, Barbara Peacock, Diane Leclerc, James Wilhoit, John Mark Comer, and many others—as well as retreats and seminars on the topic. Many seminaries teach spiritual direction and offer specialization in spiritual formation.
“You can’t run a seminary in North America unless you say you do spiritual formation. It’s part of the package,” Robb said. “In Europe, you don’t really see that.”
Robb said Protestant seminaries in Europe still offer theological education as it was conceived by Friedrich Schleiermacher, known as the “father of liberal theology.” You study biblical theology, systematic theology, and practical theology. Spiritual life and individual piety never really come up. If class discussion does turn to the idea of application, professors will most likely cover issues of social or political action.
So church leaders, including those in evangelical or Pietist traditions, often have no training in spiritual formation. But that has started to change. A growing number of educational programs in Europe help Christians—both leadership and laity—go deeper in their spiritual lives.
The European Nazarene College in the central German town of Gelnhausen, for example, offers a certificate in spiritual formation. Several organizations in the UK provide formation retreats and training in spiritual direction as well.
The growth of interest in spiritual disciplines, practices, and habits among Christians, Robb said, results from a new openness to ideas about personal transformation.
“People are curious and searching, sometimes quite radically, for something that helps them deal with life,” he said.
Younger generations seem both dissatisfied with the lack of spiritual formation in the churches they were raised in, Robb said, and attracted to historic Christian practices that could help them find meaning and peace amid the strain of daily life.
In Bulgaria, Global Methodist Church pastor Daniel Topalski has resurrected an old Wesleyan discipleship practice called “band meetings” or classes. These are similar to small groups but place emphasis on confessing failures, monitoring spiritual progress, and supporting each other in the effort to live a holy life.
“These classes provide meaningful forms and structures to develop a mature Christian personality,” Topalski said. “They are about making sanctification a daily business.”
Topalski was inspired by Methodist history. As the pastor of a 100-person congregation in Varna, a city on the country’s Black Sea coast, and presiding elder for the Bulgaria Annual Conference, he’s been thinking since 2011 about the best way to cultivate what he calls “Methodist DNA.” Topalski latched on to the 18th-century practice of having band meetings, which were made up of small groups of about five people who would confess their sins to each other and talk about where they saw the Holy Spirit working in their lives.
Reintroducing the concept to his congregation, Topalski emphasized that the meetings weren’t about information but transformation.
“Christianity isn’t just theory,” he said. “It’s about the state of our souls.”
Slowly but surely, people signed up. He organized four bands, each with fewer than a dozen people, and trained four leaders to lead them. They meet after worship on Sundays and help each other “go further,” Topalski said.
In Paris, Americans Paul and Jordan Prins are looking back to a different period of Christian history to recover practices of spiritual formation. They’ve adapted the Rule of Saint Benedict, established for a monastery in Italy in the 6th century, to help them live more like monks in a modern European metropolis.
When the Prins landed in Paris in 2016, they went through a difficult period trying to plant a church in one of Europe’s densest urban environments, the third arrondissement, where more than 32,000 people live in less than half a square mile on the right bank of the river Seine. As they struggled, they wondered what it meant to live as Christians in this context. They talked about being more intentional about spiritual practices and started experimenting with fasting and contemplative prayer.
Now the couple is part of a network of Christians exploring similar spiritual formation efforts in urban environments in Germany as well as in the UK, Ireland, Sweden, and Italy. The Urban Monastics, as they call themselves, try to combine ancient spiritual practices with everyday, mundane acts of grace and goodness, including basic hospitality.
“Our motto is to be present with God and present with others,” said Paul, who has a degree from Bethel Seminary near Minneapolis. “It’s a way of life that says Christianity is about more than salvation, but experiencing that God is present in the city.”
The Prins lean on traditionally Catholic forms of spiritual practice more than other evangelicals do, but they’re not the only Americans in Europe who have felt the need to emphasize formation.
Benjamin Seidl, the European regional director of the Florida-based mission-sending agency New International, said life in a cross-cultural context raised critical questions about the spiritual formation of missionaries.
“We spent years assessing the overall spiritual health of our organization,” Seidl said, “and we realized we needed more to help our missionaries rediscover what it means to be formed in light of the gospel in a cross-cultural context.”
The leaders of New International, though, didn’t have immediate clarity on which practices would help with formation. Should they require missionaries in eight European countries to practice morning devotions? Small groups? Contemplative prayer? Fasting?
“We asked ourselves, Do we even know what spiritual formation is?” Seidl said. “It’s such a diverse and diffuse thing. There’s no clear direction for how it should be done for people who live this weird, mysterious, beautiful, and sometimes chaotic European life.”
New International is still in the process of answering that question, but the organization has started doing regular retreats, setting apart dedicated time for missionaries to focus on their own spiritual lives. When Seidl spoke with CT, his wife, Jasmin Seidl, was attending a “soul-care retreat” in Portugal with New International missionaries.
Jasmin said the retreat incorporated spiritual formation by way of guided reconnection to God, self, and others. “This was done by quiet times of rest and self-reflection, guided prayer, lectio divina, meditation, and the exchange of personal insights in a group setting,” she said.
The retreat also included an entire day of silence and solitude. Other initiatives New International is exploring include mental health support and counseling.
Not everyone fully agrees with the new emphasis on spiritual formation, however. In the Czech Republic, confessional Lutheran pastor Ondřej Stroka and his wife, Kimberly, expressed some skepticism.
For years, they said, their church in the northeastern part of the country had all kinds of programs, such as Bible studies and prayer groups, to help people grow deeper in their faith.
“People were just used to doing these things and not giving any thought to the reason why,” Kimberly said.
While the Strokas welcome rediscovering ancient liturgy or biblical habits, they’re not sure these efforts brought the benefit they were supposed to. Spiritual practices became social obligations. Many gatherings became formulaic and rigid. Sometimes they seemed burdensome—introducing a kind of legalism into the community that contradicted the things the Strokas said they believed.
“We preach the gospel, Christ crucified,” Ondřej said. “We don’t want people to get the impression that if you don’t go to events that God will punish you.”
Back in Munich at the Sanctus Institute, Robb has been thinking about the meaning of gospel too. For him, the big concern is not that people add too many requirements but that the idea can get a bit thin.
“The orthodox evangelical understanding,” he said, “is something more than mere conversion. It’s about moral formation and dying to self.”
Intellectual assent to the message of Christ can’t be the end of things, in Robb’s view. It should catalyze discipleship and formation. Christians and congregations can develop practices that bring powerful change.
“The work of the Spirit will be working through what the individual is doing and what the congregation is going to be doing,” Robb said. “Obviously that has an effect on the kinds of churches that you can have on the continent and the kinds of transformation you will or won’t see.”
Spiritual formation can change European hearts, he believes. And that could change Europe.
