I. Formation Is Rejected in Name Only
There is no such thing as an unformed believer. The question is never whether a person is being shaped but by what, by whom, and toward what end. Every community that gathers around shared language, shared rhythms, and shared assumptions about God is forming its members, whether it acknowledges the process or not. The rejection of formation is itself a formation — one that teaches its adherents to distrust scrutiny, resist structure, and treat suspicion of institutions as a mark of spiritual maturity.
This distinction between invisible formation and accountable formation is the first thing obscured by anti-formation rhetoric. Accountable formation names its sources. It identifies the texts it draws from, the tradition it inhabits, the authorities it recognizes, and the ends toward which it is shaping people. It submits itself to evaluation. Invisible formation does none of these things — not because it lacks sources, authorities, or ends, but because it has learned to disguise them as natural, spontaneous, or Spirit-led. The congregation that rejects liturgy still has a liturgy; it simply cannot name it, defend it, or correct it. The church that refuses catechesis still teaches doctrine — through its songs, its silences, its leadership structures, and its implicit hierarchies of experience — but it does so without accountability to any standard outside the preferences of those presently in the room.
What results is not freedom from formation but formation without transparency. The believer who insists that he needs no shaping has not escaped the process; he has merely placed himself beyond the reach of anyone who might name what is shaping him. He is not unformed. He is unaccountably formed — and this is a far more dangerous condition than any he imagines himself to have escaped.
II. Common Rationales for Formation Hostility
The hostility to formation that characterizes significant portions of contemporary Christianity does not arise from nowhere. It draws on real theological commitments, real historical grievances, and real pastoral failures. What makes it a distortion rather than a correction is not that its concerns are fabricated but that its responses are disproportionate, totalizing, and finally incoherent. Four rationales recur with particular frequency.
The confusion of grace and works. The Pauline insistence that justification is not earned by human effort is among the most consequential doctrinal commitments in the history of the church. It is also among the most routinely misapplied. In its distorted form, the grace-works distinction becomes a blanket prohibition on any intentional practice, any disciplined habit, any structured expectation placed on the believer. Formation is recast as an attempt to earn what has already been given. Catechesis becomes legalism. Memorization becomes dead religion. Repeated practice becomes a failure to trust in the sufficiency of the finished work of Christ. What this reading cannot account for is the overwhelmingly formational character of the biblical text itself. The Psalms were not composed for spontaneous use; they were crafted, collected, edited, and transmitted precisely so that Israel would have authorized language for worship across generations. Moses commands Israel to teach the words of the covenant diligently to their children, to talk of them when sitting in the house and when walking by the way, to bind them as signs on their hands and fix them as frontlets between their eyes (Deuteronomy 6:6–9). This is not legalism. It is the divinely commanded formation of a people who would otherwise forget. The refusal to form is not fidelity to grace; it is disobedience to the plain command of Scripture dressed in Pauline vocabulary.
“Relationship, not religion” rhetoric. Few phrases have done more to erode ecclesial seriousness than the claim that Christianity is “a relationship, not a religion.” The appeal is obvious: it promises intimacy over institution, warmth over structure, the personal over the impersonal. What it delivers is something else. Relationships, in any meaningful sense, are themselves structured by disciplines — by faithfulness, by patterns of attention, by the willingness to show up when feeling is absent. A marriage sustained only by spontaneous affection is not a deep relationship but a shallow one. The same is true of the covenant relationship between God and his people. Israel’s worship was not the abandonment of structure in favor of feeling; it was the inhabiting of structures given by God precisely because they were adequate to the relationship he had initiated. The Levitical system, the festival calendar, the daily sacrifices, the appointed readings — these were not obstacles to knowing God but the means by which a forgetful people could remain in living contact with the God who had revealed himself. To dismiss such structures as “mere religion” is to misunderstand both relationship and religion simultaneously.
Anti-legalism as totalizing instinct. Closely related to the grace-works confusion but distinguishable from it is the phenomenon of anti-legalism that has ceased to function as a corrective and has become a totalizing instinct. In its original and legitimate form, the critique of legalism identifies the substitution of external conformity for internal transformation, the reduction of covenant faithfulness to rule-following, the elevation of human tradition to the status of divine command. These are real dangers, and Scripture addresses them directly. But when anti-legalism becomes a reflex rather than a discernment, it loses the capacity to distinguish between the misuse of structure and the structure itself. Every expectation becomes suspect. Every standard becomes a burden. Every call to discipline becomes an imposition. The result is a community that has immunized itself against correction — not because it has achieved the freedom Paul describes, but because it has redefined freedom as the absence of all demand. This is not Pauline liberty; it is antinomianism wearing Paul’s vocabulary.
Expressive authenticity as moral norm. Perhaps the most culturally powerful rationale for formation hostility is the conviction that the authentic self is the unexpressed self — that formation corrupts, that discipline distorts, and that the highest spiritual good is to come before God exactly as one is, without mediation, without preparation, without the shaping influence of inherited language or communal practice. This conviction has deep roots in Romantic expressivism and in the broader therapeutic turn of Western culture, but it has no roots in Scripture. The biblical picture is precisely the reverse: the worshiper is not validated in coming as she is but is given new language, new posture, new identity through the covenantal acts of God. The Psalter does not invite Israel to express whatever it naturally feels; it provides Israel with speech adequate to what God has done and what God requires. The distinction is enormous. Authentic worship, biblically understood, is not the expression of the unformed self but the formation of the self by the speech God has authorized. Sincerity without form is not biblical worship; it is the Romantic ideal in theological costume.
III. Authority Substitution Patterns
The rejection of formation does not create a vacuum. It creates a substitution. Where accountable structures of authority are dismantled, unaccountable structures invariably take their place. Three substitution patterns are particularly common in anti-formation Christianity.
Charisma replacing discipline. When institutional authority is weakened and doctrinal formation is abandoned, the authority that fills the gap is almost always personal charisma. The leader who can command a room, elicit emotional response, and project an aura of spiritual immediacy becomes the de facto authority in communities that have formally rejected all authority. This is not an accidental outcome; it is a structural inevitability. Communities that refuse to invest authority in offices, texts, and traditions must invest it somewhere, and the charismatic personality is the readiest alternative. The result is a form of authority that is simultaneously more absolute and less accountable than anything the anti-formation believer imagines himself to have escaped. An elder board can be questioned; a doctrinal standard can be examined; a liturgical tradition can be evaluated against Scripture. A charismatic leader who derives authority from the force of personality and the immediacy of claimed spiritual experience is answerable to none of these mechanisms. The irony is precise: the rejection of institutional authority in the name of freedom produces a form of authority that is more difficult to check, more resistant to correction, and more susceptible to abuse than the structures it replaced.
Experience replacing inheritance. In communities shaped by formation hostility, the primary currency of spiritual authority is experience — specifically, the individual’s claimed experience of God. This replaces what might be called inheritance: the received body of doctrine, practice, and language that a community transmits across generations as its shared deposit. The shift is not merely a change in emphasis; it is a change in the structure of authority itself. Inherited doctrine can be examined, debated, and corrected. It sits in texts that persist across time and can be evaluated by successive generations. Individual experience, by contrast, is epistemically closed. It cannot be questioned without appearing to question the person. It cannot be evaluated against an external standard without appearing to subordinate the Spirit to human judgment. It cannot be corrected without appearing to deny the reality of someone’s encounter with God. The result is a community in which the least verifiable, least transmissible, and least correctable form of authority becomes the most determinative. Scripture itself, in this framework, becomes less a norm that judges experience than a resource that validates it — mined for passages that confirm what the individual has already felt rather than consulted as the authoritative word that shapes what the community is to believe and practice.
Language fragments replacing doctrine. A subtle but consequential feature of anti-formation Christianity is the reduction of theological language to fragments — isolated phrases, decontextualized verses, and affective slogans that circulate without the doctrinal architecture that once gave them meaning. “God is love” is retained; the doctrine of divine holiness that gives the claim its weight is discarded. “Where two or three are gathered” is quoted; the ecclesiology that structures the gathered community is dismissed. “The Spirit leads” is affirmed; the canonical boundaries within which the Spirit’s leading is recognized are ignored. What results is not the absence of theological language but the presence of theological language that has been severed from its structural context. These fragments function less as doctrinal claims than as affective tokens — verbal gestures that signal belonging and emotional orientation without requiring the intellectual labor of understanding what they mean or the communal discipline of submitting to what they demand. The believer who speaks in these fragments is not doctrinally empty; she is doctrinally disordered, possessing the vocabulary of faith without the grammar that makes it intelligible.
IV. The Role of Anti-Institutional Identity
Formation hostility does not occur in an abstract theological space. It occurs within a broader cultural context in which institutional suspicion has become a default posture and institutional affiliation has become a liability to be explained rather than a commitment to be honored. Anti-formation Christianity draws deeply from this cultural moment, and it is impossible to understand its persistence without attending to the role that anti-institutional identity plays in sustaining it.
Institutions as scapegoats. The narrative is familiar: institutions corrupt, institutions control, institutions substitute human tradition for divine reality. In this account, the history of the church is primarily a history of institutional failure — of councils that suppressed, hierarchies that oppressed, traditions that calcified, and structures that quenched the Spirit. There is enough historical material to make this narrative plausible, which is precisely what makes it dangerous. The selective reading of institutional history as a story of failure obscures the equally undeniable fact that institutions are the means by which anything — doctrine, practice, text, memory — survives across time. The Psalter exists because institutions preserved it. The canon exists because communities with institutional structures recognized, transmitted, and guarded it. The doctrinal commitments that anti-formation believers affirm — that God is creator, that Christ is risen, that the Spirit is active — arrived in their hands through institutional processes they now despise. The scapegoating of institutions is thus a form of ingratitude that does not recognize itself as such. It receives the fruits of institutional labor while denouncing the labor itself.
Memory erasure and presentism. One of the most consequential effects of anti-institutional identity is the erosion of corporate memory. Institutions are, among other things, memory structures. They preserve what would otherwise be forgotten, transmit what would otherwise be lost, and connect the present community to the community that came before. When institutions are weakened or rejected, memory contracts. The community’s functional history shrinks to the span of living memory — to what the current leadership recalls, to what the present congregation has experienced, to what feels relevant now. This is presentism: the tacit conviction that the present moment is self-sufficient, that what the community needs can be generated from its own immediate resources, and that the past is at best a curiosity and at worst a burden. Presentism does not announce itself. It simply proceeds as if the community began with its current configuration and will persist through its current energy. What it cannot do is account for the patterns that repeat across generations, the errors that have already been identified and corrected, or the resources that previous communities developed for precisely the challenges the present community faces. The community without memory is not free; it is amnesiac — and amnesia is not a gift but a disability.
Formation reframed as oppression. In the most advanced stages of anti-institutional identity, formation itself is recast as a form of oppression. To shape someone is to impose upon them. To transmit doctrine is to constrain their freedom. To provide authorized language is to deny their voice. This reframing borrows heavily from liberationist rhetoric but applies it in a context where it does not fit. The biblical paradigm is not the liberation of the individual from communal formation but the formation of a people who are thereby liberated from the powers that would otherwise shape them. Israel is formed by Torah so that it will not be formed by Egypt. The church is formed by apostolic teaching so that it will not be formed by the surrounding culture. Formation is not the enemy of freedom; it is the condition of freedom rightly understood. To refuse formation is not to escape shaping; it is to be shaped by whatever forces happen to be most powerful in the absence of intentional, accountable, covenantal formation. The reframing of formation as oppression is thus not a liberation but a surrender — a handing over of the community’s members to the unexamined forces of the cultural moment.
V. Worship and Music as Flashpoints
It is not accidental that debates about worship music are among the earliest and most intense sites of conflict between formation-oriented and anti-formation approaches to Christianity. Music is not a peripheral concern that happens to generate disproportionate controversy; it is the point at which formation is most viscerally experienced, most immediately contested, and most consequentially decided.
Why formation debates surface here first. Worship music is the primary vehicle through which most believers encounter theology on a regular basis. It is repeated more frequently than sermons, absorbed more deeply than readings, and retained more durably than any other element of gathered worship. What a congregation sings, it believes — not because music is magic but because repetition is formational and musical repetition is among the most powerful forms of repetition available. This means that worship music is the front line of formation whether anyone intends it to be or not. The congregation that sings “In Christ alone” every month for a decade is being formed by the theological content of that hymn in ways that far exceed the influence of any individual sermon on the same themes. The congregation that sings emotionally evocative but doctrinally thin choruses for the same period is being formed by their content with equal power and less substance. The question is never whether worship music forms but what it forms and toward what end. This is why formation debates surface first in worship: because worship music is where formation is most active, most persistent, and most difficult to ignore.
Emotion, repetition, and resistance. Anti-formation hostility in worship typically manifests as resistance to two features that are, in fact, central to biblical worship: emotional depth and intentional repetition. The resistance takes a paradoxical form. Emotion is championed as the primary criterion of authentic worship — “I didn’t feel anything” is treated as a legitimate critique of a worship service — while the kind of emotional formation that produces durable affective habits is resisted as manipulation. Repetition is simultaneously practiced (most contemporary worship sets repeat choruses and bridges extensively) and denied as a formational strategy. The congregation that repeats a bridge twelve times in a single service will resist the suggestion that this repetition is forming them, because formation implies intentionality, accountability, and evaluation — precisely the categories that anti-formation Christianity has learned to reject. What replaces them is a theory of worship as spontaneous encounter in which the right song, performed with sufficient energy and sincerity, creates a moment of unmediated contact with God. This theory has no biblical warrant. Biblical worship is mediated worship — mediated by priest, by text, by institution, by appointed time and place. The Psalms are not spontaneous eruptions of feeling; they are crafted texts, shaped by editorial hands, organized by theological purpose, and transmitted through institutional structures for the express purpose of forming the worshiper over time.
The refusal to ask “what this does over time.” Perhaps the most diagnostic feature of anti-formation worship culture is the refusal to ask the longitudinal question: what does this practice produce in a community over ten, twenty, or fifty years? The question is avoided not because it is unanswerable but because answering it requires categories — formation, transmission, institutional stewardship, generational accountability — that anti-formation Christianity has already rejected. If the only valid criterion for evaluating worship is the immediate experience of the participant, then the longitudinal question is not merely unanswerable; it is illegitimate. It introduces a standard external to the moment, and anti-formation Christianity has committed itself to the sufficiency of the moment. The cost of this refusal is visible in any community old enough to display it. Congregations that evaluate worship exclusively by immediate impact produce members who are affectively dependent on the worship experience but theologically incapable of articulating what they believe or why. They produce leaders who can generate emotional response but cannot transmit a coherent body of doctrine to the next generation. They produce communities that are vibrant in the short term and fragile in the long term — full of energy and empty of resilience.
VI. Predictable Outcomes
The outcomes of anti-formation Christianity are not random. They are structurally predictable, and they recur with sufficient regularity across diverse contexts to warrant description as outcomes rather than coincidences.
Shallow theological resilience. The first and most widely observed outcome is a community whose members lack the theological resources to withstand pressure — whether the pressure of suffering, of cultural hostility, of intellectual challenge, or of internal conflict. Resilience is a product of formation. The believer who has been formed by deep engagement with Scripture, by sustained catechesis, by the practice of lament and praise in community over time, possesses internal resources that the unformed believer does not. This is not a comment on sincerity or devotion; it is a comment on structure. A believer who has memorized the Psalms of lament has language for suffering that the believer without such formation must improvise in the moment of crisis. A believer who has been catechized in the doctrine of God’s sovereignty has a framework for interpreting loss that the uncatechized believer must construct from scratch. The difference is not that one believes more sincerely than the other but that one has been equipped with resources the other has been denied — denied, in many cases, by communities that believed they were doing her a kindness by sparing her the labor of formation.
Fragmentation and burnout. The second predictable outcome is the fragmentation of community and the burnout of leaders. Communities that reject formation must generate their communal life from scratch in each gathering. There is no inherited structure to fall back on, no liturgical rhythm to carry the community through seasons of low energy or internal disagreement, no shared language that persists when the leader who introduced it moves on. Everything depends on the vitality of the present moment and the energy of the present leadership. This is unsustainable. Leaders in anti-formation communities burn out at high rates not because they are less gifted or less devoted than their counterparts in formation-oriented communities but because they bear a structural burden that no individual can sustain indefinitely. They must be, in every gathering, the source of energy, the generator of content, the creator of atmosphere, and the mediator of experience — roles that in formation-oriented communities are distributed across inherited structures, shared texts, and institutional processes that do not depend on any single person’s capacity. When the leader’s energy flags, the community flags with it. When the leader departs, the community fractures — not because its members lack commitment but because the community’s coherence was located in the leader rather than in the structures, texts, and practices that outlast any individual.
Drift toward authoritarian informality. The third outcome is the most counterintuitive and therefore the most important to name. Communities that reject formal authority structures do not become egalitarian; they become informally authoritarian. The mechanism is straightforward. In the absence of defined roles, transparent processes, and accountable structures, power flows to whoever can claim it — typically the most charismatic, the most confident, or the most emotionally compelling figure in the room. Because this authority is informal, it is also uncheckable. There is no constitution to appeal to, no doctrinal standard to invoke, no institutional process to activate. The leader who holds informal authority can exercise it without the constraints that formal authority entails, and the community that has rejected formal authority has no vocabulary for identifying what is happening, let alone for correcting it. The result is a community that is, in practice, more authoritarian than the institution it fled — not because its leaders are necessarily more authoritarian by temperament but because the structures that constrain authority have been removed while the human realities that produce it have not. Informal authority is not the absence of authority; it is authority without accountability, and it is among the most dangerous forms of authority a community can possess.
Conclusion: The Cost of Refusing to Be Shaped
The diagnosis offered here is not a call to any particular tradition, liturgical form, or institutional structure. It is a description of what happens when formation itself is rejected — when the shaping of believers by inherited, accountable, communal practices is treated as a threat rather than a gift, a burden rather than a mercy, an imposition rather than a provision.
The cost is not borne primarily by those who make the decision to reject formation. It is borne by those who come after — by the next generation, which inherits a community without memory; by the new believer, who enters a community without language; by the suffering saint, who reaches for resources that were never provided. The cruelest irony of anti-formation Christianity is that its consequences fall most heavily on those least equipped to diagnose them. The believer who has never been formed does not know what she is missing. She has no frame of reference for the resilience she lacks, no vocabulary for the theological depth she has not been given, no awareness that the community she inhabits is running on the fumes of a formation it has officially repudiated.
Scripture does not present formation as optional. Moses commands it. The Psalter embodies it. The wisdom tradition assumes it. The prophets lament its absence. The apostolic letters insist upon it. The community that refuses to be shaped is not obeying a biblical mandate; it is defying one — and the defiance is no less real for being sincere, no less costly for being well-intentioned, and no less consequential for being invisible to those who practice it.
To be formed is not to be diminished. It is to be entrusted with the speech, the memory, and the posture of a people who belong to a story larger than any individual experience or any present moment. The refusal of that trust is not freedom. It is the most profound impoverishment a community can choose — and it is chosen, in nearly every case, by people who believe they are choosing life.
