Missional Spiritual Formation
The Active Contemplative Life
Introduction
As I begin writing this article, I do so in the shadow of the recent passing of Dr. John Perkins. His life and work have shaped me in ways I am still discovering.
Years ago, while serving on staff at a large, primarily white congregation just across the river from downtown Pittsburgh in an impoverished neighborhood, I found myself living outside the area, south of the city. It did not take long for me to realize that my location was isolating me from the very community I was pastoring. Something in me knew this disconnect mattered, and I felt the tension deeply.
Dr. Perkins gave language to what was stirring in me. His three Rs of Christian Community Development, relocation, reconciliation, and redistribution, became a mirror. They exposed both my longing for a deeper life with God and my desire to participate in God’s healing of the world. That recognition began a journey that has led me into what I now call Missional Spiritual Formation.
What follows in this article and the ones to come is an attempt to name what has been taking shape through personal experience, conversation, study, and the slow work of grace.
The Tension Many of Us Feel
Many of us know this tension.
We feel the quiet pull toward deeper intimacy with God, while also sensing the urgent call to join God’s mission of justice, mercy, and reconciliation. Too often, these longings are treated as if they belong to two different paths. On one side is contemplation. On the other is action. One is about prayer, silence, and union with God. The other is about justice, healing, advocacy, and community renewal.
But Jesus never separated them.
The Great Commandment holds them together. We are called to love God and love our neighbor. This is the heart of missional spiritual formation. It is the integrated life of abiding in God’s love, aligning with the values of the Kingdom, and actualizing that love in the world.
Richard Rohr calls this the active contemplative life. The early church simply called it following Jesus.
Jesus Never Split the Life of Faith
Recently, I listened to a podcast from the Center for Action and Contemplation in which Rohr reflected on the early days of the center. He wondered whether, over time, the emphasis had shifted too heavily toward contemplation at the expense of action. That question stayed with me.
How easily even communities founded on integration can drift toward imbalance.
Some Christians naturally lean contemplative. They are drawn to silence, prayer, and deep communion with God. Others lean toward action, toward justice, advocacy, reconciliation, and community engagement. But Jesus does not offer us two separate lives to choose from. He offers one life, a life rooted in union with God and expressed through participation in the mission of God.
When Jesus is asked about the greatest commandment, he does not divide the spiritual life into categories. He names one command with two inseparable expressions: love God and love your neighbor.
John says it even more directly: “Those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen cannot love God whom they have not seen” (1 John 4:20).
Contemplation without active love becomes an illusion.
The Cross Reveals the Shape of This Life
At the cross, that illusion is shattered.
In Jesus, the second Adam, we see the full expression of love for God and love for neighbor. The cross is not only the place of divine self-giving. It is also the place where God’s holy No is spoken against everything that destroys love.
As Baxter Krueger writes, God’s wrath is God’s unyielding No to injustice, oppression, exclusion, violence, broken relationships, and self-centeredness.
At the cross, Jesus embodies the active contemplative life. He is totally surrendered to the Father and fully in solidarity with humanity.
Then, at the resurrection, God’s great Yes breaks into the world. It is God’s Yes to new creation, restored humanity, and the possibility of living the Kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven.
The Spirit Turns Devotion Into Mission
But the disciples could not live this resurrection life in their own strength.
They waited in the upper room for the empowering presence of the Spirit. And when the Spirit came, contemplation became courage and devotion became mission. The Spirit sent them into community, forming faith-filled communities marked by prayer, teaching, fellowship, generosity, and justice, just as we see in Acts 2:42 to 45.
This is the life we are invited into.
This is the life missional spiritual formation seeks to cultivate.
A Simple Framework for an Integrated Life
Missional spiritual formation is the integrated life of abiding in God’s love, aligning with the values and ways of the Kingdom, and actualizing that love in the world through both compassionate presence and courageous resistance.
It is the active contemplative life Jesus modeled, and the Spirit empowers.
To help us live this integrated life, I use a simple but deeply formative framework:
Abide → Align → Actualize
These three movements describe the natural flow of spiritual formation in the way of Jesus.
Abide is about union with God. It is learning to remain in God’s love, to become rooted in presence, prayer, and intimacy.
Align is about the reordering of our inner life. It is allowing our desires, values, habits, and imagination to be shaped by the Kingdom of God.
Actualize is about embodied love. It is what happens when the life of God in us begins to take visible form in how we live, how we serve, how we resist evil, and how we participate in God’s healing of the world.
This movement is not mechanical. It is relational. It is organic. It is the Spirit forming in us the kind of life we see in Jesus.
Where This Series Is Going
This article is only an introduction, but it names the heartbeat of the series.
Missional Spiritual Formation: The Active Contemplative Life is an invitation to recover a life that has too often been split apart. It is a call to resist the false choice between deep spirituality and meaningful action. It is a reminder that intimacy with God and participation in God’s mission belong together.
We are called to abide in God, align with God’s Kingdom, and actualize God’s love in the world.
That is the life Jesus lived.
That is the life the Spirit empowers.
And that is the life this series will continue to explore.
