How to Think about Spiritual Formation and Online Education

What is the nature of spiritual formation?¹ Is it possible to work toward formation in online education? And if so, how?

In recent years, questions like these have often been discussed. Institutions have grappled with market forces and wrestled with an increasing role online education.

These discussions have sometimes raised serious concerns. If students aren’t physically present at institutions, does their absence negatively affect their formation?

Moving toward an Answer

The answer I’d like to give is, in short: “No.” Online education isn’t necessarily any more problematic than physically face-to-face education. Both can foster students’ spiritual formation.

Each mode—whether online or face-to-face—includes challenges. Some challenges are common to both sides. Some are unique to one or the other. But none of these challenges necessarily make either mode inappropriate for institutions concerned with students’ spiritual formation.

It doesn’t seem like that long ago, but for more than a decade now, I’ve worked in online education in one way or another. I started doing so from force of necessity. It was where there was work to be had in the wake of the Great Recession. And employment is a very good thing, especially when you have a family in the mix.

During this time, I’ve worked both as an online administrator and as an online professor. I’ve seen spiritual formation both happen and fail to happen. And for all intents and purposes, it’s looked to me a lot like what we experience also if we’re working at formation physically face-to-face.

But why and how does this happen? And how can Christian educators improve online efforts toward spiritual formation?

To these questions, answers emerge along two lines. One is the different ways in which one person can “be with” another. The second is when that “being with” takes the shape of “play.”

Thinking Differently about Presence

Online and face-to-face education obviously differ. But their differences aren’t the absolute binaries of presence or absence.

Instead, each has at play a different kind of presence. And recognizing this fact paves the way for fostering rich community—even when that community gathers online.

Insights from Aquinas

In his Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas observes that “a thing is wherever it operates.”² So, “incorporeal things are in place not by contact of dimensive quantity, as bodies are, but by contact of power.”³

That is, we say physical bodies are in a particular place because they occupy that place’s space. But we say incorporeal entities (e.g., God, the soul) are in a particular place not because they “take up space” but because they exert power within that space.⁴

As it happens, cognitive, emotional, and social presence are incorporeal realities as well. That fact means they can be genuinely present through “contact of power.” That is, they can be genuinely present through using one’s ability to act. And that ability may play out physically or non-physically.

Insights from the Pandemic

For a concrete example, imagine calling a loved one in an isolation ward in the heaviest days of the COVID pandemic. You might reassure your loved one with words like “I’m here for you” or “I’m with you.”

The whole point of the isolation ward is that you’re not physically present with your loved one. But such statements wouldn’t be meaningless. They wouldn’t be falsehoods. Instead, they would express presence.

They’d do so by “contact of power,” in Aquinas’s language. Or less vividly and more psychologically, such statements express presence by drawing your loved one’s attention to how your attention is drawn toward him or her.

Being Present Online

In the same way, formative community needn’t be limited to face-to-face interaction. You can also foster and find it when you engage others online in certain ways.

How communities interact online obviously differs from how they interact if everyone sat around a table together. There are various practical ways to foster genuinely formative community online. But all of these boil down to “play.”

Spiritual Formation as Play

Play sometimes gets a bad rap.⁵ Thinking about it might raise notions of frivolousness, un-seriousness, even irreverence. So, it could seem an odd framework for thinking about spiritual formation. But none of those associations are necessary.⁶

Instead, play is about to-and-fro movement.⁷ That play might be between oneself, a deck of cards, and a set of rules for the game of solitaire. It might be at a joint between two pieces of wood that aren’t fully fastened together. It might be between two or more people in the “game” of communication.

Seen in this light, spiritual formation is about faculty, staff, and administrators being present, bringing themselves fully into play toward students’ formation. That being present in play can’t ever control or determine what students’ responses will be. But it can “stack the deck” toward better, more formative outcomes.

That said, play is about to-and-fro movement—not just movement in one direction. So, a key part of being fully in play is for faculty, staff, and administrators to receive from students (implicitly or explicitly) feedback on what moves have or haven’t proven successful. Subsequent moves then take account of this feedback and respond accordingly. They try again to “stack the deck” in fresh ways toward still better, more formative outcomes.

Conclusion

In the end, if “online” is a means of “moving away,” then it clearly supports checking out and a lack of connection. But where it means “moving toward,” it can be a powerful way of being present with and for others. And it can be a site of meaningful communities of learning and spiritual formation.

If you’d like to look at these dynamics more deeply, drop your name and email in the form below. I’ll then send you two articles that extend this discussion specifically of spiritual formation in online education.⁸ And I’ll include a third that considers Christian education a bit more broadly in terms of Jesus’s two-fold love command.⁹

1. Header image provided by Ben White. ↩︎
2. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 22 vols. (London: Burns, Oates, and Washbourne, 1913), I.8.1. ↩︎
3. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I.8.2; see also Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I.8.3. ↩︎
4. Cf. Thomas Aquinas, A Summa of the Summa, ed. Peter Kreeft, trans. The Fathers of the English Dominican Province (affiliate disclosure; San Francisco: Ignatius, 1990), 103n62. ↩︎
5. For discussion, see Greg McKeown, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less (affiliate disclosure; New York: Crown Business, 2014). Image provided by the National Cancer Institute. ↩︎
6. Cf. G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (New York: Lane, 1909), 298–99. ↩︎
7. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, ed. and trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, 2nd ed., Bloomsbury Revelations (affiliate disclosure; London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 108–12. ↩︎
8. J. David Stark, “Being Present at a Distance,” Didaktikos 1.2 (2018): 12–13; J. David Stark, “Gaming the System: Online Spiritual Formation in Christian Higher Education,” TEd 52.2 (2019): 43–53. ↩︎
9. J. David Stark, “Why the Christian University? Reflections on the Comprehensiveness of Jesus’s Two-Fold Love Command,” Journal of Faith and the Academy 11.1 (2018): 58–66. ↩︎