Formation is slower than content

A believer in 1970 with an unusual appetite for teaching might have heard forty sermons a year, read perhaps six Christian books, and had access to one or two teachers outside their own church. A believer today can listen to forty sermons in a fortnight, from anywhere, at any hour, for nothing.

If access to teaching were the bottleneck in Christian formation, we would expect the second believer to be dramatically more formed than the first. It is not obvious that they are.

The category mistake

The mistake is treating formation as an information problem. If it were, more information would solve it, and the last thirty years would have been an unambiguous triumph.

Formation is not primarily about what a person knows. It is about what a person has become, which is a slower and more stubborn thing. Becoming happens through repetition, relationship, correction and time under load — none of which scale, and none of which can be delivered by a file.

Content can inform a decision. It cannot notice that you have made the same decision badly four times.

What content genuinely does

This is not an argument against publishing. It is an argument for being precise about what publishing achieves.

Good teaching does at least four things well. It gives language to something a person already senses but cannot articulate. It corrects a specific error. It exposes someone to a question they would not have thought to ask. And it reaches people no relationship currently reaches — which, for anyone outside church, is often the only route in.

Those are real and worth doing well. What content cannot do is the part where somebody who knows you says the sentence you have been avoiding.

Where the bottleneck actually is

The scarce resource in formation is not teaching. It is people willing to be known, and people willing to do the knowing.

Being known is expensive. It means someone has enough access to your life to notice the gap between what you say and what you do, and enough standing to mention it. Most adults, including most Christian adults in leadership, have carefully arranged their lives so that no one is in that position. Not deliberately. It is simply what happens when you get busy and senior.

Doing the knowing is expensive too. It requires sustained attention to a small number of people over years, with no visible output. It is the least scalable activity in Christian ministry and the one most consistently under-resourced, because it produces nothing to report.

The implication for a digital-first organisation

We describe ourselves as digital-first, and it would be easy to hear that as a claim that technology does the work. It does not, and building as if it did would be the fastest route to producing well-informed people who have not changed.

What technology is genuinely good at is coordination. Finding the person in your city who works in your industry and has walked the road you are on. Keeping a cohort connected between meetings. Making a guide available at two in the morning to someone who cannot ask anyone. Getting a request to a trained human being within a day. Removing the friction from everything around the relationship, so that more of the scarce resource goes into the relationship itself.

That is a supporting role, and it is a valuable one. It is not the same as being the formation.

Three things this changes in practice

Cohorts are small. A programme that can take five hundred people is a broadcast with a login. If mentoring is real, the numbers stay uncomfortable.

The local church is not optional. Weekly, embodied, accountable community is where formation is actually sustained. Any programme that quietly competes for that time is undermining its own outcome, however good its content is.

The standard has to be failable. If everyone who completes a programme is commissioned, completion is measuring attendance. Formation that cannot be assessed as incomplete is not being assessed.

The uncomfortable version

The honest summary is that the part of this work that matters most is the part that photographs worst, reports worst, and scales worst. It is slow, it is expensive per person, and it produces very little that can be put on a website.

Which is presumably why so many organisations, including sincere ones, drift towards the part that scales. The drift is never announced. You simply notice, some years in, that the mentoring has thinned and the content has grown, and that the metrics all still look fine.

Naming that in advance is not a guarantee against it. But it is harder to drift somewhere you have already described.