Formed Before They Arrived

What the early church knew about resilience that we keep forgetting

Photo by Karim MANJRA on Unsplash

There’s a temptation in American church culture that we rarely name out loud, but most of us know it well.

We work incredibly hard to attract people. We refine our worship, our branding, our guest experience. We lower the barrier to entry, smooth out the rough edges, and make the message as accessible as possible. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with any of that.

But underneath a lot of it is an unspoken assumption:

Get them in the door first. Form them once they’re here.

We’ve wagered the resilience of our people on a sequence — attraction, then formation. And I’m not sure the early church would recognize that bet.

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Two Temptations, One Problem

I recently came across a lecture by Gerald Sittser — church historian, author of Resilient Faith, and professor emeritus at Whitworth University — delivered at the Practicing the Way Pastors Conference in 2023. As a good historian, he was using church history to ask uncomfortable questions about the present. And one framework he laid out has stayed with me.

Sittser describes a tension baked into the DNA of Christianity from the very beginning — all the way back to a decision made around 50 AD, at what he calls “the most important meeting in human history”: the Jerusalem Council.

The decision was stunning in its simplicity. The early church decided, in Sittser’s words, “not to require of converts a double conversion to a culture before Jesus Christ.” You don’t have to become a Jew first. You don’t have to become white, American, educated, or middle class. One conversion is enough — to the person of Christ. This is why Christianity exists in every nation on earth today, spoken in over 3,000 languages across every culture and class.

But it also created a permanent and uncomfortable question: if Christians aren’t defined by cultural distinctives — the food, the dress, the language, the boundary markers — then what makes them different?

Sittser argues this question pulls the church toward one of two dangerous extremes.

The first temptation is isolation. As he describes it, “we draw clear boundaries to protect ourselves and maintain our integrity. But it’s always at the expense of the mission of the church. We isolate. We protect ourselves. But we’re not relevant and we’re not effective.”

The second temptation is accommodation — what Sittser calls “the way of accommodation. We blend in at the expense of message.”

Most of us instinctively recognize both traps. And most of us, if we’re honest, know which one the American church has been leaning into for the last few decades. Not out of malice — out of a genuine desire to reach people.

The problem is that accommodation and attraction are not the same as formation.

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What the Early Church Did Instead

Here’s what blows my mind about those first Christians. They were a minority movement inside a hostile empire. Sittser points out that Rome had 50 to 60 million people and a remarkable capacity to absorb and neutralize new religious movements — “they would simply recruit a new God to join the Pantheon,” he says, and “basically defang it. Erase it of its distinctiveness.” The only religion that had survived Rome’s domesticating power was Judaism, with its sharp cultural boundary markers and rigorous practices.

So how did the early church stay distinct without isolating? How did they remain in the culture without capitulating to it?

Sittser’s answer: they figured out how “to produce a creative church by the help of the Holy Spirit that didn’t accommodate Roman culture, not isolate from Roman culture, but immerse themselves in Roman culture without drowning. Adaptive, but never captive.”

And to do that, they developed a process.

The early church created what became known as the Catechumenate — a two to three year formation journey that seekers underwent before baptism. Baptism wasn’t the entry point. It was the culmination. The graduation. The public declaration of an already-formed life.

There were three key parts to this process:

Instruction — and not, he’s careful to note, “like in a classroom.” It was formation in the Christian story, an early version of what became the Apostles’ Creed, and — crucially — instruction in a Christian way of life. Sittser describes how at baptism, candidates weren’t only asked doctrinal questions. They were asked behavioral ones: “Do you visit widows and orphans? Do you care for the poor? Do you visit prisoners?” As he puts it: “At their baptism, it wasn’t just belief, it was behavior.”

A mentor — every person going through the process was assigned a sponsor. The sponsor was assigned to them and stayed with them for the entire journey, including time of instruction but more importantly modeling the Christian faith with them.

Life together — Formation happened through participation, not program. There was no building to point to. There was only life lived alongside someone who already knew the way. Candidates for baptism lived with people of the church learning to visit the widow, orphan, sick, and prisoners.

Sittser’s conclusion about what this produced is worth quoting directly: it “created a formidable movement over a long period of time that learned how to survive in an empire that did not welcome it.”

That’s not the language of a growth strategy. That’s the language of a people who had been genuinely formed.

The Sequence We’ve Reversed

Compare that to the dominant model of disciple-making in American church culture today.

We attract first. We welcome people into our communities — into our worship gatherings, our programs, our events — and we hope that exposure to good preaching, good community, and good experiences will gradually form them over time. We trust that identity will be built on the back end.

And sometimes it works. I’ve seen it. But I’ve also seen what happens when it doesn’t.

People come. They enjoy the community. They appreciate the messages. And when the culture outside starts pushing hard — when life gets difficult, when the cost of following Jesus becomes real, when the church asks something of them that conflicts with comfort or convenience — they don’t have the roots to hold.

They were attracted before they were formed.

We’ve essentially inverted the Catechumenate. We’ve taken the baptism — the moment of welcome, the entry point — and moved it to the front of the journey. We lowered the barrier so far that we accidentally removed the formation process along with it.

And then we wonder why our people look so much like the surrounding culture. Why the resilience isn’t there. Why retention is a constant challenge. Why the faith so often doesn’t seem to reach past Sunday morning.

Formation Is Not Optional

I want to be careful here. I’m not arguing for a return to gatekeeping — making people earn their way in before they’re allowed to belong. The Jerusalem Council settled that question, and thank God it did. Belonging before believing has real pastoral wisdom in it.

What I am arguing is that welcome and formation are not the same thing, and we’ve been treating them as if they are.

Sittser frames the early church’s goal in terms that feel almost impossible by today’s standards: they created “a critical mass of what I’d call functional Christians — not perfect, but functional like a functional athlete is. Put them on a court and they know what to do.” That kind of resilience, he argues, “allowed them not only to survive in a suspicious and hostile culture, but over ten generations of Christians to thrive.”

Ten generations.

The early church formed people relationally, slowly, and with skin in the game. Not through a six-week membership class. Not through a sermon series, however good. Not through a small group that meets for an hour and discusses last Sunday’s message. Those things have value. But they aren’t the Catechumenate.

What the Catechumenate built was one person walking with another person through the actual texture of a lived Christian life. Doing the things together. Visiting the poor together. Praying together, not just talking about prayer. Following Jesus together, not just talking about following Jesus.

That’s the model that produced the resilience.

A Question Worth Sitting With

The challenge for us isn’t to copy the early church’s methods wholesale. We’re not in the second century. Our cultural moment is different, and the creative work of figuring out what faithful formation looks like in this time and this place belongs to us.

But the question is: Are we forming people, or are we attracting them and hoping formation follows?

Because the two temptations, isolation and accommodation, are still very much alive. And the only antidote the early church found wasn’t a better program or a more compelling worship experience.

It was a person, walking with another person, over time, into the way of Jesus.

That’s slow work. Unglamorous work. It doesn’t scale the way an attractional model scales.

But it produces people who don’t need the conditions to be right in order to stay. People who have been formed — not just welcomed — into something worth holding onto.

I am interested in your church experiences. Please share them. How is your church creating a culture of formation? When you have joined a church did you have to seek formation or was it expected? How do we foster resiliency in our churches?

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The ideas in the “Two Temptations” and “What the Early Church Did Instead” sections draw heavily from Gerald Sitzer’s 2023 lecture at the Practicing the Way Pastors Conference, available via The Contemplative Pastor podcast. His book Resilient Faith expands these themes at length and is well worth your time.