The Five Shifts · Installment 2 of 5: From information to formation
There is a pile of books on my bedside table that has taken on a life of its own.
Each one arrived with good intentions. A speaker mentioned something in a talk and it stayed with me. A colleague recommended a title over coffee. A conversation surfaced a topic I realised I knew almost nothing about. I ordered the book. Sometimes I started it. Often I didn’t finish it. Once, I bought a book I already owned.
I love learning. I’m genuinely energised by new ideas, new frameworks, new ways of seeing. That’s real. I don’t think it’s the problem. Somewhere in the pile, though, is a question I keep stepping around: am I actually being formed by what I’m consuming, or am I just consuming?
This is the second in a five-part series called The Five Shifts, drawn from Arrow’s 2035 research into what faithful, healthy, credible Christian leadership requires in Australia right now. Last month we looked at the shift from performing credibility to embodying it. This month the shift is from information to formation.
There are three realities underneath that shift worth sitting with.
Reality 1: Information accumulation is not the same as transformation
I don’t think I’m unusual in this. Most of the Christian leaders I know are consuming more content than ever. Podcasts on the commute, books on the bedside table, conferences in the calendar, online courses squeezed into the margins. We have access to more leadership thinking than any generation before us and most of us are making good use of it.
And yet… the data on pastoral burnout and leadership failure doesn’t suggest we’re producing more formed leaders. If anything it suggests the opposite. More information hasn’t closed the gap. It may have widened it, because the restlessness that comes from always searching for the next insight can itself become a way of avoiding the slower, less measurable work of actually changing.
I noticed this in myself recently. I finished the AICD course, over 700 pages of pre-reading, an exam, an essay, genuinely stretching, and the moment it was done, all I wanted was something light. Something that asked nothing of me. My mind and body were telling me something my diary had been ignoring for months. I’d been filling myself up without leaving any space for what I was taking in to actually land.
Ruth Haley Barton, whose work has been a genuine source of disruption for me in the best sense, writes that leaders are often the last to know they’re running on empty. The capacity to keep producing, to keep showing up, to keep delivering is real and it can mask for a long time what’s happening underneath. Transformation happens in us before it can flow through us. We cannot give what we do not have.
The gap isn’t in what we know. It’s in who we’re becoming.
Reality 2: Productivity can become a subtle resistance to formation
For years my morning dog walks were some of my most productive time.
Earphones in, podcast queue loaded, off we go. Leadership content, theology, faith conversations, recordings of webinars I’d missed. I genuinely believed I was making the most of it. Exercise and learning at the same time. My Achiever wiring was very happy. Something was always being produced, even from a walk around the neighbourhood at 7.30am.
Then about eighteen months ago I had this growing sense that God was asking me to walk differently. In silence. His pace, his way. No podcasts, no audiobooks, nothing to show for the time. I resisted longer than I’d like to admit. Unproductive time doesn’t sit easily with me and I kept finding reasons to put it off.
At first it was genuinely awful. The quiet was uncomfortable. My mind wandered everywhere. I’d finish the walk feeling unsettled, like I’d wasted it. There was nothing to show for it, no insight captured, no content consumed.
But something was happening underneath that I couldn’t measure or report on.
What I’ve come to see is that filling every available space with input, even good input, even genuinely useful content, can become a way of never quite arriving at the place where formation happens. The efficiency is real and it can quietly become a resistance to the very thing God is most interested in doing in us. Busyness, even intellectual busyness, is sometimes just a more respectable version of avoidance.
Reality 3: Formation requires space that most leaders are not protecting
The dog walks are completely different now.
I look forward to them. The silence that once felt like deprivation has become and I mean this without embarrassment, sacred. There’s space to think without an agenda. To notice what’s been sitting underneath the week, to let things settle. To pray without it feeling like a task on the list.
What shifted wasn’t discipline or a new technique. It was something more basic. I stopped working at God and started allowing God to work in me. For a long time I confused those two things and the confusion was costing me more than I realised.
Ruth Haley Barton writes that solitude isn’t the absence of people. It is the presence of God. That landed somewhere real for me. The silence on those walks isn’t empty. It’s inhabited and what happens in that inhabited silence is something that 700 pages of pre-reading cannot produce.
I want to be honest that I haven’t got this sorted. The bedside table pile keeps growing. Some mornings I still reach for a podcast because the silence feels like too much. Formation isn’t a threshold you cross, it’s a direction you keep choosing to turn toward, imperfectly, repeatedly.
The leaders who will matter most by 2035 won’t necessarily be the most knowledgeable, they’ll be the most formed. Not because knowledge doesn’t matter, it does, but because a leader who has done the interior work, who knows their own patterns, who has learned to lead from a settled place, is capable of something that content consumption alone cannot produce. The tradition and the research keep arriving at the same place from different directions. Not a certificate. Not a completed reading list. A person.
And that, in the end, is what the people we lead most need from us.
I’ll probably order another book this week. That’s not going to change. What I’m trying to hold onto is whether I’m reading as someone who is also, in the quiet of an early morning walk, being changed or whether the reading has become a way of staying busy enough to avoid finding out.
A question to sit with: where in your week is there space for formation rather than information, and if there isn’t, what would it cost you to create some?
A note on process: I use AI tools to support my writing. The ideas, stories, and voice are my own.
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