Question

What role do individual spiritual disciplines play in forming procedural knowing?

Summary:

Spiritual disciplines aren’t achievements or proofs of seriousness. They are practices that, over time, form procedural knowing. Prayer is learned by praying. Scripture reading develops instincts that can’t be acquired any other way. The practices form what no amount of teaching alone can form.

Spiritual disciplines have an image problem. They are often presented as achievements, performances, or proofs of seriousness. Christians who practice them faithfully are sometimes admired as especially devoted. Christians who don’t are sometimes made to feel spiritually inferior. Both responses misunderstand what the disciplines are and what they do.

Spiritual disciplines are practices. They are the specific, repeated activities by which we train ourselves in the life of the Spirit. Prayer, fasting, meditation on Scripture, solitude, confession, Sabbath keeping, and journaling are among the most common. None is magical. None guarantees particular results. What they do, cumulatively, is form procedural knowing. They train our capacity to live the Christian life by embedding it in repeated practice.

Procedural knowing is the knowledge of how. It is the capacity to do something well. Scripture consistently treats Christian life as a way of walking: a pattern of ongoing practice rather than a set of occasional events (1 Thess 4:1). Walking is procedural. It can’t be taught primarily through information. It has to be practiced to be learned.

Prayer is a good example. We can believe that prayer matters. We can know the theology of prayer. We can read books about prayer. None of this teaches us to pray. Prayer is learned by praying. The practice itself develops the capacity. The disciple who has prayed daily for twenty years prays differently than the disciple who has prayed daily for twenty days. The difference isn’t primarily knowledge. It is procedural formation.

The same is true of Scripture reading. There is a way of reading Scripture that develops only through sustained practice. The Christian who has read Scripture daily for decades develops a set of interpretive instincts that can’t be acquired any other way. They begin to hear echoes between passages. They notice patterns that a newer reader would miss. They develop what theologians have sometimes called the second naivete: a capacity to encounter the text freshly after having wrestled with it at length. This capacity doesn’t come from reading books about Scripture. It comes from reading Scripture, many times, over many years.

Fasting teaches something particular about the relationship between bodily appetite and spiritual formation. The disciple who fasts discovers, often to their surprise, how much of their emotional and spiritual life is entangled with immediate physical comfort. The discovery doesn’t come from reading about fasting. It comes from doing it. The practice exposes what was previously invisible. It also trains a disposition toward those appetites that makes their management less fraught.

Solitude operates similarly. A culture that has trained us to constant stimulation produces a particular kind of discomfort with silence and absence of input. Solitude addresses this by practicing the absence directly. At first, it is difficult. Over time, it becomes possible. Over more time, it becomes nourishing. The practice itself forms the capacity.

The disciplines aren’t spiritual athletics. They aren’t competitions. They aren’t proofs. They are practices that, over time, form our capacity to live the Christian life more faithfully. This is why Scripture repeatedly urges sustained practice rather than episodic intensity. Joshua is told to meditate on the law day and night (Josh 1:8). The Psalmist commits to hiding God’s word in the heart (Ps 119:11). Paul urges Timothy to train himself in godliness (1 Tim 4:7). The verbs assume repetition.

Two cautions are worth noting. The first is that disciplines can be practiced in ways that don’t form us. We can pray daily as a performance, fast regularly as self-improvement, and read Scripture faithfully as information retrieval. The practices, divorced from their purpose, can become their own rival formation: producing a particular kind of religious seriousness without producing the transformation they are meant to produce. Discipline requires not only the practice but the disposition in which the practice is undertaken.

The second is that disciplines can’t be all of formation. They are one part of a larger life that includes worship, community, accountability, service, and suffering. A disciple whose formation is reduced to individual disciplines alone will miss dimensions of formation that only communal life provides. The disciplines are necessary. They aren’t sufficient.

Practiced faithfully, within the context of a larger life of discipleship, the spiritual disciplines do what no amount of teaching alone can do. They form our capacity to live under Christ’s authority, patiently, over time, in ways that become increasingly instinctual. This is the procedural knowing of a mature Christian. It is developed only through the practices that produce it.

Key Takeaways: Spiritual Disciplines and Procedural Knowing

• Prayer Is Learned by Praying: We can know the theology of prayer without knowing how to pray. The capacity develops through the practice itself.

• Sustained Reading Forms Instincts: Decades of Scripture reading develops interpretive instincts that books about Scripture can’t produce.

• Two Cautions: Disciplines can be practiced as performance or self-improvement, becoming their own rival formation. They also can’t be all of formation; communal life is essential.

• The “So What”: Joshua 1:8, Psalm 119:11, and 1 Timothy 4:7 all assume repetition. The verbs Scripture uses for spiritual practice are sustained, not episodic.

About the Author

James Spencer, PhD, is a theologian, author, and host of the Thinking Christian podcast, where he writes and speaks on Christian formation, political theology, and technology. He holds a PhD in Theological Studies from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and completed the Institute for Educational Management at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He serves as President of the D.L. Moody Center in Northfield, Massachusetts, as adjunct faculty in Wheaton College’s MA in Leadership program, and as an Associate Research Fellow at the Kirby Laing Centre for Public Theology. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times, Christianity.com, and Sojourners; he has been quoted in The Telegraph; and he is a regular guest on Stand in the Gap Today with the American Pastors Network. His forthcoming book is Digital Discernment (InterVarsity Press, Fall 2026). Learn more at jamesgspencer.com.