Most pastors don’t have an information problem. They’ve read the books, sat through the classes, and can talk theology for hours. What’s harder to come by is a way of actually living differently because of it. That’s the question at the center of this conversation: not what it means to know about following Jesus, but what it takes to become the kind of person who does it. Mark Scandrette and Dave Kludt dig into why churches tend to treat failure as something to avoid rather than learn from, what it looks like to lead from inside a group instead of out in front of it, and how a tool like the Enneagram can either sharpen self-awareness or just become another label.
Why Information Doesn’t Transform Pastors
Mark Scandrette traces his life’s work back to a personal crisis about twenty years ago. He realized he could talk about the Bible all day, but he wasn’t very good at actually following Jesus. “Getting more information by itself did not bring about transformation in my life,” Scandrette says. He points to the end of the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus says that the wise person is the one who hears his words and puts them into practice.
That insight became the seed of Scandrette’s first book, Practicing the Way of Jesus, and it’s still at the center of what he and Dave Kludt teach pastors today. In a culture with unprecedented access to information, Scandrette argues, our impulse to collect more of it can actually pull us away from the embodiment that leads to real change.
An Integral Approach: Facing a Fractured World Honestly
If Scandrette’s word is “embodied,” Kludt’s is “integral.” Dave Kludt describes a world that is increasingly fractured: in how we get our news, in how denominations and congregations splinter, and in our own souls. As a pastor, Kludt felt the toll of constantly deciding how much of his honest wrestling to bring into a public role.
An integral approach, Kludt explains, means opening our eyes as wide as possible, drawing on neuroscience, psychology, and other fields alongside theology, and refusing to compartmentalize spiritual formation into “one wing of the building.” As Kludt puts it, “everything we do is formational.” The goal isn’t to talk about everything because it’s trendy. It’s because zooming in on a single program or practice means missing what God is doing in the rest of a person’s, or a community’s, life.
Embodied Formation and the Learning Lab
So how do Scandrette and Kludt actually teach this? One of their primary tools is something Reimagine calls a Learning Lab: a small group that explores a theme connected to a real human ache, like suffering or being mistreated, through journaling, honest conversation, reframing, and daily embodied practices.
The key, Kludt says, is that a Learning Lab is led from within. The leader isn’t the expert with the most book knowledge. They’re a participant willing to go first, ask their own questions, and admit when they’re wrong. “You learn through failure,” Kludt says, “but failing in a Christian context is seen as something you really got to steer clear from, rather than recognizing that’s just part of the human process.”
Students in Scandrette and Kludt’s Fuller cohort design their own six to eight week formation labs around needs they see in their own communities, whether that’s anxiety, busyness, or something else entirely, paired with spiritual companionship along the way.
From a Closed Fist to an Open Hand
Both Scandrette and Kludt push back on the idea that transformation works like a three-step program. “Jesus meets us where we’re at,” Scandrette says. Rather than handing everyone the same steps, a leader’s job is to help each person identify their own next step and support them in taking it.
Kludt frames it as a posture: moving from a closed fist to an open hand. Eyes open to what’s happening in the world, a heart open to what God might be saying, and hands open and willing to take a next step. He suggests this might be one of a pastor’s hardest jobs, especially in a cultural moment that often rewards certainty over curiosity. As Kludt notes, in the Gospels, Jesus asks far more questions than he answers.
The Enneagram as a Tool for Formation, Not a Personality Quiz
Scandrette and Kludt also use the Enneagram in their teaching, but not the way it often shows up at parties. Scandrette, who has a mental health background, describes the Enneagram less as a way to label other people and more as language for understanding our own patterns: why we react the way we do, and where God might want to meet us in those patterns.
Kludt admits he’s grown wary of the Enneagram’s “social quiz” use, where it becomes shorthand for sorting people into boxes. But he’s found it consistently valuable as an introspective tool, a way to look beneath the surface at what’s really driving him. Scandrette adds that the Enneagram is also gaining more serious attention from researchers like Daniel Siegel, who has spent two decades studying connections between the Enneagram, neuroscience, and personality.
Still on the Journey: Mark and Dave’s Own Formation Edges
Toward the end of the conversation, Mark Scandrette and Dave Kludt each name their own current “formation edge,” the place they’re still being stretched. Kludt is wrestling with what it means to be a person of hope in a fractured world, without minimizing the very real fractures he sees. Scandrette, meanwhile, is in a season of confronting old resentments and learning to act out of love rather than insecurity or ego, and to be at peace with himself.
It’s a fitting close to a conversation about formation: even the people teaching it are still very much in process, and that, Scandrette and Kludt would say, is exactly the point.
Discussion Questions
- Mark Scandrette says that getting more information about God didn’t bring transformation, only practicing what Jesus said did. Where in your own life have you noticed a gap between what you know and how you actually live?
- Dave Kludt describes our world as increasingly fractured and fragmented, from the news we consume to our own souls. Where do you feel that fragmentation most right now?
- Reimagine’s Learning Labs are led “from within” by someone willing to be wrong, not an expert with all the answers. What would it look like for you to lead this way in your context?
- Kludt talks about moving from a “closed fist” to an “open hand” posture. What would it take for you to open your hand to a next step God might be inviting you toward?
- Scandrette says a leader’s job is to help people find their own next step, not hand everyone the same step. How do you currently discern what someone’s next step might be?
- Both Scandrette and Kludt talk about how church culture often discourages failure. How does your community handle failure, and how might that need to change?
- Scandrette describes using the Enneagram to ask “why do I do what I do” rather than as a label for others. How have you used, or misused, personality tools like the Enneagram?
- Kludt names his own formation edge as learning to hold both hope and fracture together, rather than dwelling only in one. Which of those postures comes more naturally to you, and which is harder?
- Scandrette shares that he’s learning to “do good for the right reasons” rather than out of insecurity or ego. What motivations tend to drive your own ministry, for better or worse?
- Mark and Dave describe their Fuller cohort as wanting to “talk about everything” rather than compartmentalizing formation into one program. Where in your context is formation currently siloed, and what would it look like to integrate it more broadly?
