The Quiet War for the Soul, Part 3: Together, But Not Formed — How Shallow Community Keeps Us from Becoming Disciples

The most decisive battles for the soul are rarely loud. They are fought quietly—through attention, direction, and daily choice.

We talk about community a lot.

It’s one of the most celebrated words in the modern church. We encourage people to find it, join it, plug into it, build it. And for good reason because Christian faith was never meant to be lived in isolation.

But there’s a question we rarely stop to ask, even as we champion togetherness. What if community, by itself, isn’t enough?

What if you can be surrounded by people—known, liked, welcomed—and still never actually be changed?

That question sits quietly beneath another of the strategies exposed by C. S. Lewis in The Screwtape Letters. Not a strategy of isolation or hostility, but something far subtler: connection without depth.

Lewis understood that the Enemy doesn’t need to dismantle Christian community. He only needs to hollow it out.

In The Screwtape Letters, the demons are pleased when people gather often but never get too serious. When conversations stay friendly, faith stays vague, and truth remains abstract. As long as no one presses too deeply—into belief, behavior, or allegiance—the arrangement works just fine.

Everyone feels included. No one feels confronted. And nothing really changes.

This kind of community feels warm. It feels safe. It feels loving. Which is exactly why it’s so effective.

Scripture paints a different picture of community, one that is far less sentimental. 

“All the believers devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching, and to fellowship, and to sharing in meals (including the Lord’s Supper), and to prayer.”— Acts of the Apostles‬ ‭2‬:‭42‬ ‭NLT‬‬

Paul speaks of relationships that sharpen, warn, exhort, and build up. Biblical community is formative by design.

But formation requires something many of us quietly resist: friction.

“Be careful then, dear brothers and sisters. Make sure that your own hearts are not evil and unbelieving, turning you away from the living God. You must warn each other every day, while it is still “today,” so that none of you will be deceived by sin and hardened against God.”— ‭‭Hebrews‬ ‭3‬:‭12‬-‭13‬ 

Growth requires friction. The metaphor assumes contact, resistance, and mutual engagement. Formation doesn’t happen through affirmation alone, but through honest interaction that refines both people involved.

It requires truth spoken gently but clearly. It requires trust deep enough to allow challenge. It requires relationships that care more about growth than comfort. And those kinds of relationships take time, courage, and intentionality.

Lewis saw how easily community could be rebranded as mere togetherness. When belonging becomes the goal instead of transformation, groups can gather for years without ever producing disciples. People feel supported, but not shaped. Encouraged, but not challenged. Known in safe ways, but never fully seen.

We see this play out constantly.

Small groups that avoid Scripture because it might feel heavy engage in conversations that circle endlessly around feelings but never touch obedience. Bible studies that never actually read the Bible create relationships that know each other’s schedules but not each other’s sins.

No one intends for it to happen this way. It usually grows out of good instincts; kindness, patience, a desire not to offend. But over time, avoiding discomfort becomes a habit, and habits form cultures.

Lewis understood the danger: community that avoids truth doesn’t merely fail to confront sin, it quietly protects it. Not because people are malicious, but because comfort becomes the highest value.

And comfort, left unchecked, is a poor teacher.

This is why shallow community can feel spiritually productive while producing very little. People stay busy. Calendars fill. Conversations flow. But formation, the slow reshaping of desire, belief, and behavior, never quite happens.

The Enemy doesn’t mind full rooms. He doesn’t mind laughter. He doesn’t mind connection. He only minds transformation.

Christian community exists for more than proximity. It exists so that God can use people to shape people. That shaping doesn’t require harshness or intensity, but it does require honesty. It requires Scripture opened together, lives examined together, and faith practiced together.

“Instead, we will speak the truth in love, growing in every way more and more like Christ, who is the head of his body, the church. He makes the whole body fit together perfectly. As each part does its own special work, it helps the other parts grow, so that the whole body is healthy and growing and full of love.”— ‭‭Ephesians‬ ‭4‬:‭15‬-‭16‬ ‭NLT‬‬

Community is presented as a safeguard against drift. Mutual exhortation is not optional or harsh, it’s necessary protection. These verses frame truth-telling as an act of love, not intrusion.

Lewis’s insight presses us to ask a harder question than whether we belong:

Are we being formed?

Are our relationships aimed anywhere? Or are they simply maintaining equilibrium, keeping things pleasant, familiar, and unchanged?

Togetherness without formation feels good. But it leaves us exactly where we are.

And faith that never moves is not neutral. Over time, it weakens.

If this part exposes how faith can stall in community, the final part brings everything together, looking at how delay, good intentions, and a softened version of love quietly neutralize obedience altogether.