Dwelling in Christ challenges the quick-fix version of Christianity and asks what it actually takes to become more like Christ
by Brandon Burley
Christianity has no shortage of moments.
Walk the aisle.
Raise your hand.
Say the prayer.
Attend the conference. Start the devotional. Make the commitment. Feel something powerful enough that tomorrow is supposed to be different.
Then tomorrow comes.
And sometimes we are remarkably unchanged.
That tension sits near the center of Jonathan R. Bailey’s Dwelling in Christ: Discover the Threefold Path of Spiritual Transformation. Bailey begins with his own experience of sincerely wanting to change, repeatedly participating in the kinds of spiritual moments that promised transformation, and eventually confronting the uncomfortable fact that the moments themselves had not produced the person he wanted to become.
He calls the mindset underneath much of that experience transactional Christianity.
Do this, and God will do that.
Pray correctly and receive the outcome.
Make the commitment and experience the transformation.
Try harder and become better.
Bailey’s alternative is not another formula.
It is a path.
Drawing from Scripture and centuries of Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant spiritual writing, he organizes that path around what Christian tradition has called the Threefold Way: purgation, illumination, and union. Purgation is the slow work of confronting what distorts love. Illumination is the growing awareness and intentionality that develops as a person is formed. Union is increasing intimacy with God that expresses itself in greater love of other people.
Bailey is careful about one important point: these are not three levels in a spiritual video game.
They overlap.
A person experiencing illumination may encounter purgation again. Someone further along the journey can still struggle with old temptations. Moments of union can appear before a person believes they are ready for them. Bailey describes the path as both developmental and cyclical rather than a neat staircase upward.
That distinction is important because one of this book’s strongest arguments is also one of its simplest:
Transformation takes time.
We may be trying to hurry holiness
Bailey’s discussion of spiritual disciplines is particularly useful because he has little patience for the idea that intensity proves maturity.
He describes his own early attempts at fasting, silence, memorization, study, and retreat. Again and again, he tried to begin where more experienced Christians had arrived.
The result was predictable.
Burnout.
The lesson he draws is not that spiritual disciplines do not matter. Quite the opposite. They matter enough that they should be sustainable.
A small practice that becomes part of a life can do more than an heroic practice abandoned a week later.
Bailey repeatedly insists that spiritual practices themselves do not transform anyone. Grace does. Practices position a person to receive and participate in that grace.
That distinction protects the book from becoming the very thing it criticizes.
Otherwise, the Threefold Way could easily become another transaction:
Follow these steps.
Practice these disciplines.
Receive transformation.
Bailey keeps interrupting that interpretation.
Effort matters.
Grace is decisive.
When suffering refuses to become a lesson
The book becomes more difficult, and more substantial, when Bailey turns from voluntary spiritual practices to affliction.
He writes about the premature birth and death of his son, Smith.
This is not presented as inspirational suffering.
Bailey wrestles directly with the theological impulse to explain tragedy by assigning it a divine purpose. He ultimately rejects the idea that God caused his son’s death in order to transform him.
That is an important distinction in the book.
Bailey believes suffering can become an occasion in which grace works. He does not conclude from that that suffering itself is therefore good, divinely engineered, or justified by whatever growth follows it.
There are experiences we can learn from.
That does not mean they happened so we could learn.
Bailey leaves some of the question where grief often leaves it: unresolved. He argues for trust without pretending trust eliminates the “why.”
For a book about spiritual formation, that restraint matters.
A theology of transformation can become cruel very quickly if every wound has to be converted into a lesson.
Bailey refuses to do that.
Your library can grow faster than your character
One of the book’s sharpest observations arrives when Bailey admits that there was a period when he felt most Christian while learning about Christianity.
Books accumulated.
Ideas accumulated.
Knowledge accumulated.
Character did not necessarily keep pace.
His point is not anti-intellectual. Dwelling in Christ itself is filled with Augustine, Teresa of Ávila, John Climacus, Benedict, Gregory of Nyssa, Thomas Merton, Dallas Willard, Richard Foster, and others.
Bailey clearly believes ideas matter.
But information and formation are not synonyms.
That distinction may be especially relevant in a moment when Christians have almost unlimited access to sermons, podcasts, books, apps, courses, videos, and theological arguments.
A person can consume Christian content for hours every week without becoming noticeably more patient, generous, truthful, forgiving, or loving.
The library can grow faster than the character.
That is a problem no reading list can solve by itself.
From inspiration to intention
The middle portion of the book shifts from purgation into illumination.
Bailey’s Rule of Life chapter is among the most practically useful.
He describes the danger of building a spiritual life around inspiration: another worship experience, another conference, another teacher, another practice.
Inspiration can begin something.
It cannot necessarily sustain it.
Bailey turns instead toward the ancient practice of a Rule of Life: an intentional framework that helps order practices, relationships, time, ordinary activities, and spiritual commitments.
But again, he introduces an important safeguard.
The Rule cannot become the point.
Bailey describes occasions when his commitment to spiritual practices competed with the people standing directly in front of him: continuing spiritual reading instead of listening to his wife, maintaining a fast rather than meeting a friend, protecting prayer time instead of attending to a child.
If a Rule intended to form love prevents someone from loving, the Rule has become the problem.
The practice is a means.
Love is the test.
Prayer without bargaining
Bailey applies the same framework to prayer.
He describes growing up with prayer that frequently functioned as bargaining: protect me, rescue me, give me this outcome, and I will respond appropriately.
Over time, his understanding moves toward prayer as attention and relationship.
One of the book’s memorable ideas is that distraction in prayer is not necessarily evidence that prayer has failed. The practice is returning.
The mind wanders.
Return.
A discipline is missed.
Return.
Temptation wins.
Get back up.
Bailey describes transformation not as an uninterrupted ascent but as thousands of returns.
That idea may be one of the most accessible in the entire book.
A great deal of spiritual discouragement comes from interpreting recurrence as failure.
Bailey asks whether recurrence may simply be part of formation.
The slow work of becoming honest
By the time he reaches humility, Bailey’s argument has deepened.
The problem is no longer simply bad behavior.
It is the desire to appear further along than we actually are.
He describes three masks.
The Spartan tries harder.
The Researcher learns more.
The Hermit imagines transformation would occur if only life happened somewhere else.
Each can look spiritual.
Each can also become a way of avoiding the person who actually needs to be transformed.
The most mature version of spirituality in this book is therefore not particularly impressive.
It is increasingly honest.
Bailey’s humility is not self-loathing. It is learning to live without exaggerating either one’s virtue or one’s worthlessness.
It is accepting dependence and dignity at the same time.
That fits The Redemption Project particularly well.
Change does not require pretending the past did not happen.
Neither does accountability require believing a person can only ever be what they have been.
Transformation happens somewhere between those two distortions.
The book gets more theologically demanding near the end
Readers should know that Dwelling in Christ does not remain a practical book about prayer habits and spiritual disciplines.
Its later chapters make substantial theological claims.
Bailey argues that deeper union with God should make a person increasingly available to other people, not increasingly isolated from them. He describes spiritual maturity as becoming the kind of person whose presence makes other people feel seen, safe, and capable of growth.
That is one of the book’s best tests of spirituality.
If supposed intimacy with God consistently produces less patience with people, something has gone wrong.
But Bailey goes further.
In his chapter on charity, he directly challenges accounts of salvation centered primarily on legal pardon and substitution. His larger claim is that salvation must include transformation: not merely forgiveness, but becoming the kind of person who increasingly lives in Christlike love.
The final chapter similarly pushes against the idea that death instantly completes a person’s moral and spiritual formation. Bailey instead imagines transformation as an ongoing participation in divine life, one that begins now and continues into eternity.
Those are not minor details.
Some evangelical readers will disagree with Bailey’s framing of atonement, salvation, perfection, or postmortem transformation. Others may find that his retrieval of older Christian traditions gives language to questions their own churches rarely addressed.
Either way, the theological argument deserves to be engaged rather than hidden beneath the book’s more immediately appealing material about prayer and spiritual disciplines.
Where the book occasionally reaches too far
The book’s greatest strength creates one of its risks.
Bailey is a gifted synthesizer.
He pulls from Eastern Orthodoxy, Catholic spirituality, monastic traditions, Protestant writers, Scripture, personal experience, and modern spiritual formation movements and draws them into a surprisingly coherent path.
But synthesis can smooth over differences.
The Christian traditions Bailey draws from do not always understand salvation, sanctification, suffering, the saints, spiritual authority, atonement, or union with God in precisely the same way.
Sometimes the Threefold Way functions as a bridge between traditions.
At other times, it can make those traditions appear more unified than they really are.
Bailey’s personal stories also carry substantial theological weight. They make the book readable and human. They do not, by themselves, prove every theological conclusion drawn from them.
Experience can illuminate an argument.
It cannot settle one.
Readers should keep that distinction in view.
The book’s strongest contribution
Those reservations do not undermine what Dwelling in Christ does particularly well.
It refuses to sell transformation quickly.
That sounds simple.
It is surprisingly countercultural.
Bailey is writing into a religious environment that can easily reward dramatic testimonies, visible platforms, immediate decisions, measurable outcomes, emotional experiences, and spiritual techniques.
His alternative is slower.
Practice.
Fail.
Return.
Pay attention.
Receive grace.
Learn to love.
Repeat.
And then keep going.
The Threefold Way gives Bailey a vocabulary for that process, but the larger insight does not depend on mastering the terminology.
Spiritual transformation may be less like flipping a switch and more like becoming a different kind of person through thousands of choices, failures, relationships, practices, acts of grace, and returns.
There is no dramatic shortcut in that vision.
Maybe that is the point.
The question is not merely whether someone once made a decision to follow Christ.
The deeper question is what kind of person is slowly being formed because they did.
Disclosure: InterVarsity Press provided The Redemption Project with a complimentary review copy of Dwelling in Christ.
I am a retired detective and criminal justice / government educator based in Tennessee. I founded The Redemption Project, as a place to focus on civics, rebuild non-partisan trust, and provide educational and emotional grace while learning about the news. I also have a column in Knox TN Today. My reporting and commentary have also appeared in other outlets including; Governing, The Arizona Capitol Times, South Florida Sun Sentinel, Police1, among other state and regional outlets.
