When Dallas talks about intention in relation to spiritual formation, he has in mind a person who actually arranges their life in such a way that they make a space for spiritual practices. He specifically contrasts that with someone who thinks it would be a good idea to do so, but who never takes the steps to make that space. And the goal of making such a space is to take on the character of Christ, which means we will begin to see and interact with life and others in ways that Jesus would. That includes how we think about things and what we believe about them.
Wilder misses Dallas’ whole-person understanding of intention and instead equates it with rational choice, and then says that Dallas is resorting to “thoughts about God” to achieve change, and that the VIM model relies on ideas in the left hemisphere to do the work of transformation. But clearly this is not what Dallas was proposing. That would be a form of “direct effort” which Dallas always said will not work. The whole point of spiritual practices is to go beyond thinking about God and instead actually experience God at work in our life. To say that Dallas is advocating cognitive approaches to change is a significant misreading of Dallas and terribly misleading.
To “correct” this non-existent problem, Wilder offers us another word “impetus” to replace “intention” because he wants to emphasize the aspect of motivation. But of course, Dallas already included real-life motivation in his word Intention. Once again, it is only by truncating Dallas’ terms that Wilder is able to proceed with offering a “better” approach.