A working map of the online communities doing spiritual formation outside the church.

The deacon's daughter, twenty-four years old, lives at home and works remotely. She is at the breakfast table every morning. She attends the family church on Sunday with her parents. She is, by every external measure, a believer. The deacon does not know that she spends three hours every weeknight in a Discord server where a community of strangers has, over the past eighteen months, become the most theologically influential voice in her life.

The deacon does not know that one of those strangers, a person she has never met in person, is the friend she turns to first when she is in crisis. The deacon does not know the name of the server, the name of the friend, or the name of the theology they share. The deacon thinks he is forming his daughter. He is not. He is one of several voices, and he is not the loudest.

This piece is about where formation is actually happening in the lives of the people you serve. It is meant for pastors, parents, youth leaders, healing ministers, small group leaders, and anyone who is responsible for the spiritual care of people who also have phones. The framework you have been taught for understanding formation, the one that locates the work in pulpit and small group and family devotions, is not wrong. It is incomplete. The communities that are forming the people you serve are larger, more active, more sustained, and more theologically coherent than the church has often recognized. This piece is a working map.

This piece sits alongside our Wounded Sovereign Paradox series, but you can begin here.

01 — Scale The Scale of What You Are Looking At

When I conducted the research for Athority Ministries® that produced the Wounded Sovereign Paradox, I expected to find spiritual seeking happening on a handful of platforms. What I found, across multiple studies, is that contemporary spiritual formation happens across at least fifty-three online communities I could identify with confidence, and likely far more I did not have the bandwidth to reach.

This means that the average spiritual seeker is not, in any meaningful sense, in one community. They are in several at once. They are reading content from one community while asking questions in another. They are forming convictions in one space while testing them in a second and confirming them in a third. The formation work is distributed across an ecosystem the church does not always see, and the ecosystem has structure.

Let me say plainly what the structure looks like. The top three subreddits in the Athority Ministries® research corpus carry more than one in three of the conversations we analyzed. r/Spirituality alone holds 61 threads in the dataset. r/Christianity holds 47. r/TrueChristian holds 39. These three are not random. They are not casual. They are organized formation systems with moderators, recurring questions, shared vocabulary, in-group hierarchies, and theological consensus that takes years to develop. They have memory. They have culture. They have norms. The person who enters one of these communities for the first time is entering an existing formation environment, not an empty room.

Below the top three, the conversation fans out. r/Christian, r/Christians, r/Bible, r/OpenChristian, r/Religion, all carry substantial threads. So do communities the church does not always consider spiritual at all. Trauma-survivor communities. Mental health communities. Communities organized around specific life experiences (deconstruction, faith transition, religious abuse, queer faith) that combine pastoral and political and therapeutic content in ways no single category captures. The spiritual life of contemporary spiritual seekers is being formed in the spaces between these communities, in the cross-pollination of vocabulary and conviction across spaces that the church's traditional categories did not anticipate.

This is the scale. The deacon does not know about three of the platforms his daughter uses, and his daughter does not think to tell him, because the platforms are not, in her mind, particularly remarkable. They are just where she lives. The church's question is not how to monitor her use. The church's question is how to do its own formation work in a moment when the formation field is this large.

02 — Causation What the Communities Are Actually Doing

The most important finding in the Athority Ministries® research is not that the communities exist. The more important finding is that the communities are doing formation work. This is not background activity. The communities are causal agents in the shaping of faith.

When I analyzed 281 conversations for the Multi-Pathway Meaning-Making Model study, I expected community to operate as context. Setting. Backdrop. What I found is that community operates as cause. In nearly six in ten of the threads we analyzed, community members were performing the work of faith affirmation, validating each other's spiritual experiences and beliefs in ways that materially shaped what each member came to believe. In more than four in ten threads, community members were performing constructive challenge, asking each other hard questions about claims and helping each other refine convictions. In four in ten threads, scripture itself was being reframed through community conversation. Members were rereading verses in light of each other's interpretations and arriving at consensus understandings that no individual would have reached alone.

Roughly seven in ten threads include ratifying responses, where one community member says to another, in effect, yes, what you experienced was real, and what you believe about it is also real. The ratification work alone, repeated thousands of times across these communities, is doing what the church used to do exclusively. It is telling people what their experiences mean. It is telling people what to believe.

I want you to sit with this for a moment, because it changes the pastoral question. Your conversations with the people you serve are one input. The sermon you preach is one input. The small group your member attends is one input. The community of strangers on a phone is also an input, and in many cases it is the larger one, because it is sustained. The community is available every night. The community responds in minutes. The community remembers what the member said three weeks ago and references it back. The community knows the member in ways the small group, which meets every other Tuesday for ninety minutes, cannot.

The church is not the primary formation environment for the people you serve, even when they sit in the pew on Sunday. It is one formation environment among several. The other environments are not waiting for the church to act. They are forming people right now, in real time, with measurable effects on what those people come to believe.

03 — Movement Where the Cross-Pollination Happens

There is a particular pattern in the data that ministry leaders should know about, because it explains something that has been quietly puzzling for years.

The spiritual seekers in our research move between communities that the church has traditionally considered separate. They move between explicitly spiritual communities and trauma-survivor communities. They move between deconstruction communities and contemplative-practice communities. They move between communities organized around faith transition and communities organized around mental health. The boundaries that the church draws between spiritual content and therapeutic content are not the boundaries the spiritual seekers themselves are observing.

The religious-trauma narrative is the clearest example. In our Authority Loop study, we identified seven recurring narrative scripts that surface across communities. The religious-trauma narrative is the most frequent of the seven, appearing across more than thirty distinct communities in the dataset. The story is the same story, told in different vocabularies, across communities the church would have organized into different categories. The person who left a high-control church and is now processing what happened is in trauma-survivor communities. The same person is also in spiritual-but-not-religious communities exploring alternative spiritualities. The same person is in mental-health communities working through anxiety. The same person is sometimes still in Christian communities, asking whether what happened to them was abuse or whether they were just oversensitive.

The spiritual seeker is one person. The communities are doing different parts of the same formation work. The trauma community is helping them name what happened. The spiritual community is helping them imagine what is possible after what happened. The mental health community is helping them manage what was done to their body and brain. The Christian community, when they are still in one, is helping them decide whether the gospel as they have received it has been a source of harm or a source of hope.

The church's framework, which sometimes treats these as four separate conversations belonging to four separate ministry domains, does not match the integrated experience of the spiritual seeker. The person at the center has one life, one wound, and one question. The communities, working together across a landscape the church does not always recognize, are giving the spiritual seeker an integrated answer the church has often failed to give.

There is something here for ministry leaders to name carefully. The church that wants to receive these spiritual seekers cannot do so by improving any one ministry domain alone. Better pastoral care will not solve the problem if the spiritual seeker's trauma is not also being recognized. Better trauma-informed practice will not solve the problem if their spiritual longing is not also being honored. Better small groups will not solve the problem if their questions about whether their experience was abuse are met with deflection. The communities they have found are integrated. The church's response needs to be integrated too.

04 — Language The Vocabulary Trap

There is a finding in our research that complicates a story the church sometimes tells itself, and ministry leaders need to know about it.

The story the church sometimes tells is that the spiritual-but-not-religious communities are using a different vocabulary from Christians. New Age language. Therapeutic language. Self-help language. Language that signals a different worldview. The story implies that if the church just spoke the language of biblical Christianity clearly enough, the spiritual seekers would recognize the gap between their framework and the church's.

The data tell a different story. In The Authority Loop, we found that the vocabulary overlap between Christian-Insider communities and Spiritual-Seeker communities exceeds three-quarters. They are using the same words. Soul. Spirit. Faith. Healing. Prayer. Wisdom. Truth. Discernment. Sacred. Holy. Mystery. Surrender. The words are shared. What is different is how the same vocabulary is held inside systematically different authority frameworks.

When a Christian-Insider community uses the word discernment, the word operates inside a framework where discernment is tested against Scripture, the body of Christ, the pastoral relationship, and the long tradition. When a Spiritual-Seeker community uses the word discernment, the word operates inside a framework where discernment is tested against the felt sense, the intuition, the resonance of the moment.

This is why the conversation between the church and the spiritual seekers often feels frustrating to both parties. Each side hears familiar words and assumes the other side means what they would mean. The Christian small group leader hears the spiritual seeker talk about discernment and thinks the spiritual seeker is in the church's framework. The spiritual seeker hears the Christian small group leader talk about discernment and thinks the small group leader is in their framework. The conversation proceeds for months on the basis of a shared vocabulary that is actually not shared. Eventually, in some small moment, the difference surfaces, and one or both parties feels betrayed. The conversation ends, often without either party fully understanding what happened.

What this means for pastoral work is that the church cannot rely on shared vocabulary to do the work of shared meaning. The work of shared meaning is slower than the work of shared vocabulary. It happens in relationship across time. It happens when the church does the patient work of asking the spiritual seeker what they mean when they use the word, and listening to the answer, and naming, with care, what the Christian tradition means by the same word. The conversation that can land does not begin with arguing about the words. It begins with making the difference visible.

05 — Paradox What the Same Person Hears in Both Frameworks

There is one more pattern from our research that I want to share, because it is the single most important finding for ministry leaders trying to make sense of why their people seem so internally divided.

In The Authority Loop, we found that the Christianity-as-helpful frame appeared in roughly eight in ten of the threads we analyzed. We also found that the Christianity-as-controlling frame appeared in more than six in ten of the threads we analyzed. These two findings, taken alone, would seem to contradict each other. What our data actually shows is that the same threads contain both. In more than half of the threads we analyzed, the same person, sometimes in the same paragraph, was holding both the experience of Christianity as deeply life-giving and the experience of Christianity as deeply controlling. The frames co-occur.

This is the experience of millions of contemporary believers and former believers. They love what Christianity gave them and they have been wounded by what Christianity required of them. The internal division is not confusion. It is a real response to a real experience. The communities the people you serve have found are giving them permission to hold both the gratitude and the wound simultaneously, in ways the church has not always done well.

What this means pastorally is that the spiritual seeker who comes to you holding both will be poorly served by being asked to choose. The choice is not between gratitude and wound. The choice is between continuing to hold both alone, in the communities that have learned to hold both, or being received by a Christian community that can hold both with them. The church that can do this work is the church that can receive spiritual seekers back. The church that requires the spiritual seeker to leave the wound at the door, to be a person who only experiences Christianity as helpful, will not receive them.

06 — Practice What the Work Asks of Us

The communities the people in your care belong to are real. They are organized. They have been doing formation work for years, in some cases for decades. They are not going away. The pastoral question is not how to compete with them on their terms. The pastoral question is how to do the church's own formation work with awareness of what else is happening in the lives of those who sit in the pews.

A few things to take from this piece.

The first is that your conversation with the person in front of you is one of several. You are not the only voice. The teenager hearing your sermon is also hearing a Discord server, a TikTok creator, a YouTube channel, and a Reddit community. The convert from the SBNR community who has joined your church is still, in many cases, in the communities that formed them, even if they have stopped posting there. The deacon's wife who has rediscovered her faith is also in three women's spirituality groups online that are quietly shaping how she reads her Bible. None of this is to your discredit. It is the new normal. The pastoral work is to do your work with awareness of theirs.

The second is that the cross-pollination across communities means the spiritual seeker is rarely engaging one issue at a time. They are bringing trauma, spirituality, mental health, and biographical wound to the conversation simultaneously, because the communities that have formed them have taught them to hold these together. The pastoral response needs to be integrated. The church that wants to receive spiritual seekers will need to grow capacity in pastoral care, trauma-informed practice, spiritual direction, and theological clarity, all at once.

The third is that shared vocabulary is not shared meaning. The spiritual seekers and the Christians are using the same words inside different frameworks. The pastoral work is to make the difference visible without making the conversation combative. What do you mean when you say discernment? is one of the most useful questions a small group leader can ask.

The fourth is that the spiritual seeker who comes to you holding both gratitude and wound for Christianity is doing exactly what the data predicts. The church that can hold both with them is the church that can receive them. The church that requires them to choose between gratitude and wound will lose them, again, to communities that have learned to hold both.

The fifth is that you cannot, and should not try to, replicate what the online communities do. You cannot match their availability. You cannot match their sustained attention. You cannot match their decentralized voice. What you can do, that the online communities cannot, is offer embodied community over decades. You can offer the body of Christ in a way no Discord server can offer. You can offer the sacraments. You can offer the actual presence of believers across generations in one room. You can offer the deep work of being known, over years, by people who hold the same faith you hold. This is what the online communities cannot deliver. The church's work is not to be a better Discord server. The church's work is to be the church that the gospel has always made possible.

07 — Further Reading What to Read Next

If this piece raised questions about what the people in your community are actually practicing, our piece Which Spiritual Practices Are Your People Choosing, and Why It Is Not Random takes up the question of the specific practices that emerge from the communities described above.

If you want to understand the deeper framework that produces these communities, the eight-post Wounded Sovereign Paradox series is the foundational synthesis from which this piece is drawn. The first post, Your People Are Spiritually Seeking. So Are You., is the right place to begin.

If you are working with someone whose community participation is connected to a wound from a previous Christian community, our piece What Does Trauma Have To Do With Spiritual Seeking addresses the relationship between religious trauma and spiritual seeking directly.

If you want to understand why these communities reach consensus on some questions and remain permanently fragmented on others, our piece Why Your Spiritually-Seeking People Agree on Experience and Disagree on Meaning names the underlying structure.