Which Spiritual Practices Are Your People Choosing, and Why It Is Not Random

A Pastoral Reference for the Practices Showing Up in Your Pews, Your Youth Groups, and Your Family Conversations

The parent who finds tarot cards in a teenager's drawer. The pastor whose youth leader admits to using crystals for stress relief. The small group leader who hears a member of the group describe, casually, the manifestation practice he has been working with for a year. The seminary graduate who is asked, by a parishioner of a decade, whether yoga is okay for Christians.

None of these encounters is rare. None of them is the work of an unusually drifting believer. They are the surface expressions of a much larger pattern, and the pattern has been forming our people for years, often without anyone naming what is happening. This piece is meant to help you, whether you are a parent, a pastor, a youth or young-adult leader, a small group leader, a mentor, a healing minister, a care pastor, a chaplain, a ministry director, or a lay leader, to see what the people in your care are encountering, to understand why they are encountering it, and to respond with the kind of clarity the moment is asking of you.

The goal is not a checklist of safe and dangerous activities. The goal is to give you a working map of what the people around you are actually doing, why those choices are not as random as they appear, and where the pastoral work of love and truth actually happens.

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

01 · The formation beneath the activityWhat You Are Looking At

Before we walk through any specific practice, you need to understand what practice itself is doing in the framework the spiritual seekers around you are operating in.

When I conducted the research for Athority Ministries® that produced the Wounded Sovereign Paradox, the single most important pattern I found is this. Spiritual authority has been relocated from outside the self to inside the self. It is not located in the Bible the way it used to be. It is not located in the church. It is not located in the tradition. It is not located in the credentialed pastor or the wise elder. It is located in the felt sense, the intuition, the inner knowing. Inside this framework, the spiritual seeker is responsible for hearing their own truth, and the work of the spiritual life is the work of clearing the channels, refining the perception, and developing the practices that make accurate hearing possible.

This is why the spiritual seekers around you lead with practice. They are not, in the main, contesting Christian theology. They are operating in a framework where the question of belief sits downstream of the question of practice. They are looking for what works. The Christian conversation has often centered on what is true. The two conversations pass each other, sometimes for years, without quite meeting.

This is also why the practice question can feel pastorally elusive. When a parent asks a teenager why they are using tarot, the answer is rarely theological. The answer is functional. It helps. It calms me. It tells me what I already know. The practice is doing work. The pastoral conversation that gets stuck arguing whether tarot is true is having the wrong conversation. The conversation that helps is the one that asks what the practice is actually doing in the teenager's interior life, what need it is meeting, and what fuller answer the Christian tradition offers to the same need.

There is a second pattern I want to name, because it shapes everything that follows. The people in your community are not arriving at random practices. They are arriving at practices the communities around them have named as worth trying. The practice is the surface. The community is the deeper formation. The teenager with the tarot deck almost never made the practice up. They learned it from someone they trust. The youth leader carrying the crystal heard about it from someone whose pain looked like his and whose relief was real. Every one of these practices arrived in a person's life through a relationship and is now being held in place by a community. This matters pastorally because the practice cannot be addressed without addressing the community that authorized it, and the community cannot be addressed without addressing the church that lost its voice with these people in the first place.

There is a third pattern I want you to hold in mind. The practices have crossed the church door. Pew Research Center has been telling us this at the population level for years. Six in ten self-identified Christians hold at least one New Age belief. Among Catholics and mainline Protestants the share is closer to seven in ten. Even among evangelicals, roughly forty-seven percent. Our research at Athority Ministries® corroborates the same finding in the discourse data. The practices are not over there with the spiritual seekers. They are in here. They are in the pews. The young woman in your women's Bible study who quietly believes in reincarnation. The deacon's wife who checks her horoscope before hard conversations. The worship leader who reads tarot in private. The small group leader who keeps crystals on the nightstand. The seminary professor who, in the interior life, holds elements of belief that would not survive a rigorous theological examination. The framework reaches everyone, and the work in front of us is bigger than addressing one teenager's tarot deck.

This is what you are looking at. Now we can walk through the practices.

02 · What is this doing for the personThe Pastoral Question to Ask First

The first question is not is this practice okay. The first question is what is this practice doing for the person in front of me.

Almost every one of these practices is meeting a real human need with a partial answer. Anchored attention. Self-knowledge. Discernment in hard decisions. Meaning when something has gone wrong that should not have gone wrong. The need is real. The framework's answer is partial. The Christian tradition has fuller answers to the same needs, but you can only offer those fuller answers if you can see the need underneath the practice clearly enough to name it.

The parent who finds tarot cards may not be encountering conscious occult devotion. They may be encountering a teenager who is anxious about a decision and looking for a structured way to externalize the question. The youth leader using crystals is not making metaphysical claims about geology. He is using a tactile object to anchor his attention through hard moments. The person doing manifestation is rarely engaging in cosmic command. In many cases, they are engaging in a structured form of goal-setting that operates adjacent to what Christians have always known as prayer.

The pastoral move is not to argue with the practice. The pastoral move is to see what the practice is doing, name the human need it is meeting, and offer the tradition's resources for the same need. The Christian tradition has older, deeper, more relationally grounded responses to almost every need these practices are partially addressing. The pastoral conversation that begins with the need rather than the practice can land in a place the conversation about the practice cannot reach.

03 · A practice-by-practice pastoral mapWhat the Most Common Practices Are Doing for Your People

I will walk you through five practices in depth, because these are the ones that do the most pastoral work for the audiences this ministry serves. The others (yoga, meditation, energy work, chakras, karma, sorcery, the occult) I will gather toward the end, because the pastoral approach to them is different in degree but not in kind from the approach you will see modeled here.

Tarot: When the Cards Become the Permission

Come back to the parent who found the cards.

The teenager has a decision to make. Maybe it is a college choice. Maybe it is a relationship. Maybe it is whether to come out to a parent they are not sure will hold them. The decision is genuinely hard, and the teenager has been carrying it alone. They have not been able to bring it to anyone because they are not yet sure what they think themselves, and they are afraid that bringing it to a person will either pressure them toward an answer they do not want or expose them to a judgment they cannot bear.

Then they discover tarot. They draw three cards. They look up the meanings. They sit with what the cards seem to be saying. And something happens that is genuinely useful to them. The cards externalize the question. The cards give the teenager a structure inside which they can say, to themselves, what they already knew. The cards do not actually tell the teenager what to do. The cards give the teenager permission to listen to what they have been hearing in themselves but have not been able to trust.

This is what tarot does in the data we have collected at Athority Ministries®. It functions as delegated discernment. A quiet structure outside the self that seems to give the self permission to say what it already knew. The first pastoral assumption does not need to be occult devotion. Often, the teenager is looking for a structured way to externalize a hard question. That does not make tarot a Christian practice, and Scripture's warnings about divination should be taken seriously. But it does tell the parent where the pastoral conversation needs to begin.

The Christian Scripture speaks with a clear voice about divination. The Old Testament's prohibitions are real and should not be softened. The Christian conviction is that the believer brings questions to a living God in prayer, and discerns through Scripture, the body of Christ, and the slow accumulation of evidence over time. These commitments are not negotiable. But the pastoral question for the parent in the bedroom holding the cards is not, in the first moment, what the Old Testament says. The first question is why the teenager could not bring the question to them. The teenager who can bring a hard decision to a parent who will listen without judgment does not need tarot. The teenager who can bring it to a small group leader who treats their questions with reverence does not need tarot. The teenager who can bring it to God in prayer, having been formed by a family and a church that taught them how to do that, does not need tarot.

The pastoral work, then, is not the work of confiscating the deck. The pastoral work is becoming the kind of parent, the kind of leader, the kind of church to whom hard decisions can be brought.

Crystals: The Body Wants a Place to Put the Prayer

Come back to the youth leader.

He is exhausted. His marriage is harder than he expected. His teenagers at the church are processing griefs he is not equipped to hold. His denomination is in conflict, and the conflict has reached his board. He has been praying about it for months and the prayer has not lifted what he carries. Then a friend gives him an amethyst and tells him to put it in his pocket when he needs to remember to breathe.

He puts it in his pocket. Through the day, his hand finds it. Each time his hand finds the stone, he remembers. He remembers to breathe. He remembers to release. He remembers that he is not alone, even when the prayers feel unanswered. The stone does not do anything metaphysical. The stone is a touchstone. The body wanted a place to put the prayer, and the stone is where the prayer goes.

This is what crystals are doing for most of the people in your communities who are using them. They are anchored attention. They are tactile reminders of what the user is trying to remember. The framework calls it grounding. The body, which is wiser than the framework, is doing real work with it.

The Christian tradition has always known the body wants somewhere to put the prayer. This is why we have crosses around necks and on walls. This is why the Eastern Orthodox carry a prayer rope, with knots to count the Jesus Prayer. This is why monks across centuries have carried small relics, small icons, small crosses in their robes. This is why some Christians wear a wedding band, not just as a sign to others, but as a tactile reminder of a covenant they want to keep with their own hands. The body wants a touchstone for the prayer, and the Christian tradition has always given the body what it wants.

The pastoral question is not only whether the crystal is dangerous. It is also what the crystal is doing for him, and why he has not been given a Christian way to bring his body into prayer. The further pastoral question is whether anyone in his life has shown him the older Christian practice that is doing the same work with greater fidelity to the gospel. Most have not. The Protestant traditions in particular have sometimes treated tactile prayer as suspicious, and the result is a generation of Christians who have lost the body's ability to hold the prayer. They are not finding the answer in their inherited tradition because their inherited tradition has, in some streams, forgotten the resource. The crystal is filling a gap the church created.

Show him what his tradition offers. Show him the cross he could carry in his pocket. Show him the rosary or the prayer rope, depending on his tradition. Show him the breath prayer, where the inhalation and the exhalation are themselves the rhythm of remembering. The body wants what the body wants. The Christian tradition can give it.

Manifestation: When Prayer Becomes a Vending Machine

Come back to the small group member.

He has been struggling. His career has stalled, his savings are thin, and he has been listening to a podcast that has taught him a practice he believes is changing his life. The practice is manifestation. He writes down what he wants. He visualizes himself receiving it. He says affirmations as if the thing has already happened. He says he has felt a shift. Things are moving for him. He wants the small group to know.

The small group leader nods. The small group leader is not sure what to say. The small group leader has heard the same teaching at conferences, in Christian books, sometimes from the pulpit. Speak it into existence. Decree and declare. Name it and claim it. The small group leader cannot tell, in the moment, what is Christian and what is not.

This is one of the places where the framework has moved most aggressively into the Christian conversation, and the church has not always recognized it. Manifestation in its purest form is the practice of using focused intention and visualization to bring desired outcomes into reality. In its strong form, it operates on the premise that thought shapes material reality directly. The believer's mind is the engine. The believer's mind is generating the reality the believer wants. The universe is responding to the believer's frequency. The believer is, in this framework, doing the work that the Christian tradition has always reserved for God.

Now hear the difference. The biblical witness on prayer is plain. Christians ask God for things. The Lord's Prayer is a sequence of petitions. Give us this day. Forgive us. Lead us not. Deliver us. The Christian has always asked God for things and trusted God's wisdom about whether and how to answer. The Christian tradition has practiced focused prayer, visualization (in Ignatian spirituality, in the imaginative practice of being present in scripture's scenes), and intentional living for two thousand years.

What the tradition does not affirm, has never affirmed, and cannot affirm without ceasing to be Christian, is the premise that the believer's mind generates reality. The Christian framework holds that reality is generated by God, that prayer is relationship with the One who generates reality, and that the believer's posture in prayer is finally one of asking and trusting rather than commanding and creating.

The pastoral work here is genuinely beautiful, because the small group member is closer to mature Christian prayer than he knows. He has discovered that thoughts and words matter, that focused attention shapes the day, that visualization can hold a hope. These are true. The Christian tradition affirms all of them. What the small group leader can do, gently, over time, is show the small group member what the Christian tradition has always known. That the focused attention is best directed not at the thing wanted but at the One who gives. That the words matter because they are addressed to a Person who hears them. That the visualization is faithful when it is rooted in the actual promises of God, not in the projection of what the self has decided it wants. That the deeper joy is not in commanding the universe but in trusting the One who made it.

Manifestation is one of the most productive pastoral conversations available, because the spiritual seeker who has been practicing manifestation often discovers, when introduced to mature Christian prayer, that the Christian tradition addresses what they wanted manifestation to do, with a deeper theology underneath it.

Astrology: A Vocabulary for Self When No One Is Listening

The parishioner of a decade asks the seminary graduate about yoga, but before she asks about yoga, the seminary graduate notices something. The parishioner has been talking about herself differently for the past year. She mentions her sign. She mentions Mercury retrograde. She mentions that her best friend is a Scorpio and that explains the difficulty between them. The vocabulary is new. The vocabulary is doing work.

This is what astrology does, in the data and in the lives. It is a vocabulary of self-description. A language for naming who you are when you have not been known well enough by anyone for long enough to have other language. The parishioner who reads her horoscope every morning is, in most cases, not making metaphysical claims about cosmic determinism. She is using a working vocabulary for self-knowledge in a culture that has not taught her better language and a church that has not always known her well enough to teach her.

The Christian tradition has richer resources for the same project. The doctrine of being made in the image of God is the deepest possible vocabulary for who you are. The Christian tradition of spiritual examination, going back to the desert fathers, knows the patterns of the interior life with a precision astrology cannot match. The Christian practice of being known by a community across time produces self-knowledge in a way reading the horoscope of a stranger cannot. Spiritual direction, where it survives in your tradition, offers what astrology pretends to offer.

But here is the pastoral truth. Most Christians have not been offered any of these. They have been offered sermons that addressed them as a generic believer. They have been offered Bible studies that taught them content but rarely taught them themselves. They have been offered small groups that polite-talked around the actual questions of who each person is. The horoscope, for all its theological poverty, gave them a vocabulary their church did not. The pastoral move is not to argue about Mercury. The pastoral move is to offer the richer vocabulary, in the relational soil that makes the richer vocabulary possible. Be the parishioner's seminary graduate who actually knows them.

Witchcraft: When the Spiritual Seeker Has Found the Power Church Contexts Did Not Give Them

I have to write this one carefully, because the pastoral work here is different. Witchcraft, sorcery, and the occult name themselves, in their contemporary forms, as alternatives to Christianity. They are not in the same category as a teenager's tarot deck or a youth leader's crystal. The practitioners of these traditions are engaged with a coherent spiritual framework that has its own theological commitments and that has, in many cases, explicitly defined itself in opposition to the Christianity its practitioners experienced. The Christian Scripture and tradition speak with a clearer voice about these practices than about any of the others I have named. The Old Testament's prohibitions are explicit. The New Testament continues this stance. Across centuries, the Christian tradition has treated these practices as incompatible with discipleship to Christ.

I name this not to lead with prohibition, but because the pastoral work that follows requires the church to know what we believe before we walk into the conversation. The work with a practicing witch is not the work of a quick correction. It is patient relational work that may take years, and it requires you to hold theological clarity and pastoral patience together without collapsing one into the other.

Hear what the practice is doing for the practitioner, because if you cannot hear this, you will not be able to do the pastoral work the moment requires.

Many contemporary practitioners of witchcraft, sorcery, and the occult are women and men who experienced the church as silencing. They were told they had no voice. They were told their intuitions were unreliable. They were told their bodies were dangerous. They were told their leadership gifts were not for them. They were told that the spiritual power they sensed in themselves was either nonexistent or demonic. They left, and they found a tradition that told them the opposite. That they have power. That their intuition is real. That their bodies are sites of sacred knowing. That they can lead. That they can shape what happens in their lives. For many contemporary practitioners, the witchcraft revival is not only a metaphysical claim. It is also a power claim made by people who experienced church contexts as silencing, dismissive, or disempowering.

The pastoral work here is not, in the first moment, theological argument. The pastoral work is the long, patient witness of a Christian community that honors the dignity, the gifts, the leadership, and the voice of every person in its care. The argument about practice belongs in a season of relationship when the framework's exhaustion has become visible to the practitioner themselves, when they have begun to ask whether the power they were promised actually delivered what they hoped, when the relationship has earned the right to ask harder questions. Before that season, the work is to be the kind of church the spiritual seeker did not find the first time. The work is to be a body of Christ that does not need to silence to lead.

There is theological clarity that must come, eventually. Witchcraft and the occult, in their fuller forms, are not reconcilable with Christian discipleship. The traditions name competing sources of power and competing spiritual loyalties. The Christian believer cannot finally hold both. But the conversation about that incompatibility belongs in a relationship that has earned it. The drive-by theological prohibition is not pastoral work. It is the same silencing that drove the practitioner away in the first place.

04 · Disaggregate before you answerThe Practices We Have Not Yet Named

A working pastoral reference would not be complete without naming briefly what the other common practices are doing, even when there is not space to walk through each one with the care the five above received.

Yoga, like meditation, needs disaggregation. The practice ranges from physical exercise to spiritual practice rooted in Hindu philosophy. The pastoral question is what is being practiced, with what intent, in what community, and to what end. The yes-this-is-fine and no-this-is-demonic answers both fail the actual situation. The parishioner attending a class at a gym for back pain is doing something different from the parishioner studying yoga as a complete spiritual path. The Christian tradition has historically been alert to the spiritual dimensions of yoga, and the alertness is not paranoia, but the pastoral move is the same as elsewhere: ask what is happening, name the need underneath, and offer the tradition's resources for the same need.

Meditation has a Christian form. Several of them. Scripture meditation, lectio divina, the Jesus Prayer, the Reformed tradition of holy meditation. The spiritual seeker who meditates is training the mind to be present, to release intrusive thoughts, to develop sustained attention. The Christian contemplative tradition has cultivated the same capacity across twenty centuries. The pastoral conversation is rarely about the practice itself. It is about what tradition the practice is in service of.

Energy work and chakras are the broad categories that include practices oriented around what the spiritual seeker calls energy. Our research at Athority Ministries® documents that the SBNR population is overwhelmingly persuaded that energy is real. Nearly all affirm that they can feel another person's energy. The substantial majority affirm that chakras are real energy centers. What the spiritual seeker is describing when they describe feeling someone's energy is, in many cases, real perception. The capacity to read another person's emotional state through nonverbal cues is documented human perception, and the spiritual seeker has built vocabulary around it. The framework's deeper claim, that energy is a metaphysical substance the believer can manipulate, is not affirmed by the Christian tradition. The pastoral move is to honor the perception while gently differentiating the metaphysics.

Karma is the principle that actions in this life have consequences in future lives, with moral causality operating through the structure of the cosmos. It operates primarily as a moral framework that allows the spiritual seeker to make sense of suffering without requiring belief in a personal God who could have prevented it. The Christian tradition does this work differently. Where karma describes impersonal moral causality, the Christian tradition describes the providence of a personal God who orders all things, including suffering, toward the good of those who love him. The Christian tradition does not reduce suffering to deserved consequence. It does not allow the sufferer to be told that their pain is what they earned in a previous life. The Christian tradition is, on balance, kinder to the sufferer than karma is. This is a pastoral opening, when the moment is right.

05 · Formation is the larger fieldWhat the Work Asks of Us

The work in front of us, as ministers and parents and small group leaders and youth workers and healing ministers and the people who carry the body of Christ in this cultural moment, is bigger than any single practice. The deeper question is what is making us, into what shape, by whose hand. The practices are part of the story. They are not the whole story. The whole story is the formation of souls in this cultural moment, by communities the church does not always see, into shapes the gospel did not author.

Some of the practices we have walked through have Christian forms the church can offer in their place. Some do not. The discernment work belongs to you, in your tradition, with your theological convictions intact and your pastoral imagination engaged. What the work asks of all of us is the willingness to see clearly, to name what we see, and to do the long, patient, embodied work of being the kind of church the gospel intended. The teenager with the tarot deck deserves a parent who can be brought hard questions. The youth leader with the crystal deserves a tradition that has not forgotten how the body holds the prayer. The small group member with the manifestation practice deserves to be introduced to mature Christian prayer. The parishioner with the horoscope deserves to be known. The practitioner of witchcraft deserves a church that does not need to silence in order to lead.

The work is patient. The work is generational. The framework reaches everyone, including us. The gospel is for everyone, including us. The work is for all of us, together.

06 · What to read nextWhat to Read Next

If this piece raised questions about where these practices are coming from, our piece Why Your People's Faith Is Being Formed in 55 Communities You've Never Heard Of takes up the question of the online communities that have produced the practices described above.

If you want to understand the deeper framework that produces these practices, 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 pastorally responding to a specific practice involving discernment, our piece When Your Gut Becomes Your God: The Quiet Crisis of Christian Discernment addresses the underlying epistemic crisis that drives many of these practices.

If you are working with a parishioner whose practice journey is connected to a wound, our piece What Does Trauma Have To Do With Spiritual Seeking is the relevant resource.