Lakendra Burgess

Her writing, from the foundational series to a growing library of ministry pieces, turns that research into equipping for pastors, ministry leaders, and parents.

Lakendra grew up in the faith, on a foundation her mother and her childhood churches built well, and the foundation was real. What faded was the habit around it. She graduated, moved into adult life, and more than a decade passed without a local congregation that knew her name, while faith remained woven through her life: she prayed, brought decisions to God, stayed connected to Christian family and friends, and worshiped through online services. Scripture reading, theological study, and regular in-person worship became less consistent.

Then a hard season met an algorithm, and in the final two years of that decade she slipped into what the research would later give her language for: Christian syncretism, a spirituality that never meant to put Christ down while it added card readings and guidance drawn from the New Age world. She joined an online community that was already there and began posting daily readings of her own, and the readings landed. She was not fumbling at the edges of it; people followed, engaged, came back for the next day's reading. She believed she was helping them too.

Then the Holy Spirit pulled her out of the blend, and she saw the whole landscape from the other side: sincere people, real hunger, borrowed answers, and a dependence on tools and signs that had quietly crowded out dependence on God. She renounced those practices publicly and came home, back to a local congregation, with a faith that had never actually let go of Him.

What she did next is what makes her useful to the church. She turned to the data and began studying the wider world of contemporary spiritual seeking. Through grounded theory, she coded conversations, compared patterns across communities, and tested emerging explanations against the wider corpus. Her experience helped her recognize the ministry questions at stake, and the evidence gave the framework its shape. The result is research attentive to both the patterns in the data and the people whose lives they describe.

Her testimony is also one reason Athority Ministries® refuses to treat spiritual seekers as if they were someone else's people. Her road reflects one of the patterns the research describes: raised in church, still Christian, and drifting without meaning to as tarot, signs, and online spiritual advice gradually became louder than Scripture and congregational practice.

Lakendra writes and researches, and she attends her local church, where she worships, serves, builds friendships, and is known in real life. That embodied belonging keeps her connected to the body of Christ she writes to serve.

The ministry's tagline was hers before it was a brand: It's About God. Not U.