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

A Ministry Reference for the Practices Showing Up Across Your Community

Imagine four ministry moments.

A parent opens a teenager’s drawer and sees tarot cards. A pastor hears a youth leader say that a crystal helps them manage stress. A small group leader listens as a member describes the manifestation practice they have followed for a year. A seminary graduate is asked by a longtime parishioner whether yoga is okay for Christians.

The details will differ in your community, but the questions will not feel remote. They arise in family conversations, ministry teams, small groups, counseling rooms, and the private lives of people who may still pray, worship, and follow Jesus.

These moments are not proof that someone has abandoned Christian faith. They are signs that spiritual formation is happening through more than one community and more than one vocabulary. Your first task is to understand what is in front of you clearly enough to respond with both conviction and care.

This piece is for parents, pastors, youth and young adult leaders, small group leaders, mentors, chaplains, care teams, ministry directors, and lay leaders. Its goal is not to hand you a checklist of safe and dangerous activities. It is to give you a working map of what these practices can mean, why they are not as random as they appear, and where the ministry work of love and truth begins.

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 a specific practice, we need to understand what practice can be doing inside a larger formation system.

Across the discourse studied by the Athority Ministries® research program, spiritual authority often shifts toward the felt sense, intuition, and inner knowing. Scripture, church, tradition, and trusted leaders may remain present, but they no longer carry unquestioned interpretive weight. The person becomes responsible for deciding which sources fit together and which voice receives the final word.

That shift helps explain why many spiritual conversations begin with practice rather than doctrine. The immediate question is often not, What system do I believe? It is, What helps me? What calms me? What gives me language for what I am experiencing?

Christian ministry often begins with the question of truth. A person trying a practice may begin with the question of function. If we hear only one question, the two conversations can pass each other for years.

This is why a practice question can feel so elusive. Ask someone why they use tarot and the first answer may not be theological. It may be, It helps me slow down. It gives me a way to face the question. It puts words around what I am feeling.

That answer does not settle whether the practice is compatible with Christian discipleship. It tells you that the practice is doing work in the person’s interior life. Ministry must ask what that work is, what claim the practice makes, who or what authorizes it, and what fuller Christian formation speaks to the same need.

There is a second pattern to hold in mind. People rarely invent a spiritual practice alone. A friend, creator, podcast, book, search result, or online community usually introduces the method and supplies the interpretation. The practice is visible. The relationships and authority structure underneath it are harder to see.

This matters because addressing an object without understanding the community that made it meaningful may leave the deeper formation untouched. The question is not only, Where did this come from? It is also, Who helped this person trust it? What did that community notice about their life? What has kept them returning?

There is a third pattern. These beliefs have crossed the church door.

Pew Research Center reported in 2018 that six in ten self-identified Christians accepted at least one of four beliefs it measured: reincarnation, astrology, psychics, or spiritual energy in physical objects. The share ranged from 47 percent among evangelical Protestants to roughly seven in ten among Catholics and Protestants in the historically Black tradition.

Those figures concern beliefs, not the frequency of particular practices. They do not tell you what any individual Christian is doing or why. They do tell you that boundary-practice questions are not confined to a population somewhere outside the church.

They are questions people in churches are already carrying. They may be carried by the person leading worship, the parent at pickup, the longtime member in a Bible study, the young adult returning after years away, or the ministry leader trying to name an experience that does not fit the vocabulary they inherited.

The people we are talking about are not “those people.” They are among us, and they are us.

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

02 · WHAT IS THIS DOING FOR THE PERSONThe First Question to Ask

The first question is not only, Is this practice okay? It is also, What is this practice doing for the person in front of me?

Many of these practices can meet a real human need with a partial answer. Anchored attention. Self-knowledge. Discernment in a hard decision. Meaning after something has happened that should not have happened. A structure for hope. A place to belong.

The need may be real even when the practice’s answer is incomplete or its spiritual claim is incompatible with Christian faith. You can offer a fuller Christian response only if you see the need clearly enough to name it.

A teenager using tarot may be looking for a structured way to face a decision. A person carrying a crystal may be using a tactile reminder to breathe, or they may believe the crystal carries spiritual power. Those are not the same claim. Someone describing manifestation may mean written goals and mental rehearsal, or they may believe focused thought can cause reality to conform to desire. Those are not the same practice.

This is why disaggregation matters. Listen before you assign a motive. Ask what the person is actually doing, what they believe is happening, and what the practice has come to mean.

The ministry move is not to trade theological clarity for empathy. It is to bring clarity close enough to the person’s actual experience that it can be heard.

03 · A PRACTICE-BY-PRACTICE DISCERNMENT MAPWhat the Most Common Practices May Be Doing

Five practices receive more space here because questions about them recur across the communities and Christian discourse studied by the Athority Ministries® research program. They do not all carry the same theology, risk, or meaning. The point of placing them together is not to flatten them. It is to model the questions ministry leaders can ask when a familiar label may be hiding a very different practice.

Tarot: When the Cards Become the Permission

Come back to the parent who found the cards.

Imagine that the teenager is carrying a decision about college, a relationship, or something they are afraid to say aloud. The decision is genuinely hard. They fear that bringing it to another person will produce pressure, dismissal, or a judgment they are not ready to bear.

Then they find tarot. They draw three cards, look up the meanings, and sit with what the spread seems to say. The cards give the question a shape. They may give the teenager permission to name what they already sense, or they may begin to carry more authority than the teenager intended to give them.

Tarot can function in several ways: reflection, ritual, identity, community, permission, prediction, or delegated discernment. It can also become a repeated source of certainty when a person feels unable to tolerate uncertainty. That range is why the first ministry assumption should not be a diagnosis.

Christian Scripture does speak clearly about divination and seeking spiritual knowledge through forbidden sources (Deuteronomy 18:9–14). That conviction should not be hidden. Christians bring their questions to the living God through prayer, Scripture, wise community, and patient discernment. They are not formed to hand final authority to cards.

But clarity about the cards does not answer why the teenager felt unable to bring the question to a parent, leader, or church community.

A parent may still decide that the deck cannot remain in the home. A ministry leader may still name a boundary. The boundary cannot complete the ministry work by itself.

The deeper work is becoming the kind of parent, leader, and church to whom a frightening question can be brought. It is teaching people how Christian discernment actually works when the answer is not immediate. It is showing that a difficult question will be met with presence before it is met with panic.

Crystals: A Tactile Reminder Is Not the Same as a Spiritual Power

Come back to the youth leader.

Imagine that ministry has been heavy for months. A friend gives the leader an amethyst and says, “Keep it in your pocket. When you touch it, remember to breathe.”

Throughout the day, their hand finds the stone. They pause, breathe, and remember that they are not alone. In that use, the stone is functioning as a tactile cue. The person is not necessarily claiming that amethyst contains healing power or redirects spiritual energy.

That distinction matters. A neutral object used as a reminder is not the same thing as a metaphysical claim about what the object can do. Ask before you assume.

Christian traditions have long understood that bodies participate in prayer. Christians wear crosses, finger prayer ropes or rosary beads, kneel, lift hands, light candles, and practice breath prayer. These objects and actions are not interchangeable with a claim that a crystal possesses spiritual energy. In Christian practice, they direct attention toward God, Scripture, covenant, and the communion of believers. Their meaning comes from that relationship, not from an impersonal power assigned to the material itself.

The ministry question, then, has two parts: How is this object being used? and What does the person believe it can do?

If the use is tactile, offer embodied Christian practices that fit the person’s tradition. If the person attributes spiritual agency or healing power to the crystal, the theological conversation is different. Either way, the leader still needs a place to bring exhaustion, stress, and unanswered prayer.

Do not make the object carry the whole conversation. Ask what the person has been carrying too.

Manifestation: When Desire Becomes a Method

Come back to the small group member.

They have been struggling. Work has stalled. Savings are thin. A podcast introduces a practice that seems to restore direction. They write down what they want, visualize receiving it, repeat affirmations, and report that something in them has shifted.

The small group leader hesitates because similar language has also appeared in Christian spaces: Speak it into existence. Decree and declare. Name it and claim it. The line between prayer, hope, goal-setting, and metaphysical control can become difficult to see.

The word manifestation now covers a wide range of practices. At one end, someone may be setting goals, rehearsing a difficult future, or directing attention toward what matters. At the other, someone may believe thought, intention, vibration, or energy causes desired outcomes to enter material reality.

Those meanings cannot be treated as identical.

Christian prayer includes desire and petition. Jesus teaches his followers to ask for daily bread, forgiveness, guidance, and deliverance. The same prayer says, “Your will be done” (Matthew 6:10). Prayer is not a technique for making reality obey the mind. It is relationship with the personal God who hears, gives, redirects, and remains God.

Christian traditions also use imagination, but not as a mechanism for producing an outcome. In Ignatian contemplation, for example, imagination helps the person enter a Gospel scene prayerfully, attend to Christ, and respond to God. That is a different purpose and a different account of power from manifestation.

The ministry opportunity is not to mock the person’s hope. It is to help them ask better questions about the method carrying it.

What are they trying to control because uncertainty feels unbearable? What desire are they afraid to place before God? What would it mean to pursue a faithful goal without treating thought as sovereign? How might prayer hold both agency and surrender?

Someone practicing manifestation may already understand that attention and words shape a life. Christian formation can affirm that human agency matters without claiming that the mind creates reality. The invitation is not from passivity to passivity. It is from control to faithful participation with God.

Astrology: When a Vocabulary Starts Interpreting a Life

Come back to the parishioner.

Over the past year, they have begun describing themselves through a sign, a rising sign, Mercury retrograde, and the compatibility of people around them. The vocabulary is new, and it is doing work.

Astrology can offer language for identity, relational patterns, timing, uncertainty, and belonging. For some people it is entertainment. For others it becomes an interpretive authority, a way to explain who they are, why relationships unfold as they do, and what a season will permit.

The ministry leader needs to know which one is in the room.

Christian faith offers a different account of identity. Human beings bear the image of God. In Christ, identity is received rather than read from a birth chart. Character is formed through grace, repentance, wisdom, community, and the Spirit’s work over time. A church that knows people across seasons can help them name gifts, wounds, habits, callings, and limits without reducing a life to a type.

But do not hear that as a quick replacement formula. “You are made in the image of God” is true, but a person may still need help understanding how that truth speaks into a conflict, a pattern of fear, or a question about who they are becoming.

The conversation does not need to stall at Mercury. Offer a richer way of being known, within relationships that make that knowledge credible.

Know the person well enough to speak with them, not merely about the framework they are using.

Witchcraft: Hold Conviction and Curiosity Together

This section requires particular care because witchcraft does not name one uniform system.

Contemporary uses of the term may refer to a religious or devotional identity, ritual or magical practice, folk tradition, spiritual power, protection, community, political or gendered identity, connection with nature or ancestors, or an eclectic practice assembled from several sources. Some practitioners define themselves in opposition to Christianity. Others do not. Some came through church harm. Others did not.

Ask what the person means before you respond to a category they may not be using in the way you assume.

Christian Scripture is not silent about sorcery, divination, or appeals to spiritual powers apart from God. Deuteronomy 18:9–14 prohibits divination and sorcery within Israel’s covenant life. In Acts 19:18–20, people who come to faith turn from the magic arts they had practiced. Christian discipleship cannot simply absorb every spiritual loyalty or source of power into itself.

That conviction does not give Christians permission to treat a person with contempt.

A person drawn to witchcraft may be seeking agency, ritual, protection, spiritual experience, identity, community, or a voice after being silenced. Church harm may be part of that story, but it should never be assigned without listening. Even when it is present, it does not explain every dimension of the person or every commitment they now hold.

Relational patience and theological clarity belong in the same conversation. You do not have to hide what Christian faith teaches until a relationship has reached some undefined level of trust. You also do not have to make prohibition the only sentence the person ever hears.

Say what you believe without reducing the person to a practice. Listen without pretending every spiritual claim is compatible with following Christ. Honor dignity, gifts, questions, and agency without confusing respect for a person with agreement about spiritual power.

The ministry work may take time. That does not make it vague. It makes it faithful enough to hold truth and a human life in the same room.

04 · DISAGGREGATE BEFORE YOU ANSWERThe Practices We Have Not Yet Named

A working ministry reference would not be complete without naming what several other common practices may involve, even when there is not space to give each one the care the five above received.

Yoga

Yoga is not one single modern activity. It belongs to a broad family of Indian traditions with physical, ethical, meditative, philosophical, and devotional dimensions. A contemporary class may emphasize stretching, balance, breathing, stress reduction, religious formation, or some combination.

That is why the ministry question is not answered by the label alone. Ask what is being practiced, what is being taught, with what intent, in what community, and toward what end.

The parishioner attending a gym class for back pain is not necessarily doing the same thing as someone embracing yoga as a complete spiritual path. Neither panic nor blanket approval does the discernment for you. The actual practice does.

Meditation

Meditation also requires definition.

Christian traditions include Scripture meditation, lectio divina, the Jesus Prayer, and other forms of sustained attention before God. Clinical mindfulness may be taught as an attention or stress-management skill. Buddhist, Hindu, and other religious traditions may locate meditation within distinct accounts of the self, suffering, liberation, and ultimate reality.

The shared use of attention does not make every form theologically identical. Ask what the person does, what they believe is happening, and what end the practice serves.

Energy Work and Chakras

The Felt Commons™ gives us two useful, bounded snapshots of the language surrounding energy.

In Question 52, “Can You Really Feel Someone Else’s Energy?”, 70 of 74 respondents, or 94.6 percent, selected “Yes.” In Question 224, “Are chakras real?”, 42 of 51 respondents, or 82.4 percent, selected “Yes, energy centers,” while six more selected “Yes, holistic health.”

These were own-audience polls among people engaging a Spiritual But Not Religious X community. They are not population estimates, and the questions do not tell us what each respondent meant by energy or chakra.

That limitation is part of the ministry lesson. When someone says they can feel another person’s energy, they may be naming emotional attunement, nonverbal perception, bodily stress, a metaphysical force, or a combination they have never separated. Do not tell them what they “really” experienced before asking.

Honor the experience of noticing. Then examine the interpretation. Christian discernment can take perception seriously without automatically affirming that an impersonal energy field or chakra system explains it.

Karma

Ask what a person means by karma.

Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain traditions do not all define karma in the same way. Each places action, consequence, moral causality, and rebirth within a distinct religious framework. Popular Western speech often uses the word more loosely to mean, “What goes around comes around.”

Those meanings should not be collapsed into one formula.

Christian faith teaches moral agency and consequence, but it does not present suffering as reliable proof that a person deserved what happened. It speaks of sin, grace, judgment, mercy, providence, lament, and a world in which the righteous can suffer. That gives ministry leaders a way to challenge a simple cosmic scorecard without caricaturing traditions they have not taken time to understand.

The first question remains the same: What does this word mean to the person in front of me, and what work is it doing in their understanding of suffering?

05 · FORMATION IS THE LARGER FIELDWhat the Work Asks of Us

The work in front of parents, pastors, small group leaders, youth workers, chaplains, care teams, and everyone carrying the life of the church in this cultural moment is bigger than any single practice.

The deeper question is what is forming us, toward what kind of life, under whose authority, and within which community.

The practices are part of that story. They are not the whole story. The whole story includes the loneliness that made an online community feel like home, the unanswered prayer that made a method feel urgent, the desire for language that made a framework feel personal, and the questions a person was afraid to bring into church.

Some of the practices we have named have limited features that resemble Christian forms, though their meanings may be different. Others make claims Christian discipleship cannot affirm. Discernment belongs to your church and tradition, with theological conviction intact and ministry imagination awake.

But none of us gets to do that work from a safe distance.

Ministry leaders also want certainty. Parents also want control. Christians also confuse strong feeling with divine guidance. Churches also form people through repeated language, trusted relationships, rituals, and authority. We are not examining spiritual formation from outside it.

So return to the four ministry moments.

The parent holding the tarot deck needs more than a verdict about cards. They need help creating a home where hard questions can be spoken.

The pastor hearing about a crystal needs to ask what the person believes the object does, and what burden made the object matter.

The small group leader hearing about manifestation needs language for the difference between faithful agency, hopeful imagination, prayer, and control.

The seminary graduate hearing a yoga question needs enough patience to ask what is actually happening before answering a version of the question no one asked.

Love asks, Who is the person in front of me?

Truth asks, What claim is being made, and is it compatible with following Christ?

Function asks, What is this practice doing in this life?

Formation asks, Who and what is this person becoming through repeated participation?

Hold all four questions together. That is the ministry work.

The work is patient, but it is not passive. It is clear, but it is not cold. It belongs to all of us because spiritual seeking belongs to all of us. The gospel is not for a distant population we have learned to analyze. It is good news for the person across the table, the person in the pew, the person leading the room, and the person asking the question inside us.

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 53 Communities You’ve Never Heard Of takes up the online communities that can introduce and interpret 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 responding to a specific practice involving discernment, our piece When Your Gut Becomes Your God: The Quiet Crisis of Christian Discernment addresses the underlying authority question that can drive many of these practices.

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