Your People Are Spiritually Seeking. So Are You.

What Three Years of Research and One Alpha Course Taught Me

When I began this research, I thought I knew where my people were. They were out there. On Reddit threads at midnight, in Twitter polls, in the comment sections of TikTok spirituality reels, in private Discord servers, in conversations with AI chatbots that no ministry leader would ever read. For nearly three years, I lived in those digital spaces. I coded posts.

I mapped discourse. I built theory. I learned the vocabulary of contemporary spiritual seeking until I could read a Reddit thread or a Twitter poll and predict, paragraph by paragraph or response by response, where it was going.

My call, as I understood it, was research. I understood my work as applied ministry intelligence, and my people happened to be outside the Church. The Church was where I worshipped. The unchurched was where I worked. The two were related, of course, but they sat in different domains of my life. I was sure of this picture for a long time. I held it carefully, and it held me.

Then I joined the Alpha course, and the picture I had been holding for three years came apart in the space of a few weeks. But before I can tell you about Alpha, I have to tell you about the months that came before it. My Alpha realization did not arrive out of nowhere. It arrived as the embodied confirmation of something that had already been slowly clarifying through a quieter, more interior season.

01 · DiscernmentThe Discernment Season

As a new season began, I found myself in what I can only describe as internal discernment. My research had been going well. Patterns were emerging. The data were telling me something coherent about how we seek meaning, healing, and the divine outside institutional religion. I had spent months building a theoretical framework that explained why the contradictions in the data were not contradictions at all, but predictable features of a deeper structure. I will introduce that framework later in this post.

For now, what matters is that the intellectual work was alive in a way I had not expected. I loved it. The rigor of systematic research. The slow process of translating complex findings into accessible frameworks. The discipline of testing my own hypotheses against the data and watching them survive or fail. All of it. I had stumbled into, by the prompting of the Holy Spirit, work that I knew was mine.

But something else was alive too, and it was not so easy to name.

I had the call. I was sure of the call. What I did not have was the form. The shape of it. I knew the research was the work, but the research alone was not the whole work. I kept turning over a question that I could not quite answer. If this research is for the Church, what is the Church supposed to do with it?

The research could go out as blog posts, social media reflections, and infographics inviting spiritual seekers to consider Christianity. That would be one form of the work. But the Church the spiritual seekers were being invited into needed to know what was coming. How to prepare. How to receive and form the people walking through its doors. And the Church the spiritual seekers were being invited into also needed, in many cases, to be formed itself.

I held this question through prayer, with God, my husband, and my family. It was in that prayer that I received what I now understand to have been the answer to the question I had been carrying. The phrase came simply, the way the Spirit often speaks. Spiritual formation. The answer to your question. It came with an image of something being written, repeatedly, like a phrase being drilled in.

I did not know what spiritual formation was, not really. I researched it afterward and found the term frustratingly vague. The internet definitions are broad. Some emphasize spiritual disciplines. Some emphasize discipleship. Some emphasize contemplative practice. None seemed specific enough to answer the specific question I had been asking.

But I made a note, the way you do when you are not sure what something means but you suspect you will need to know. And, with God, I kept working.

02 · FormationWhat the Research Had Been Describing All Along

It was only weeks later, looking back across the writing I had been producing and the questions that had been driving me, that I saw it.

Spiritual formation is the work of helping people be shaped into Christlikeness. It is not only teaching, which can become information transfer. It is not only evangelism, which can stop at conversion. It is not only pastoral care in a moment of crisis. It is the slow, intentional process of forming souls. The shaping of the interior life. The work of becoming, over time, the kind of person whose interior architecture has been remade by the presence of Christ.

I had been describing formation work without using the word.

For three years, I had been studying what shapes contemporary souls. What forms are available to people who are searching. What the digital environment teaches its participants to want, trust, fear, and mistrust. What practices, frameworks, and authorities are at work in the spiritual lives of people who would never call themselves religious. The research was, in its essence, a description of formation. Not Christian formation. Other forms.

It described the formation of the sovereign self through the affordances of digital platforms, the vocabulary of therapeutic culture, the felt authority of intuition, and the communal validation of online communities. I had been mapping the formation of souls outside the Church for years without knowing that this was the word for it.

And once I had the word, the question I had been carrying came clear too.

If contemporary souls are being formed in spaces the Church cannot see, and if some of those souls eventually find their way back to the Church, then the Church needs to understand the formation they have already received. Not as a curiosity, but as a precondition for serving the formation that comes next. You cannot serve a person’s formation well if you do not understand the formation they bring with them.

The work of the Church in this moment is not just to invite spiritual seekers back. It is to be ready when they arrive. It is to become the kind of community that can receive someone who has spent five years building a sovereign self in digital spaces and meet them, not with formulas, but with the patient, intentional, communal work of being slowly remade into the image of Christ.

This is what the research had been describing all along.

It is also where I started to feel something that I would not have called grief if you had asked me at the time, but that I now know was grief.

03 · GriefThe Grief

For a spiritual seeker carrying church-related harm, walking into a church can require an extraordinary amount of trust. The data help explain what many ministry leaders are already seeing. The Athority Ministries® Authority Loop study found that religious-trauma framing appeared in thirty-two distinct online communities, the widest spread of any concept studied. In mental-health-adjacent communities, harm framing appeared in 71.4 percent of the analyzed threads.

Some people considering a return are not arriving from neutral ground. They may be carrying a wound connected to a church or leader they once trusted. For them, stepping through the door of a sanctuary can mean risking the possibility that what happened before could happen again.

I was, and am, glad that people are coming back. The Holy Spirit is doing something in this generation that the Church should not miss. But I started to be afraid of what the people coming back would find.

Not because the Church is failing on the whole. Many congregations are doing extraordinary work. Many ministry leaders are pouring themselves out for the souls in their care. But in some places, the formation of the Church has not yet caught up with the formation of the souls walking through its doors.

Some spiritual seekers are arriving from a culture that taught them to trust the interior voice, mistrust external authority, read the church as a system of control, and keep what feels right while discarding what hurts. They may enter congregations that have absorbed some of the same cultural patterns without recognizing them. The result can be a kind of soft mismatch. The spiritual seeker is met with a Christianity that confirms the suspicion that there is nothing here they did not already have.

That is the grief. Not at the spiritual seekers. Not at the Church. At the gap between what is being walked into and what is being offered. The gap exists not because anyone meant for it to, but because the Church has not always had the framework to see what is happening. This work is an attempt to close that gap.

04 · AlphaAlpha

And then I went to Alpha.

I went as a participant, a Christian who had said yes to a season of being formed by what the course offered. I went with my own questions, my own places of needing more of Christ, my own quiet sense that there was work in me that the Holy Spirit was not finished doing.

What I did not expect was the depth at which the Holy Spirit was about to work. Alpha has been one of the most transformative church experiences I have had, one of the places the Holy Spirit has used to work on me at the deepest level. I am a spiritual seeker. I do not have it figured out. And God, in His kindness, used Alpha to reveal me to myself.

In the first week, as I sat across from other participants and listened to them talk about their lives, I started to recognize the questions. The questions I had been holding in my own interior life were the same questions the people around me were holding in theirs.

The question of whether the voice in our heads is God’s voice or our own anxiety. The question of whether there are parts of the Christian story we have quietly set aside because they are hard, rather than letting them shape us in full. The question of whether we trust our gut more than the sermon, more than the witness of the body of Christ, more than the long Christian tradition.

They were the same questions I had spent years studying in Reddit threads, Twitter polls, and online conversations. They were not being asked at the volume the online communities asked them, because we had been formed in a different vocabulary. But the questions underneath were the same. And I was asking them too.

The questions I had been studying among Spiritual But Not Religious communities, I realized as I listened, were not confined to people who identify that way. Spiritually skeptical and spiritually curious people ask them. People who have been in the same pew for thirty years can carry them quietly too. The population I had been researching was distinct, but the questions beneath its discourse also lived, in different forms, inside the Church. They were part of being human in this cultural moment, trying to bear the weight of meaning.

In that broader, human sense, we are all spiritual seekers. Some of us are digital natives, forming our beliefs in the comment sections of strangers. Some of us are vagabonds, picking up practices and putting them down as we go. Some of us have been in the same congregation for forty years, faithfully present every Sunday and still asking, in the quiet hours, the questions our pastors and leaders have not been able to answer.

Some of us are pastors, teachers, ministry directors, and lay leaders who are still asking those questions anyway. And some of us are sitting in an Alpha course, having said yes to being formed, only to discover that the framework we have been researching reaches us too.

That reframe changed the way I understood my own call. I had been picturing myself in solitude in a kind of public square, doing research that could only be done outside the Church because that was where I had assumed my people were. Alpha showed me what I had been missing. The framework reaches the spiritual seeker outside the Church. It reaches the spiritual seeker inside the Church. It reaches the researcher studying it. It reached me, in the seat next to theirs.

My people are also in the pews. And I am one of them.

05 · The frameworkThe Wounded Sovereign Paradox

The research program I had been leading for three years had a name by then. The Wounded Sovereign Paradox is the framework I named to explain the contradictions in the data, an extension of the Control-Surrender Paradox theory I had named earlier in the research. Through the Holy Spirit’s prompting, I shared it with the leadership of my church, with my family, and now with you. I developed both frameworks from the data. Both enter prior conversations rather than claiming to invent them.

The broader theological, sociological, and philosophical conversation about autonomous selfhood and spiritual sovereignty runs from Jacques Maritain through Charles Taylor’s “buffered self” and into contemporary discussion. That conversation also includes sociologist Christian Smith’s account of moral individualism in Lost in Transition, along with the related critiques of therapeutic culture developed in Philip Rieff’s The Triumph of the Therapeutic and Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism. The broader concept of surrender as a paradoxical path to control has prior treatment in the psychology of religion, notably in Pargament’s work, and across spiritual traditions including Christian, Buddhist, and Stoic.

My contribution names specific structural patterns in contemporary spiritual seeking that this prior literature anticipates but does not fully describe. I will spend the rest of this series unpacking what these patterns mean, what the evidence is for them, and what they ask of the Church. For now, the simplest version of the Wounded Sovereign Paradox is this.

When we move spiritual authority from outside ourselves, from institutions, Scripture, and tradition, to inside ourselves, to intuition, personal experience, and what feels right, we ask a fragile thing to do a sovereign thing’s work.

The instrument we now rely on to know what is true is the same instrument wounded by whatever made us start searching in the first place. The result can be a crisis that reproduces the anxiety we were trying to escape.

The wounded sovereign cannot bear the weight of their own sovereignty.

That is the framework in two sentences. The research corpus behind it is extensive. It includes hundreds of social media polls drawing more than twenty thousand responses and hundreds of Reddit threads carrying thousands more. Across that corpus, the pattern appears consistently.

External authority accounts for less than one percent of the analyzed response selections. The Bible appears in none of the winning answers in the analyzed poll corpus. Feeling-based responses win roughly five times more often than thinking-based responses.

In separate questions, 96 percent of respondents acknowledged that spiritual people experience anxiety, 85 percent expected to experience multiple dark nights of the soul, and 60 percent equated the Holy Spirit directly with their own intuition. The sample sizes and study references for these findings appear in the Source Notes below.

The contradictions are not random. They form a recognizable structure. A framework that promises liberation can reproduce the anxiety it was meant to relieve because the instrument tasked with finding the path is the same instrument marked by the suffering that started the search. In the corpus, that tension appears to move toward three recurring outcomes. A person may continue seeking, surrender to an external authority, often Christianity, or stabilize through partial integration.

That is the Wounded Sovereign Paradox. It is not a description of someone else’s pathology. It names a gravitational pull within late-modern life, including among those of us inside the Church.

06 · The mirrorWe Are All Spiritual Seekers

The reframe I have been circling is this. The Wounded Sovereign Paradox does not stop at the church door. It does not stop at conversion. It does not stop at decades of faithful participation in a local body of believers.

Many of us in the Church have moved authority inward in our own quiet ways. We may trust our gut over Scripture when we are tired. We may soften the hard edges of doctrines that have come to feel implausible. We may absorb the language of resonance without noticing until we describe our spiritual lives in terms that would have been unfamiliar to our grandparents in the faith. In some cases, we may treat the Holy Spirit as a confirmation system for what we already wanted rather than as a Person with His own will.

The framework reaches us because the human pull beneath it reaches us. We know the long search for an authority we can trust that will not crush us. We know the exhaustion of trying to carry sovereignty in places we have not yet handed over to God. It is not foreign. It is human.

This is the first extension of the framework that I want to commend to you. The spiritual seekers we are studying, learning to engage, and learning to receive are a distinct population, but the underlying human struggle is not foreign to us. It may appear at a different volume or through a different vocabulary.

The work of the Church in this moment is not just to reach people outside it. It is to recognize what the framework exposes in us, including the parts of the wound we have not yet named in ourselves.

07 · LeadershipEven Those in Leadership

There is a second extension, harder to say and necessary to say. The Wounded Sovereign Paradox may reach people in leadership too. A title, credential, pulpit, classroom, or seat of spiritual care does not remove the human struggle with wound, authority, and surrender.

We need to be precise about what the research can support. The data behind this framework were drawn from online discourse, not from a direct study of congregations or ministry leaders. What follows is a ministry-facing extension of the framework, not a measured finding from the online corpus.

The framework gives leaders a serious question to ask of themselves. What can happen when a person exercises spiritual authority from a wound they have not surrendered to God?

One possible warning sign is that discipleship begins to give way to management. A person’s gifts may be welcomed when they serve existing ministry priorities, then treated differently when those gifts develop beyond a leader’s direct involvement. Volunteers may become valued primarily for what they produce rather than for how they are being formed. Relationships may begin to narrow around protecting a position, a ministry, or a sense of control.

None of these outcomes is inevitable, and the framework should not be used to diagnose a leader from a distance. They are warning signs of what can happen when wounded sovereignty meets spiritual authority. In those moments, the person whose formation should be part of the ministry’s care can instead experience management, restriction, or harm.

The concern is not confined to one role. A pastor may begin to treat a congregation as territory. An elder or ministry director may protect standing rather than welcome honest discernment. A care pastor, chaplain, or discipleship leader may allow spiritual care to become controlling when authority feels challenged. A leader at any level may manage information to protect a position.

The point is not that leadership makes someone a wounded sovereign. The point is that leadership does not make any of us immune. We cannot offer the gospel as a credible alternative to the wounded sovereignty of the spiritual seeker if we are exercising wounded sovereignty over the souls in our care. The question is not which ministry role exempts us. The question is whether we are willing to let the framework become a mirror and yield our own authority to God.

The framework reaches leadership because leaders are human too. The gospel offers the same relief to every one of us.

08 · The seriesWhat This Series Is, and Is Not

The series that follows this post is one attempt to give the Church language for what the research describes and what living in this cultural moment confirms. Eight posts in total, including this one. Each takes up a theme of the Wounded Sovereign Paradox and develops what it asks of the Church.

The next post takes up one of the most consequential findings for ministry in the research corpus: the Jesus Exception, the pattern by which spiritual seekers retain Jesus with affection while rejecting Christianity with hostility. The post after that asks why they came wounded and why the Church sometimes felt like the wrong place to bring that wound. Then comes a question Christians and spiritual seekers both ask in the quiet hours: Is that the Holy Spirit, or is that anxiety?

The series then turns to the unbundling happening inside the pews as well as outside them, the exhaustion of being one’s own god, and what the gospel offers as an alternative. It examines why traditional arguments from external authority have stopped working and closes with a synthesis on engaging spiritual seekers without losing the gospel. The series asks us to do that work as people who first recognize ourselves in what the research reveals.

I write this series as one wounded sovereign trying to make sense of a framework that reaches everyone, including me. The work is rigorous because it has to be. It is pastoral because it has to be. It is honest because anything less would fail the people it is trying to serve and the truth that none of us are exempt from the human pull the data describe.

I have known the framework in the corpus, the discourse, the threads, and the polls. I have also known it in the long, slow, often costly work of being formed by Christ inside a local church that includes leaders, at every level of ministry, who are themselves still being formed.

The framework is not a theory I observed from a distance. It describes a gravitational pull all of us are navigating, one only the gospel of Jesus Christ has the power to undo.

I invite you to read the rest of this series with that posture. Not as a field guide for engaging them. As a mirror for understanding us. The questions the spiritual seeker is asking are not foreign. They are human. They are, more often than we admit, our own. And the answer the gospel offers is not just an answer for them. It is an answer for all of us.

09 · What to read nextWhat to Read Next

Continue the series with Your People Love Jesus. They Are Done With Christianity.

Then read Why They Came Wounded for the wound-centered ministry context behind spiritual seeking.

Read Is That the Holy Spirit, or Is That Anxiety? for the series’ practical discernment framework.