Why Spiritual Growth Stalls — and What the Data Say Actually Moves It

Not long ago, a friend of mine — I'll call him Jared — shared a struggle that I've also experienced many times.

Jared runs a nonprofit ministry, and by almost any measure it's bearing real fruit. People are encountering God through the work. Lives are being changed in deep, lasting ways. He's faithful in his own walk, too — he prays, he's in the Word, he's pursuing God the way you'd hope a ministry leader would.

But that day he was worn down. Resources are thin and getting thinner. He's wearing five hats and the pace isn't sustainable. The finances keep him up at night. And then he said something that struck me: "Honestly, it feels like God has abandoned me in this. The work is good. The fruit is real. And yet God is nowhere to be found."

You could hear the logic underneath it: If the ministry is bearing this much fruit, wouldn't God show up to sustain it? He was doing the practices. He was seeing the impact. And he still felt profoundly alone — as if the closeness he was counting on wasn't there.

If you've ever felt some version of that — the practices are in place, the work may even be going well, but the connection isn't — I want to share something that I hope will be helpful. Because we recently looked at the data, and they point somewhere most of us don't expect.

What More Than 37,000 Christians Revealed

We analyzed the responses of more than 25,000 Christians who took the Spiritual Transformation Inventory, along with a separate sample of nearly 12,000 people who took the SpiritPulse (both assessments I developed). I wanted to answer a deceptively simple question: what actually predicts whether someone flourishes spiritually?

The usual assumptions would say: the spiritual disciplines. How consistently you pray, read Scripture, attend church. And those things matter. Let me say that clearly, because I don't want to be misunderstood: spiritual practices are essential. They are not the problem.

But here's what the data showed. When we put all the factors side by side and asked which one best predicts spiritual flourishing, the frequency of practices came in surprisingly low. The single strongest predictor — by a wide margin — was something different.

It was a person's felt sense of closeness to God — their experienced intimacy with God. Not how often they engaged in the practices, but how connected to God they actually felt.

Felt intimacy with God predicted flourishing roughly five times more strongly than how often someone engaged in spiritual practices.

The gap wasn't small. And when we added that one factor (intimacy with God) into the picture, our ability to explain why some people flourish and others plateau jumped dramatically — from less than half to about two-thirds.

Does How Much We Serve Predict Our Flourishing?

I found myself thinking about Jared here, so we checked something related: does how much we serve predict our flourishing? On its own, service and outreach activity did track with flourishing. But once we accounted for felt intimacy with God, that connection nearly disappeared — the same pattern we saw with the practices. Serving, like praying, seems to nourish us through the relationship it flows from, not on its own. And I suspect the same is true for the fruitfulness of our work. You can pour yourself into good work that's genuinely bearing fruit and still run dry, if the felt connection with God isn't there.

Then we checked something else, because I wondered if this was just a young person's pattern. It wasn't. Among Christians who'd walked with God for more than a decade, felt intimacy still predicted flourishing far better than practice frequency. The same held for leaders in their thirties, forties, and fifties.

And in the second dataset, when we asked people what wasn't going well in their spiritual lives, the most common answer out of everything they could have named was simply this: closeness to God. Not a lack of knowledge. Not a lack of discipline. A felt distance.

Why This Happens

So what's going on here?

Here's how I've come to understand it. We've inherited an assumption that transformation works in a mechanistic way: put the right practices in, and growth comes out the other end. Pray more, read more, serve more — and you'll grow. When that doesn't happen, we conclude we must not be doing enough. So we add more practices. And the distance often grows.

But that's not how relationships work, and our connection with God is fundamentally a relationship. Think about a marriage. Two people can share a home, a schedule, a calendar full of activities — and still feel like strangers. The activities aren't the problem. But the activities alone don't create intimacy. Intimacy comes from something embedded within the activities: felt safety, attunement, being truly known.

This is the heart of what I call Relational Spirituality. The spiritual practices are real and they matter — but they're not the engine of transformation. They're the context in which a relationship can deepen. Prayer isn't a transaction that earns closeness; it's a place where closeness can happen. When we treat the practice as the goal, we can do all of it faithfully and still end up like Jared — engaged in practices, having an impact, and yet feeling relationally distant.

The data are telling us what Scripture has been telling us all along. "We love because he first loved us" (1 John 4:19). We are, quite literally, loved into loving. Transformation flows from a felt experience of being loved by God — not from the volume of our spiritual output or impact.

So How Do We Cultivate Closeness to God?

Which raises the real question: if felt closeness to God is what matters most, how do we actually cultivate it?

Here's the first thing to say — you can't manufacture intimacy by trying harder. The moment we treat "feel closer to God" as one more thing to achieve, we're back to a mechanistic approach. Intimacy can't be produced on demand, just as you can't force a plant to grow. But it can be cultivated, by creating the conditions in which it grows. And those conditions rarely unfold in a straight line. Deep growth is nonlinear — it moves in seasons, with plateaus and setbacks and sudden openings.

Over three decades of research and practice, I've come to see five interconnected conditions that cultivate this kind of felt connection with God. Below is a brief overview of them:

•     Deep, secure relationships — a few "growth companions" who offer both comfort when you're struggling and challenge when you need to stretch. We are loved into loving, and our felt sense of God's love is very often mediated through people who embody it.

•     Contemplative practices as sanctuary — not more religious activity, but space simply to be with God rather than perform for him.

•     Learning to suffer well — turning toward God in our pain through honest lament rather than pretending we're fine. (This is exactly where Jared is — and lament, not performance, is the way through.)

•     Transforming our attachment patterns — the protective habits that shape how we experience God, often below our awareness.

•     Community — because none of this deep growth happens alone.

You don't need to work on all five at once. Start with the one that resonates, and as it grows, it tends to strengthen the others.

Four Ways to Begin This Week

So what does this mean for you, practically — first in your own life, and then in the people you lead?

•     Measure connection, not just completion. This week, instead of asking "Did I do my devotions?", ask a different question: "Where did I actually feel close to God this week — and where did I just go through the motions?" That second question is the more honest measure, and it's the one the data say matters most.

•     Notice what actually brings you close — and lean into it. We're each wired differently, and what awakens our sense of God's presence shifts across seasons of life. For some it's time in nature; for others it's studying and meditating on Scripture, worship, serving, or an unhurried conversation with a spiritual director or mentor. Pay attention to what genuinely renews your felt connection with God right now — not what you think should — and make more room for it.

•     Receive before you do. If prayer has become a task to complete, slow it down. Before you ask God for anything or work through your list, sit for two minutes and simply receive — let yourself be loved before you do anything for him. You may be surprised how much the felt connection, not the duration, is what you've been missing.

•     For those you coach and lead, change the first question you ask. Most of us, when someone says they feel stuck spiritually, instinctively prescribe more practices: pray more, get in the Word, join a group. The data suggest a better first question: "When you're with God, do you feel close to him — or far?" That single question opens the door to the thing that actually drives growth, instead of piling on activity that may deepen the distance.

I know how counterintuitive this can feel, especially for those of us who've built our spiritual lives — and sometimes our ministries — around faithful practice. I'm not asking you to abandon any of it. I'm inviting you to put it back in its proper context: in the service of a relationship, not in place of one.

In the end, you were not made to perform for God. You were made to be loved by him — and then, out of that fullness, to love others. That doesn't lower the bar. It resets the context to focus on the most important goal.

Key Takeaways

•     Across more than 37,000 Christians, felt closeness to God predicted spiritual flourishing far more strongly than the frequency of spiritual practices — roughly five times more.

•     Spiritual practices remain essential, but they are the context for a relationship with God, not the engine of transformation on their own.

•     The most-endorsed struggle Christians named was simply a felt distance from God — not a lack of knowledge or discipline.

•     Felt intimacy with God can't be manufactured by trying harder, but it can be cultivated through five interconnected conditions — and deep growth is nonlinear.

•     Start by measuring connection over completion, and by asking those you lead whether they feel close to God — not just whether they're doing the practices.

Ready to Go Deeper?

Attachment Filter Matrix. Curious how your own way of relating to God shapes your spiritual growth? This free guide walks you through the patterns that shape your connection with God — and how to work with them. Get the free guide.

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