Why Spiritual Practices Don't Automatically Change You (And What Actually Does)

There have been far too many times in my life when I've experienced "the gap."

I've done the practices. The quiet times, the fasting, the journaling, the disciplines I've taught and modeled and believed in for years. And then somewhere along the way I noticed a disturbing gap — between the person I'm striving to become and the person I actually am.

Maybe you can relate. Perhaps you've seen it in the people you serve, too. They show up. They're sincere. They're doing the practices. And still, the deep change you long to see stays just out of reach.

If that's familiar, I want to offer two points of encouragement. First, you're not failing. Second, you're not imagining it.

The Problem No One Names: "Nontransformation"

I recently had the privilege of participating in a spiritual formation conference at the Martin Institute at Westmont College. We all read and interacted with nine papers written by theologians, philosophers, and psychologists, each addressing the question of Christian virtue formation from a different angle.

What struck me wasn't their differences. It was their agreement. Across disciplines and across centuries, they kept circling the same uncomfortable diagnosis.

The psychologist Brittany Tausen even gave it a name, borrowed from theologian Simeon Zahl: the problem of nontransformation. Christian practices, it turns out, do not automatically produce Christlike people. 

In fact, under certain conditions, they can even make things worse. In one study Tausen describes, a hospitality project with unhoused neighbors actually increased dehumanization among the students who had the most contact.

Let that settle for a moment. The practice was good. The intention was good. 

And yet for a subset of students, the result was the opposite of the project's goal.

Joseph Clair, drawing on Augustine, put his finger on why. He calls the air we breathe "secular Pelagianism" — the quiet assumption, baked into our self-optimization moment, that we already have everything we need inside ourselves to fix ourselves. 

"The treadmill of self-optimization," he writes, "is a cruel master." We've slipped the habit-tracker logic of Atomic Habits into our spiritual lives without noticing that we swapped out the engine.

Pamela King, a developmental psychologist, says it even more pointedly: "Even 'practicing unto virtue' can be quite different from 'practicing unto the Spirit' or 'practicing unto Love.'"

In her response paper, Liz Hall (who happens to be my wife), suggested that we must be clear on the ultimate telos, or goal, of virtue development: intimacy with God. If the goal becomes something else (say, to gain control of my own growth process), we've lost our way.

In other words, when we engage in spiritual practices apart from their proper meaning and transcendent telos, they don't develop virtue or lead to true transformation. The practices are not the goal — and they don't, in and of themselves, transform us.

So here's the underlying question — the one the entire conference was really asking, and the one I suspect you're already asking: if the practices themselves don't transform us, what does?

Three Ways We Try to Change Ourselves (and Why They Fall Short)

Let me start with what doesn't. 

Over the years I've observed people engage three particular strategies — and I've used all of them myself.

There's the Nike approach — just do it — where we try to power through on willpower, hoping that if we just try hard enough at our disciplines, growth will automatically follow.

There's the spiritual high approach, where we chase the next emotional experience, staying one step ahead of our pain.

And there's the intellectual approach, where we believe that if we just understood enough about God in our heads, our souls would catch up.

“Here's what all three have in common. They're rooted in an effort to control rather than connect.”

They're attempts to protect ourselves from pain rather than pathways into the kind of relationship that actually changes us. 

It's noteworthy that nearly every finding from that conference circles back to this same theme. 

Clair's "self-optimization" is the Nike approach. 

The spiritual high is what Miguel Farias warns about when he traces how modern "therapeutic" meditation got severed from its ancient roots — engineered for a reliable sense of calm rather than the harder, deeper work of transformation. 

And King's and Tausen's worry about a formation that never gets past the head is the intellectual approach.

What Actually Transforms Us: Loved Into Loving

So what does transform us?

This is the heart of relational spirituality, and it's older than any of us: we are loved into loving (1 John 4:19). 

Deep transformation happens through secure relationships — not through trying harder or knowing more. It's both the starting point and the destination of the Christian life.

Two Ways of Knowing

There's a reason for this, and it's woven into how we're wired. 

We actually know things in two different ways. 

There's explicit knowledge — the head knowledge you can put into words. 

And there's implicit (relational) knowledge — the gut-level, felt sense of how relationships work, formed long before you had language for it. Your felt sense of God lives in that second kind of knowing.

“Your brain doesn't update that implicit layer based on information or declarations. It updates based on relational experience.”

You can know, explicitly, that God loves you, and still feel, implicitly, that you have to earn your keep. More information — by itself — won't close that gap. 

Only a new relational experience will — a moment when you're met with love exactly where you expected to be judged or abandoned. This is what I call a loving contrast experience. Perfect love for that moment.

Why Friendship Was Augustine's Highest Practice

This is why Clair, reading a bishop who died sixteen hundred years ago, arrives somewhere that sounds remarkably like attachment science. 

The practice Augustine prized above the others wasn't solitude or study. It was friendship — which Clair describes, in his own words, as "a community of mutuality, secure attachment, and delight." 

And then he says something every one of us needs to hear: without the context of healthy friendship, our other practices cannot gain traction in our souls.

And this is also why Bruce Hindmarsh, working from a different stream of the tradition, lands in a similar place: it's contemplation — slow, loving attention to Christ himself — that forms real virtue in us, not self-improvement or practice approached as a technique.

“The practices were never the problem. They were just never meant to carry the weight alone.”

They were meant to be experienced in the context of relationships.

Four Practices for This Week

So what do you do with this — this week?

First, change the question. Instead of "What practice should I add?" ask, "Where am I trying to control rather than connect?" 

That single shift will tell you more about your formation than another reading plan ever could.

Second, find one spiritual friend. This was the practice Augustine prized above all others — so make it a priority, not an afterthought. 

Find one person who offers both genuine comfort and honest challenge — not a mentor with answers, not an accountability partner tracking your performance, but someone you can risk being truly known by. 

Then take the actual risk: share one true thing you'd normally keep to yourself. Your soul updates based on new relational evidence. Give it some.

Third, practice contemplation. Not as analysis or technique, but as slow, loving attention to Christ. Take a few unhurried minutes this week to stop doing for God and simply be with Him — gazing on His love rather than working at it.

Fourth, bring your real self to God — including the parts your attachment filter says aren't welcome. The doubt, the anger, the fear. 

The Psalms are full of this kind of raw honesty, and lament is a spiritual practice precisely because it integrates head knowledge and heart knowledge. 

God can handle the real you. The question is whether you'll let Him meet you there.

So — Should You Still Pursue Practices?

Yes, pursue practices. But do so as an act of surrender to God, with the goal of intimacy with Christ.

That posture — surrender rather than control — is the only thing I've ever seen that changes us for good.

You don't will yourself into being a more loving person. You're loved into one.

Key Takeaways

• A growing consensus across theology and psychology names the problem of nontransformation: spiritual practices don't automatically produce Christlike people — and severed from their true goal, they can even backfire.
• The three default strategies for change — trying harder (Nike), chasing emotional highs, and accumulating head knowledge — are all rooted in control rather than connection.
• We are loved into loving. Deep transformation happens through secure relationships with God and others, not through effort or information alone.
• We know in two ways — explicit (head) and implicit/relational (gut-level felt sense) — and the implicit layer only updates through relational experience, not more information.
• Pursue practices as an act of surrender, with the goal of intimacy with Christ. The practices were never meant to carry the weight alone.

Ready to Go Deeper?

Discover your attachment filter. Download the free Attachment Filter Matrix — a simple framework for naming your pattern and seeing how it shapes how you experience God and others.

→ https://www.relationalspirituality.co/resources/attachment-filter-matrix

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→ https://quiz.relationalspirituality.co

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