Why one of the most consequential shifts in Christianity isn’t a denomination; it’s a return to practice.
By Rev. Cameron Trimble, CEO of Convergence
For most of my adult life, those of us who care about the future of Christianity have been watching the numbers. We track worship attendance, membership, giving, baptisms, seminary enrollment, clergy shortages, church closures, and the rise of people who check “none” when asked about their religious affiliation. Those numbers describe a profound institutional shift that none of us should minimize.
The latest Religious Landscape Study from Pew Research Center confirms just how significant that shift has been. In 2007, 78 percent of American adults identified as Christian. By 2023–24, that number had fallen to 62 percent. During roughly the same period, the religiously unaffiliated grew from 16 percent to 29 percent of the adult population. Only one-third of Americans now say they attend religious services in person at least once a month, and only a quarter say they attend weekly. The rate of decline appears to have slowed in the past few years, but the long-term transformation of American religious life is unmistakable.
If those were the only numbers we had, the story would be straightforward. America is secularizing. Religion is fading. Churches are dying because people are losing interest in spiritual questions.
Except that the rest of the research makes that explanation increasingly difficult to sustain. Nearly three-quarters of American adults describe themselves as at least somewhat spiritual. Eighty-three percent say they believe in God or a universal spirit, 86 percent believe that human beings have a soul or spirit in addition to a physical body, and roughly eight in ten believe there is something spiritual beyond the natural world even if we cannot see it. Half of religiously unaffiliated Americans describe themselves as at least somewhat spiritual. In another large Pew study focused specifically on spirituality, 70 percent of Americans met its definition of spiritual, including 22 percent who were classified as spiritual but not religious. That complicates the story considerably.
People may be leaving churches, but many of them have not stopped wondering about God. They have not stopped having experiences they regard as sacred. They have not stopped searching for meaning, connection, transcendence, or some larger reality in which their lives participate. What appears to be weakening is not necessarily spiritual longing itself. It is the assumption that established religious institutions are the only, or even the most trustworthy, places to pursue it.
The research becomes even more interesting when we look at what people actually do. Pew found that 38 percent of American adults meditate at least several times a month. Nearly two-thirds say they regularly spend time looking inward or centering themselves, and 44 percent say they do this at least partly to experience connection with their true self, with other people, or with something larger than themselves. Among people who identify as spiritual but not religious, 58 percent say they regularly engage in centering practices for precisely these kinds of reasons.
These practices are not all religious, much less Christian, and we should not pretend that everybody using a meditation app is secretly becoming Meister Eckhart. Still, the long-term movement toward contemplative practices is striking. Data from the National Center for Health Statistics found that the percentage of American adults reporting meditation within the previous year more than tripled between 2012 and 2017, from 4.1 percent to 14.2 percent. The questions used in that study were about health practices rather than religious devotion, so the finding cannot be treated as evidence of a mystical revival. What it does show is that practices once associated primarily with monasteries, temples, retreat centers, and spiritual teachers have moved steadily into the cultural mainstream.
The pattern appears among younger people as well. Springtide Research Institute surveyed more than 4,500 people between the ages of 13 and 25 about what it calls “sacred moments,” experiences marked by awe, gratitude, deep truth, wonder, or interconnectedness. Fifty-five percent said they had experienced one. Among those who had, sacred experiences were more commonly reported in nature or in the privacy of home than in a place of worship. Even among young people who identified as atheist, agnostic, or nothing in particular, substantial numbers reported experiences they understood as sacred.
Many churches have misunderstood what is happening around us. We have interpreted declining institutional participation as spiritual indifference when it may sometimes be spiritual migration. The sacred has not necessarily disappeared from people’s lives. It has slipped the boundaries we drew around it.
The reasons people themselves give for leaving organized religion reinforce that possibility. In a 2025 Pew survey, 54 percent of religiously unaffiliated Americans said an important reason they do not need religion is that they do not need it in order to be spiritual. Half said they dislike religious organizations, and nearly half said they do not trust religious leaders. Meanwhile, among people who remained within the religion of their childhood, 61 percent said an important reason was that their religion fulfilled their spiritual needs, while 56 percent said it gave their lives meaning. Those numbers are worth sitting with. They suggest that people have not simply stopped asking spiritual questions. They are making judgments about whether religious communities actually help them live those questions.
The mystics reenter the story here. I do not mean “mystical” in the popular sense of something magical, irrational, paranormal, or vaguely esoteric. The Christian mystical tradition has sometimes included visions and extraordinary experiences, but those have never been its center. Evelyn Underhill, one of the great twentieth-century interpreters of Christian mysticism, offered a wonderfully concise definition more than a century ago: “Mysticism is the art of union with Reality.” For Underhill, the point was not the accumulation of unusual spiritual experiences. It was transformation. The mystic sought a way of living in deeper communion with God and, therefore, in a truer relationship with the world.
Christianity has always contained this stream. The desert mothers and fathers went into the wilderness to strip away distraction and learn how to attend to God. Hildegard of Bingen experienced creation as shimmering with divine vitality. Francis of Assisi discovered kinship with creatures Christians had been taught to regard merely as possessions. Meister Eckhart probed the mysterious depths at which the human soul encounters God beyond all our inadequate names for God. Julian of Norwich lived through plague and social upheaval and still came to trust the enduring reality of divine love. Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross mapped the interior life with extraordinary psychological sophistication. The anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing taught that God could not finally be mastered by the intellect but could be approached through a loving attention deeper than concepts.
Nor does Christian mysticism belong only to medieval Europeans. Orthodox Christianity preserved contemplative traditions such as hesychasm. Quakers built communities around the practice of communal silence and attentiveness to the Inner Light. Black spiritual traditions cultivated forms of contemplation capable of sustaining people amid slavery, segregation, violence, and relentless assaults on human dignity. Howard Thurman, whose spirituality profoundly influenced the civil rights movement, understood the inner life and public action as inseparable. In a 1945 lecture he put it beautifully: “The clue to the outer world of relations is found in the inner world of experience.”
So the mystics did not disappear. They kept praying, writing, organizing, resisting, making art, forming communities, and teaching people how to become attentive to God. What happened, particularly within many forms of modern Western Christianity, was that the mystical dimension of faith moved closer to the margins. Churches became extraordinarily skilled at teaching people what Christians were supposed to believe. We developed catechisms, doctrinal statements, membership classes, Sunday schools, seminaries, denominational structures, strategic plans, mission statements, and increasingly sophisticated organizations. Much good came from all of this. Institutions preserve wisdom, organize care, educate generations, protect communities, and make coordinated action possible.
But somewhere along the way, many congregations became much better at explaining Christianity than practicing it.
We can teach the doctrine of prayer without teaching people how to pray. We can preach about Sabbath while maintaining congregational cultures driven by exhaustion. We can proclaim that God is present everywhere while offering people few practices for becoming aware of that presence. We can talk endlessly about discipleship while measuring success primarily through attendance, budgets, programs, and volunteer recruitment. We can even become so focused on saving the institution that the institution begins consuming the spiritual energy it was created to cultivate.
People notice. They also live in a world that makes contemplative depth unusually difficult and unusually necessary. Most of us carry devices designed by some of the brightest minds on the planet to capture and monetize our attention. We absorb wars, disasters, political conflict, advertising, outrage, entertainment, grief, and other people’s carefully curated lives through the same small screen. We are surrounded by information and often starved for wisdom. Our nervous systems receive more stimulation than many of us know how to metabolize. Loneliness grows alongside unprecedented technological connection. Ecological instability confronts us with questions about our relationship to the living world that our economic systems have trained us to avoid.
In such a culture, silence becomes more than a devotional preference. Attention becomes a spiritual discipline. Learning how to remain present to pain without fleeing into numbness or rage becomes a form of moral formation. Recovering a sense of kinship with the Earth becomes a theological necessity. Practicing ways of loosening the ego’s endless demand to control, possess, categorize, and win begins to look surprisingly practical.
This may help explain why the mystics feel so contemporary. They spent centuries studying the very human capacities our culture now places under extraordinary strain: attention, desire, fear, ego, grief, wonder, compassion, surrender, courage, and love. They understood that spiritual maturity does not happen simply because someone assents to an idea. It develops through practice.
Practice assumes that transformation takes time. You do not become compassionate because you attended a lecture on compassion. You do not become contemplative because you agree that contemplation is valuable. You practice silence. You practice listening. You practice Sabbath. You practice forgiveness. You practice relinquishment. You practice noticing beauty. You practice staying present when your instinct is to escape. Eventually those practices begin shaping the person who is doing them.
This is one reason I have become increasingly interested in what we at Convergence have been calling practice-centered belonging. Institutional belonging asks, in effect, “To what organization do you belong?” Practice-centered belonging asks another question: “What way of life are you learning to inhabit with other people?” Religious institutions can support that kind of formation beautifully, but the practices themselves are portable. Prayer can survive the loss of a building. Sabbath does not require a committee. Pilgrimage crosses denominational borders. Contemplation can travel through generations even when organizations disappear.
There is, however, a danger in all of this. Mysticism can become another form of private consumption, a beautifully scented refuge from a suffering world. Christian history gives us plenty of examples of spirituality becoming detached from justice. A contemplative practice that makes us calmer while leaving us less responsive to the suffering of our neighbors is not much of a spiritual achievement.
The deepest mystical traditions insist on the opposite. Howard Thurman’s inward journey nourished a spirituality of liberation. Richard Rohr has spent decades insisting upon the relationship between contemplation and social transformation, arguing that action and contemplation “need and feed each other.” Matthew Fox makes the same connection central to Creation Spirituality. His four paths move through awe and delight, darkness and letting go, creativity, and finally the work of compassion and justice. For Fox, mystical awareness of the sacredness of creation eventually confronts us with the ways creation is desecrated. Awe has consequences.
That connection may be one of the reasons this tradition has so much to offer us now. The world does not need spirituality as anesthesia. We need spiritual practices strong enough to keep our hearts open when closing them would be easier. We need forms of prayer that increase our capacity to encounter another person’s humanity, including people we fear or dislike. We need contemplative disciplines that expose our complicity in systems that harm people and the planet. We need practices that can hold grief without becoming paralyzed by it and anger without allowing anger to consume everything else we are.
Matthew Fox has spent more than fifty years retrieving this neglected stream of Christianity. His work has brought people back into conversation with Eckhart, Hildegard, Aquinas, Julian of Norwich, Thomas Merton, and others while placing their wisdom alongside science, ecological consciousness, creativity, justice, and what Fox calls “deep ecumenism,” the willingness to learn across religious traditions. His central conviction is that mysticism does not belong to a spiritual elite. The capacity for awe, wonder, communion, creativity, and compassion belongs to ordinary human beings.
That is why Convergence is beginning Journey with the Mystics with Matthew Fox. I am not interested in studying these figures because I think the church needs another history lesson. I am interested because I suspect they may know something we need to remember.
We will not agree with everything they believed. We shouldn’t. Some lived within cosmologies we no longer share, cultures whose assumptions we rightly challenge, and institutions capable of both holiness and profound harm. The point is not to imitate medieval Christianity. The invitation is to sit beside people who spent their lives asking what happens when a human being becomes radically available to God.
They offer us something our age cannot easily manufacture: depth.
Maybe that is what lies beneath the numbers. Maybe people are not simply abandoning religion. Some certainly are, and we should respect that choice. Others may be refusing forms of religion that no longer take them deeply enough into the questions that brought human beings to religion in the first place. How do I live with suffering? What am I here for? What deserves my devotion? How do I become less afraid? How do I live in right relationship with other people and the Earth? Is there something larger than the small, defended self I spend so much energy protecting? What does love require of me?
A church can answer those questions with doctrines. The mystics invite us to live our way into them. That distinction could matter enormously for the future of spiritual community. Congregations may discover that one of their most important callings in the decades ahead is not convincing people to become more religious. It may be helping people become more deeply human by creating communities in which ancient practices can be learned, questioned, embodied, and shared.
If that is what is happening, then “the return of the mystics” is not really a return at all. They have been here the whole time. Perhaps we are finally becoming hungry enough to listen.
Notes:
Pew Research Center. “Decline of Christianity in the U.S. Has Slowed, May Have Leveled Off.” February 26, 2025.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/02/26/decline-of-christianity-in-the-us-has-slowed-may-have-leveled-off/
Pew Research Center. “Religious and Spiritual Beliefs.” February 26, 2025.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/02/26/religious-and-spiritual-beliefs/
Alper, Becka A., Chip Rotolo, Patricia Tevington, Justin Nortey, and Asta Kallo. “Spirituality Among Americans.” Pew Research Center, December 7, 2023.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2023/12/07/spirituality-among-americans/
Pew Research Center. “Americans’ Spiritual Practices.” December 7, 2023.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2023/12/07/spiritual-practices/
Clarke, Tainya C., et al. “Use of Yoga, Meditation, and Chiropractors Among U.S. Adults Aged 18 and Over.” National Center for Health Statistics Data Brief No. 325, November 2018.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db325.htm
Springtide Research Institute. “Do Young People Experience Sacred Moments?” August 26, 2025.
https://springtideresearch.org/post/data-drop/do-young-people-experience-sacred-moments
Alper, Becka A., Patricia Tevington, Asta Kallo, and Jeff Diamant. “Why Do Some Americans Leave Their Religion While Others Stay?” Pew Research Center, December 15, 2025.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/12/15/why-do-some-americans-leave-their-religion-while-others-stay/
Underhill, Evelyn. Practical Mysticism: A Little Book for Normal People. 1914.
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/21774
Thurman, Howard. “The Inner Life and World-Mindedness.” 1945. Howard Thurman Papers Project.
https://thurmanpapersproject.org/documents/801
Rohr, Richard. “Action and Contemplation.” Center for Action and Contemplation.
https://cac.org/daily-meditations/action-and-contemplation/
Fox, Matthew. Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality.
https://www.matthewfox.org/books/original-blessing-a-primer-in-creation-spirituality
Fox, Matthew. “95 Theses.”
https://www.matthewfox.org/95-theses
Trimble, Cameron. “The Architecture of Belonging.” Convergence, June 25, 2026.