Connecting the Spiritually Curious to Christ

In his new book, Faith for the Curious, Mark Matlock builds on Barna’s multi-year Engaging the Spiritually Open research, offering new data and practical insights for engaging with spiritually curious people (keep reading for an excerpt from the book below).

As of November 2023, a remarkable 82 percent of U.S. adults say they believe or are open to the possibility that a spiritual or supernatural dimension exists. Additionally, 74 percent express a desire to grow spiritually, and 79 percent affirm their belief in a higher power. This spiritual openness, potentially heightened by the global events of recent years, represents a significant opportunity for meaningful engagement.

Barna CEO David Kinnaman calls this a “new wineskin moment” (referencing Luke 5:37–39).

“A majority in our midst are open to tapping more deeply into their spiritual life. They’re curious. They are more open to Jesus than we might otherwise imagine,” he says.

Alongside this, the spiritually open are also making it clear where the Church falls short, emphasizing the need for the Church to address the trust gap between itself and those who are spiritual but not religious, including many former Christians.

In Faith for the Curious, Matlock provides strategies to cultivate curiosity and foster meaningful spiritual conversations with people of all ages, stages of life and of different faith backgrounds.

Read an excerpt from the book below, and order your copy for more practical, effective ways to better engage with the spiritually curious.

Faith for the Curious

When I helped Barna Group CEO David Kinnaman analyze and frame the research for his book You Lost Me in 2010, I was fascinated with the profile of those we came to call Prodigals.

Prodigals are “ex-Christians”—individuals who once identified as Christians but no longer do. It isn’t just that they’ve left the church, they’ve left their faith behind too. At that time, Prodigals made up about 11 percent of the individuals ages eighteen to twenty-nine that we surveyed. (That number would jump to 22 percent less than a decade later when we surveyed the same age range for Faith for Exiles.)

Often, when Christians think about people like this, they have an image of an angry, cynical know-it-all who is just itching for a theological debate. We tend to think that these Prodigals are bitter and resentful and selfishly want to bring other Christians down to their level. We may use words like exvangelical or deconstructing almost as a warning, to caution other Christians against following that same path.

However, looking deeper at the Prodigals, I found that they didn’t match the picture of the anti-Christian intellectual wanting to debate and destroy the believers of the Christian faith. There were usually two reasons why these individuals left faith and the church. 

First, they had been hurt by someone in the church or the sum collective of the church. They’d put their trust in a Christian or maybe a church, and they’d been betrayed, hurt, or even abused. Maybe they turned to the church in a time of need and found their concerns dismissed or belittled. Maybe they’d been hurt by someone in the church, and the church itself was more interested in protecting its reputation than in protecting them. Many of these people were angry or mad at the church, but more out of hurt and less out of intellectual disagreement. 

Second was a group of people who decided that they just didn’t believe the tenets of the faith anymore. Some had stronger reasons and feelings than others, but, surprisingly, most still held positive views of the church and their parents. Some even noted that they waited until college to leave the faith because they didn’t want to hurt their parents. One Prodigal told me they wished they could believe, but they just couldn’t. I’m glad David chose to label this group Prodigals, because it’s more hopeful than atheists or ex-Christians.

We often expect nonbelievers to be hard-core atheists like Madalyn Murray O’Hair or Richard Dawkins, who aren’t just atheists but anti-Christian with an almost militant nature. We take an unhealthy us versus them approach, where those who aren’t with us must be against us. We assume most atheists and agnostics are smug elitists who are mocking believers behind our backs when they aren’t doing it to our faces.

But Barna’s research says this simply isn’t the reality. After looking at the Prodigals and matching that data with my own experiences with non-Christians, I began calling this the age of “polite atheism.” These people choose disbelief in God but are okay with others believing something else . . . and often have an appreciation for those who do. Their disbelief also doesn’t mean that they aren’t open to discussing their journey or that they aren’t still searching for greater meaning. 

The Spiritually Curious

I have two aims for this book. The first is to help us understand who the Spiritually Curious are in a deeper way. This large and growing group of Americans is open to the world beyond their five senses and eager to explore their questions about the spiritual realm among a safe, nonjudgmental group of fellow travelers and guides. These people differ from each other in many ways, but curiosity is always a distinguishing factor that draws them together. As a church leader or a person interested in connecting people to Jesus, I hope you want to learn ways to better engage this group and meet their needs by seizing the opportunities that this era of spiritual openness brings.

The second goal is to help us make a shift in the way we are personally and collectively practicing Christianity. We have a lot to gain from becoming more curious ourselves, from realizing there may be something we are missing in our own spiritual life that needs tending to, and from embracing the idea that we can’t take people somewhere we haven’t been.

Spiritual curiosity isn’t a fire to be extinguished; it’s a garden to be cultivated. Gardening takes a lot more time and energy than putting out a fire. You’ve got to water some plants, prune others, and uproot when necessary. It’s a serious undertaking. It takes a lot of patience. It’s a little risky. But the results can be beautiful. 

We’ll be diving into some territory and asking questions that may at times be uncomfortable. We are leaving the shore, and the waters may get a little choppy. All I ask is that you tune up your own sense of curiosity as you read. Even if you don’t agree with me on every single point, I hope you can remain engaged. That’s part of what curiosity is all about.

If we’re serious about reaching those who stand outside the faith but are curious about it, we need to be able to meet them where they are on their journey. Are you ready to get started?