What does it mean to experience God personally, and not merely through rituals or systems? It is a question I avoided for years, because I had built a life that worked well within the systems. I knew the language. I knew the rhythms. I could perform belief fluently. And somewhere underneath all of it was a quiet, unwelcome suspicion that I had never actually met the One I was so competent at discussing.
Religion is scaffolding, not the building
Let me be clear about what I am not saying. Structure is not the enemy. Scripture, gathered worship, tradition, discipline, community — these are not obstacles to encounter. They are the scaffolding that makes encounter possible, the accumulated wisdom of people who walked this road before us and left markers.
The danger is not scaffolding. It is mistaking scaffolding for the building. It is possible to spend an entire life maintaining the framework with great devotion and never move into the house it was erected to construct.
You can be fluent in the language of faith and still be a stranger to the One it describes.
How the substitution happens
Nobody chooses this deliberately. It happens because the system is measurable and the encounter is not.
Attendance can be counted. Giving can be recorded. Doctrinal accuracy can be assessed. Service can be scheduled. All of it produces the reassuring sensation of progress, and all of it can be sustained indefinitely without any interior movement whatsoever.
Encounter, by contrast, cannot be scheduled or measured. It cannot be reliably produced by technique. It happens in stillness, in crisis, in unremarkable moments that resist being written into a curriculum. So we drift toward what we can control, and we call the drift faithfulness.
What personal actually means
When people speak of a personal faith, it is sometimes heard as private faith — something interior, individual, and unaccountable. That is not what I mean. A faith with no community is not personal; it is merely unexamined.
Personal means particular. It means God is not an abstraction you have opinions about but a presence you have history with. It means you can point to specific moments — a decision you did not make on your own strength, a conviction you did not manufacture, a comfort that arrived when nothing in your circumstances had changed.
Personal faith has evidence. Not evidence that would satisfy a sceptic, but evidence that satisfies you: a record of encounter that you could not have written in advance.
Moving from performance to presence
- Stop performing in prayer. Most of us pray in a register we would never use with anyone we actually trusted. Try saying the true thing — including the anger, the doubt, and the boredom. Honesty is the only doorway.
- Build unstructured time. Encounter rarely survives a fully optimised schedule. Leave room that is not assigned to anything. Silence is not wasted time; it is the only condition in which some things can be heard.
- Read to meet, not to master. Approach Scripture with the question "what are you saying to me" rather than "what can I extract for others." Study is good. It is not the same as listening.
- Let doubt stay in the room. Faith that has never accommodated doubt is not strong; it is untested. Bring the questions rather than suppressing them, and you will find the relationship deepens rather than dissolves.
- Keep a record. Write down what you sense, decide, and receive. Memory is unreliable and the record becomes your evidence in the seasons where nothing seems to be happening.
The seasons where nothing happens
It would be dishonest to describe encounter without describing its absence. There are long stretches where prayer feels like speaking into a room with nobody in it. Where the practices produce nothing. Where the people around you seem to be experiencing something you are not.
These seasons are not evidence of failure or of God's absence. They are, in almost every tradition I have studied, a normal and even necessary part of maturity — the point at which faith stops being sustained by feeling and starts being sustained by something sturdier.
What I would say is this: keep the scaffolding up during those seasons. This is precisely what structure is for. When encounter is absent, discipline carries you. When discipline runs dry, encounter returns. The two are not rivals; they take turns holding you.
Beyond, not against
Faith beyond religion does not mean faith without it. It means refusing to let the system become the destination — staying restless enough to keep asking whether you are still meeting God, or merely maintaining the apparatus that was built to help you.
Ask the question honestly. The answer, whatever it is, is the beginning of something real.
