For years, I assumed the people I saw every Sunday morning were my spiritual family. We shared worship services, prayer requests, potluck dinners. We knew each other's kids' names and nodded knowingly when someone mentioned a struggle. My connections developed and maintained through weekly church interactions surely qualified as true relationships—right? After all, the interactions we had were spiritual, at least in proximity, which meant they were automatically intimate—right?
Wrong.
I played church for many years as a true believer in Christ, showing up faithfully, saying the right words, performing the expected rhythms. Yet looking back honestly, I had few if any real spiritual relationships. What I had were spiritual acquaintances—people I recognized, interacted with pleasantly, and never truly knew. We orbited each other in the same sanctuary space without ever breaking past the atmosphere into genuine connection.
Going to Sunday School or being in a home small group does not automatically qualify as a spiritual relationship. I've sat in circles where we discussed Scripture deeply yet never discussed our actual lives honestly. I've prayed aloud with people whose real struggles I knew nothing about. We were performing spirituality together, not living it in vulnerability with one another.
The awakening came slowly, like dawn creeping over a landscape I thought I already knew. I began to realize that proximity to spiritual things doesn't create spiritual intimacy any more than standing in a garage makes you a car. The trappings of community—the coffee in Styrofoam cups, the chorus of "I'll pray for you," the well-worn phrases we trade like currency—can exist entirely without the substance of real relationship.
And here's what I've come to understand: my first spiritual relationship must always be with my heavenly Father. That vertical connection is the root from which all other spiritual relationships must grow. Without it, everything else is performance, religious theater where we play our parts without ever truly meeting each other.
But I also need real people connections and true relationships with fellow disciples of Christ. The Christian life was never meant to be walked alone, and knowing God doesn't negate the need for knowing and being known by others who share the journey. Jesus modeled this—He had His Father, and He also had friends He wept with, ate with, and shared His deepest moments with.
Like any other relationship, spiritual friendships must be intentional. They don't just happen because we sit in the same building once a week. They require the same things any deep relationship requires: time, vulnerability, consistency, and above all, trust.
Which brings me to the questions that haunt me now when I consider my spiritual connections: Who can I be open and honest with without fear of gossip being shared? Can I keep prayer requests shared in confidence within myself? Because trust goes both ways and is an essential element in a true spiritual relationship. It's not enough for me to want someone I can confide in—I must also be someone others can confide in. The trust must be mutual, the vulnerability reciprocal.
I think about how quickly "prayer requests" can become gossip dressed in spiritual clothing. How easily confidences are broken under the guise of "sharing concerns." How the very spaces that should be safest for our souls can become the most dangerous when trust is treated carelessly.
We need spiritual community, but spiritual community depends on mutual trust. It requires people who will guard what's shared as sacred, who understand that someone else's story isn't ours to tell, who know the difference between concern and curiosity.
I'm learning to build these relationships more carefully now, more intentionally. To move slowly from acquaintance to friend to spiritual confidant. To prove myself trustworthy and to test whether others are the same. Not cynically, but wisely. Not closing myself off, but opening myself thoughtfully.
Because spiritual relationship—the real kind—is worth the effort and the risk. It's where we learn to love as Christ loved, to bear one another's burdens, to speak truth wrapped in grace. It's where the Sunday smile gives way to Monday honesty, and the hollow performance becomes genuine communion.
That's the relationship worth building. That's the community worth pursuing.
