outbox

You walk a trail and map what you see. Steep hill at mile two. Creek at mile four. What you charted is real. It happened. You were there.

But when a hundred hikers walk that same trail and compare notes, the maps won’t match. Some people missed the creek entirely because they took a different fork earlier. Others went around the hill instead of over it. A few swear there was a waterfall that nobody else saw.

The trail exists. The features are real. But nobody experienced the whole thing the same way.

So the group stitches together a composite. They argue about which fork is the main path. They vote on whether the waterfall counts. Eventually they settle on an authoritative map. It gets printed. Posted at trailheads. Handed to new hikers.

The composite map becomes the definitive version of what’s real. Hikers trust it. They rarely question it. If their experience doesn’t match the map, they assume they took a wrong turn or weren’t paying attention.

The map stops being descriptive. It becomes prescriptive. This is what you should see. This is the correct way to walk the trail.

You learn what genuine is supposed to feel like

One night, mom picked me up from youth group. We sat in the car in the driveway, engine off. That’s when she asked if I wanted the Holy Spirit to fill me. This was Pentecostal territory. Speaking in tongues wasn’t just evidence of salvation, it was required evidence. The sign you were really saved. I didn’t care one way or the other about it, but I said yes anyway.

We sat in the car. She opened her Bible and read scriptures about the in-filling of the Holy Spirit. The usual passages. Acts 2. Acts 10. Standard Pentecostal proof texts. Then the guidance began.

Just start speaking. Nonsense syllables. Gibberish. It won’t make sense. And as I had faith, as I trusted God, the Holy Spirit would take over. Through me, a spiritual language would demonstrate itself through my utterances. She was insistent about this. Motivated. She really wanted me to have this experience.

I felt ridiculous. Sitting there making sounds that meant nothing, trying to manufacture something spiritual. But I did it anyway because she was my mom and she believed it mattered.

At some point something shifted. I stopped thinking about how silly I felt and just… did it. Started “speaking in tongues.” It still felt performative. But it also felt genuine. Like I’d crossed some threshold and the performance had become real.

That’s the part that sticks with me. How could something feel silly and genuine at the same time? How does that work?

The answer, I think, is that I’d learned what genuine was supposed to feel like. I’d been in enough services, heard enough people speak in tongues, absorbed enough of the communal expectation. When I hit the right markers, when I performed it correctly, it registered as authentic. Not because the Holy Spirit showed up, but because I’d internalized the script.

The emotional fireworks faded in the days that followed. Speaking in tongues became another thing I did in church. In my personal prayer time as well. Another performative expression of faith that didn’t seem to benefit anyone except those who already believed in it. I kept doing it for years. Out of habit mostly. After setting out on my own, I’d not done it since.

The map gets passed down

My mom didn’t invent that script. She didn’t wake up one day and decide speaking in tongues was evidence of salvation. Someone taught her. Her pastor. Her church. The faith community she joined as an adult.

She walked the trail. Followed the markers she was given. Had experiences she was taught to recognize as the Holy Spirit. Then she reported back: yes, this is real, this is what happened, this is what it feels like.

The map confirmed itself through her.

Then she did what every sincere believer does. She handed me the same map. Sat with me in that car and taught me the markers. This is what genuine feels like. This is what the Holy Spirit sounds like. These syllables, this feeling, this performance is the evidence you’re saved.

I wasn’t walking the trail blind. I was following a detailed guide. Every step had been charted before I took it. Boundaries clearly marked.

I followed the map. Found the markers exactly where she said they’d be. Where pastors said they’d be. Where my favorite Christian bands said they’d be. Reported what I was supposed to see. Felt what I was supposed to feel. The map confirmed itself again.

That’s how it works. Faith communities don’t just give you a theology to believe. They give you a template for what authentic spiritual experience looks like. You learn to recognize the patterns. You learn to produce the right responses. You learn what genuine is supposed to feel like.

Then you pass it down to the next person. The map perpetuates itself.

The trail might exist somewhere underneath all this. But nobody walks it without a map anymore. Everyone gets handed one before they start.

The pattern is everywhere

This isn’t unique to tongues. Every spiritual experience in church comes with a corporate script. The format is so consistent you can predict it before it happens.

Take altar calls. There’s a whole choreography to it. The worship team plays soft music during the invitation. The pastor’s voice drops to a more intimate register. He describes what you might be feeling. Conviction. A tug on your heart. A sense that tonight is the night.

If you respond, you walk forward. Maybe you cry. Maybe you don’t. But either way, someone meets you at the front. They pray with you. They have you repeat a prayer. Then they confirm it: you’re saved now. You made the decision.

The emotional release is real. Walking forward takes genuine courage. The tears, if they come, aren’t fake. But the interpretation of what just happened? That was prescribed before you left your seat. The community taught you what spiritual conviction feels like. You recognized the markers. You responded correctly.

Or worship breakthroughs. These follow markers too. You raise your hands at the right moment. Close your eyes during the bridge when the music swells. You feel something. A presence. A closeness. God feels near.

And maybe he is. But how do you know? Because you learned what proximity to God is supposed to feel like. The music builds. The lyrics repeat. The atmosphere intensifies. When you feel it, when you hit that emotional peak, the experience validates itself. This must be God because it feels like what God is supposed to feel like.

Same with prophetic words. Vague encouragement or rebuke wrapped in biblical language. “I sense God saying he sees your faithfulness.” “I feel like the Lord wants you to know he’s proud of you.” The recipient gets confirmation bias. The prophet gets spiritual authority. The community gets evidence that God is actively speaking.

In every case, the same mechanism. The corporate map teaches you what authentic encounter looks like. You learn to recognize the markers. When you experience them, it registers as genuine. Not necessarily because something supernatural happened, but because you performed the script correctly.

What happens when your map doesn’t match

Eventually you hit something that doesn’t fit. An experience that doesn’t match what the map told you to expect. Or the absence of an experience you were promised.

Maybe you didn’t feel anything during the altar call. Or speaking in tongues felt forced the whole time and never crossed over into genuine. Or you raised your hands in worship and felt nothing except self-conscious. Or a prophetic word given over you made zero sense.

Now you have two options.

Option one: report honestly. Tell your small group you didn’t feel God’s presence during worship this week. Say the altar call felt manipulative, not moving. Admit that speaking in tongues felt like you were just making sounds, not channeling the Holy Spirit. Explain how a prophetic word spoken over you felt like performative nonsense.

This gets you corrected. Not with hostility usually. With concern. Your faith must be weak. You might be harboring unconfessed sin. You’re grieving the Spirit. You need to submit more fully, pray more consistently, try harder to be open to what God is doing.

The underlying message is clear: the problem isn’t the map. The map is accurate. The map is authoritative. The problem is you.

Some people can endure that. Most can’t. Fighting the map means fighting the entire community’s understanding of what’s real. It means being the problem child who can’t seem to get it right. That’s exhausting.

So most people choose option two: adjust your reporting.

You learn to describe experiences in terms the community recognizes. You emphasize the parts that match the script and downplay or omit the parts that don’t. You stop saying “I didn’t feel anything” and start saying “God is teaching me to trust him even when I don’t feel his presence.” Same experience, different interpretation. One fits the map. One doesn’t.

Over time, something shifts. You stop noticing the gap between what actually happened and what you report. The performance and the experience merge. You’re not lying anymore because you’ve learned to interpret your experiences through the map. The map isn’t external guidance anymore. It’s how you see.

This is how the map becomes unfalsifiable. Not because it’s accurate, but because dissent gets treated as spiritual failure. Honest reporting is heresy. The cost of staying in the community is conformity.

The trail still exists

Here’s what I think is true: personal faith experiences are real. People genuinely encounter something in those moments. The problem isn’t that spiritual experiences are fake. The problem is what happens when the collective map stops being descriptive and becomes prescriptive.

When the stitched understanding of a hundred hikers becomes the only valid way to see the trail.

Faith communities can’t tolerate that kind of variance without fracturing their authority. If your map doesn’t match mine, someone has to be wrong. Or the map is incomplete. Or the trail is bigger and more complex than any single map can capture.

But admitting that breaks the continuity of tradition. If the map is incomplete, then the doctrine is incomplete. If the trail is bigger than we thought, then we don’t have all the answers. If variance is legitimate, then authority becomes negotiable. Every tradition we held as incontrovertible is now up for debate.

So the community doubles down instead. The map is authoritative. The map is complete. The map is sufficient. If you don’t see what the map says you should see, the failure is yours, not the map’s.

This is the trade-off. You can have a unified doctrine or you can have honest reporting. You can maintain institutional coherence or you can make room for authentic individual experience. You can’t have both.

The cost of that coherence is authenticity. The cost of that authority is trust. Because eventually people notice. They notice the gap between what they’re experiencing and what they’re supposed to report. They notice the pressure to conform. They notice that honest questions get treated like threats.

Some people make peace with it. They decide the community is worth the cost. Some people don’t notice at all because they never experienced the dissonance in the first place. Their map matched their experience perfectly.

But some of us couldn’t make it work.

I don’t speak in tongues anymore. Not because I stopped believing in the Holy Spirit. But because I stopped believing the performance was the encounter. The map told me what genuine was supposed to feel like. I learned to produce it. Then I realized I was navigating by someone else’s trail markers.

The trail might still exist. I think it does. But I’m not following that map anymore.