Why Personal Transformation Comes Before Cultural Renewal
We have spent the better part of the spring and early summer exploring some of our common ideas about God, including the ideas that He is not really good, that He is partial, that He does not particularly like us, and that disappointment is His normal posture toward us. These ideas matter because beliefs and ideas are not the same thing.
A belief, at least in our modern Western context, is generally an intellectual and conscious conclusion about something. I may sincerely believe that God loves me, affirm that belief in a statement of faith, sing about it on Sunday morning, and perhaps even teach it to other people. An idea, however, is an underlying assumption, conclusion, or principle in which the heart is rooted, but of which we are often unaware.
So while I may consciously believe that God loves me, I may still function from the idea that He is perpetually disappointed in me, grudgingly spends time with me, or accepts me only when I perform. Beliefs are usually influenced through instruction, while ideas are formed more deeply through relationships and experience.
If we wish to become deep people, people who are increasingly attentive to God, others, ourselves, and the world around us, we eventually have to journey with Jesus and a trusted friend into these hidden ideas. This is not an optional detour from discipleship. It is part of the journey itself.
I am occasionally asked why I think uncovering these mysterious ideas is so important. Why spend so much time exploring the hidden places of the heart when there is already so much to do in the world?
To answer that question properly, we need to zoom out.
The Critical Journey
A few decades ago, Janet Hagberg and Robert Guelich wrote a book called The Critical Journey, which I have referenced many times because I have found it unusually helpful in understanding the spiritual life. Their model suggests that our journeys with God can be understood through six stages, though they are careful to note that we do not necessarily move through them in a neat, linear order. We may move backward and forward, revisit earlier stages, skip one for a time, or discover that we are occupying more than one stage at once.
The earlier stages generally involve discovering God, learning about Him, participating in community, serving, growing in confidence, and becoming increasingly active and productive. Modern Christian institutions are often quite good at these stages. Churches introduce people to faith, teach doctrine, gather communities, provide opportunities for service, and invite people into leadership. These are good and necessary things.
Hagberg and Guelich also argue, however, that modern Christian institutions are often of little help in the later stages. Those later stages involve a deeper surrender, greater self-knowledge, a more secure attachment to God, a relinquishing of control, and the slow formation of qualities such as humility, generosity, peace, freedom, and self-giving love.
These are precisely the qualities of Jesus we long to assume, yet they are rarely formed simply by listening to more sermons, attending another class, reading another book, or volunteering for another ministry assignment. At some point, the journey becomes more personal, more hidden, and considerably less manageable.
It becomes an inward journey.
The Inward Journey
The inward journey is a period of intentionally exploring the caverns and crevices of our own hearts with Jesus and, ideally, with a trusted companion. It includes our ideas, desires, stories, wounds, fears, control tendencies, faded dreams, unmet expectations, talents, longings, and delightful personality quirks.
Modern Western Christianity often treats this kind of introspection with suspicion. The very idea of spending time exploring the heart may be dismissed as self-absorption, therapeutic navel-gazing, or a distraction from the more important work of serving God.
We hear familiar phrases such as, “Just fix your eyes on Jesus,” or, “If you find yourself too focused on yourself, go serve somebody.” The operating maxim of modern Christianity often sounds something like this: go, go, go, multiply, multiply, multiply.
There is nothing wrong with service or outward mission. Jesus clearly calls us toward both. But outward energy can also become a way of avoiding the inward journey, and sometimes that avoidance is not accidental.
Command-and-control environments rarely welcome deeply self-aware people. A person who begins to understand their own heart may also begin to notice unhealthy authority, manipulation, fear, or institutional dysfunction. The last thing a fragile power structure wants is a community of people learning to see clearly.
The rejection of introspection is not always overt. It often hides inside spiritual language that sounds faithful but leaves little room for the slow, courageous work of self-knowledge.
Self-Knowledge Is Not Self-Worship
To be clear, the inward journey can become an end in itself. A person can become so fascinated with their wounds, personality, history, and inner world that the journey becomes self-absorption.
That is possible, but I am not particularly concerned about it.
A lack of self-awareness is a far greater problem today than an excess of it. We regularly encounter people who know very little about their motives, impact, fears, wounds, or need for control. They may be highly competent, productive, religious, or influential while remaining largely unaware of what is driving them.
We often confuse self-denial with self-ignorance, but they are not the same thing. Jesus did not invite us to deny a self we refuse to know. He invited us to surrender the false, frightened, controlling, self-protective ways of being that keep us from love.
We cannot surrender what we cannot name, and we cannot bring into the light what we insist is not there.
This is why self-knowledge is essential to Christian discipleship. To know God and to know ourselves are not competing pursuits. They are intertwined.
Double Knowledge
The historic Christian tradition often described this relationship as double knowledge. To know God, we must also know ourselves, and to know ourselves truly, we must know ourselves in God.
This idea is woven throughout Scripture and Christian history. We find it in the Psalms, in the wisdom literature, in Augustine, and in Calvin. It was once considered a normal assumption of the spiritual life.
The Enlightenment appears to have split the two apart. Those who rejected God became increasingly interested in self-knowledge, sometimes to the point of self-invention or self-worship. Modern Christianity reacted by swinging the pendulum in the opposite direction, insisting that self-denial required self-ignorance.
The result is a strange polarization. One side explores the self without God, while the other seeks God without exploring the self.
Both approaches become distorted.
Intimacy requires knowledge of self and knowledge of the other. Anyone who has been married to, befriended, employed by, or led by someone committed to self-ignorance understands this. A person who refuses to examine their own motives, fears, wounds, and impact on other people eventually becomes unsafe.
Willful self-ignorance is not humility. It is often a form of self-protection.
The Wall
Somewhere in the deeper stages of the spiritual journey, many of us encounter what Hagberg and Guelich call the Wall.
The Wall may arrive through suffering, doubt, betrayal, illness, divorce, grief, vocational disruption, theological uncertainty, disappointment, or change. It may appear suddenly, or it may emerge slowly as questions we have suppressed for years finally become impossible to ignore.
The prayers that once seemed to work no longer work in the same way. The certainty that held us together begins to fracture. The Bible may still sit on the nightstand, but opening it feels different. God has not disappeared exactly, but He seems quieter than before.
The Wall raises questions that earlier stages allowed us to avoid. Am I truly valuable? Is God actually good? Is my doctrine a source of truth or a security blanket? Why am I still so anxious? Why do I need so much control? Why has success failed to make me secure? Where is all this peace that God promises?
For some people, the Wall is the result of a lingering theological question. For others, it appears through divorce, betrayal, illness, grief, a move, a career change, or the death of someone close. For me, the Wall was not the end of the inward journey. It was the entrance.
The Wall often feels like abandonment, but it may actually be invitation.
What the Wall Exposes
The Wall exposes the identities we have spent years constructing.
Successful people may have to admit that they are frightened. Competent people may have to admit that they are confused. Religious people may have to admit that they do not know God as well as they imagined. Leaders may discover that usefulness has become identity, and strong people may discover that strength has functioned as protection against grief.
No wonder most of us avoid the Wall.
We retreat to the earlier stages where we felt confident, useful, certain, and admired. We numb ourselves with technology, entertainment, work, food, outrage, shopping, or pleasure. We throw ourselves back into religious activity, hoping movement will spare us from attention.
Or we leave the journey altogether.
What many people call deconstruction is sometimes a courageous search for truth. It can also become an exit when no one is available to help us understand what is happening.
This is why the Wall matters so much. Without language, guidance, and companionship, we may mistake Jesus’ invitation into deeper life for spiritual collapse.
Why Churches Often Struggle Here
Modern churches are usually designed to gather, teach, organize, mobilize, and scale. They are less equipped to accompany people through disorientation, grief, doubt, surrender, and honest self-examination.
The later stages of spiritual formation are slow, relational, personal, and difficult to standardize. They require time, trust, intimacy, patience, and people mature enough not to panic when someone asks unsettling questions.
This is part of the Formation Gap. Most churches provide instruction and some form of community, but deep character formation requires five elements working together over time: meaningful time, intentional habits, consistent community, trusted intimacy, and transformative instruction.
When those elements remain fragmented, people may become informed, involved, productive, and admired without becoming deeply transformed.
They may know more and do more without becoming less anxious, angry, controlling, defensive, or self-protective.
The Wall and the Love of God
Hagberg and Guelich suggest that one of the primary reasons people remain stuck before the Wall is a deep uncertainty about whether they are truly loved and accepted by God.
That makes sense.
The Wall asks us to relinquish the identities, accomplishments, certainties, and defenses that have helped us feel secure. We will not surrender them unless we believe that Someone more trustworthy awaits us on the other side.
If we operate from the idea that God is fundamentally disappointed in us, the inward journey will feel dangerous. Honest self-examination will seem like an opportunity to provide Him with more evidence against us.
But if His settled posture toward us is delight, the Wall becomes survivable.
This is why the inward journey matters so much. We do not journey inward to prove how defective we are. We journey inward because Jesus already knows us completely and invites us into greater freedom.
The purpose is not shame. The purpose is intimacy.
What Happens in the Hidden Life Never Stays Hidden
All of this may sound like a private spiritual concern, but it is not.
What happens in the hidden life of individual people eventually becomes the culture everyone inhabits.
A person ruled by fear will help create fearful systems. A person addicted to control will centralize power. A person formed by shame will use shame. A leader unable to face their own insecurity will demand loyalty, punish dissent, and surround themselves with people who protect their image.
A community formed by anxiety will become rigid, suspicious, and reactive. A culture filled with people who refuse the inward journey will eventually build institutions that reflect their unexamined hearts.
The external world eventually becomes a projection of the internal one.
The Emperor Has No Clothes
Here in the West, we have placed extraordinary faith in institutions, bureaucracies, political systems, media platforms, corporations, and large organizations. We expect them to create justice, belonging, safety, prosperity, morality, meaning, and peace.
Then we become outraged when they fail.
The amount of energy we invest in politics provides the clearest example. We act as though the correct election, party, judge, leader, policy, or platform will finally produce the culture we want.
Institutions matter. Laws matter. Leadership matters. Systems can protect, restrain, reward, exploit, and harm.
But no system can consistently produce a healthy culture when the people operating it are anxious, self-protective, dishonest, resentful, narcissistic, fearful, and addicted to control.
Systems can restrain evil, but they cannot form love. Policies can regulate behavior, but they cannot create compassion. Institutions can reward certain actions, but they cannot make people whole.
The emperor has no clothes.
We keep asking systems to accomplish what only transformed people can ultimately provide.
Cultures Become Better When People Become Better
Cultures improve when people become more loving, honest, courageous, patient, generous, secure, forgiving, and relationally wise.
They improve when people tell the truth about themselves. They improve when leaders no longer need admiration in order to feel valuable. They improve when people can surrender control without collapsing and suffer without passing their pain to everyone nearby.
In other words, cultures improve when people become more like Jesus.
Whether someone acknowledges Jesus as King and Savior or not, His significance as a cultural and moral reformer is difficult to dispute. He embodied the virtues He taught. He was integrated, secure, courageous, compassionate, relationally shrewd, and free.
He did not merely announce a better system. He became the kind of human being from whom a better world could grow.
The Most Human Human
Jesus is not less human than we are. He is more fully human.
He reveals what a life rooted in love, truth, security, surrender, courage, and communion with God looks like. To become more like Jesus is not to become less ourselves. It is to become more whole, more honest, more free, and more capable of love.
This is why personal transformation matters. The goal is not private religious improvement. It is the formation of people who can carry love into families, churches, workplaces, neighborhoods, organizations, and public life.
As C. S. Lewis wryly observed, the institutions and systems we treat as permanent have the lifespan of a gnat. You and I are another matter.
We invest endlessly in temporary structures while neglecting the formation of eternal persons.
Why We Prefer Outward Reform
The uncomfortable truth is that reforming systems is often easier than facing ourselves.
It is easier to criticize a political party than to confront our need for control. It is easier to condemn a corrupt leader than to examine the ways we use power. It is easier to complain about cultural decline than to acknowledge our resentment, fear, passivity, dishonesty, or addiction to approval.
It is easier to demand transformation from institutions than to accept Jesus’ invitation to become transformed people.
The inward journey strips away the comfort of abstraction because the problem is no longer merely “out there.” We begin to recognize that the anxiety, control, self-protection, and fear we condemn in society may also be operating quietly within us.
The emperor has no clothes, and neither do we.
Journeying Through Together
The inward journey should not be traveled alone.
We need trusted people who can listen without panic, offer perspective without control, and remain present when our familiar identities begin to collapse. We need relationships in which honesty does not threaten belonging.
We need communities that do more than transfer information. We need the kind of Christian community our hearts actually need, communities marked by time, trust, intimacy, patience, story, and shared attention to the work of Jesus beneath the surface.
The Wall is difficult enough. Facing it alone makes it more dangerous than it needs to be.
The Invitation
If the path toward becoming love passes through greater self-knowledge, why would we refuse the journey?
If becoming less anxious, angry, controlling, defensive, and self-protective requires us to explore our hidden ideas, why would we not gather trusted companions and begin?
If we truly want healthier churches, families, institutions, and cultures, we must become healthier people.
That does not mean waiting until we are perfect before acting in the world. It means refusing the illusion that we can create outward renewal while avoiding inward transformation.
The culture we want will not be built solely through better systems. It will be cultivated through better human beings.
The best model for that journey remains the most human human.
Jesus invites us through the Wall, into the hidden places, and toward a life increasingly formed by love.
Duc in altum.
Brian Fisher is the founder of Soil & Roots and the author of Soil & Roots: Cultivating Deep Discipleship. He writes and speaks about spiritual formation, the inner life, and how people become more like Jesus from the inside out.
Explore Further
Why Self-Knowledge Is Essential to Christian Discipleship
The Wall in Spiritual Formation
