Here's a simple observation, one that keeps surfacing whenever Christians write about the shape of a spiritual life: every Christian community, in every century, has built its own machinery for feeling close to God. The desert fathers walked into the Egyptian sand to find him in silence. Medieval pilgrims walked to Compostela. Twentieth-century revivalists built tents. Twenty-first-century Protestants built conferences, worship sets, and, as Christianity Today recently noted, elaborate Christmas plays. The interesting question isn't about any of those things, though. It's about what happens in the space between them — the dry spell, the flat Tuesday, the morning the Bible reads like a phone book. What do we do when nothing happens?
I want to sit with that question longer than most treatments of it do, because I think it points at something bigger than personal devotion. The instinct to manufacture the mountaintop and the anxiety about the valley are the same instinct, wearing two faces. And once you notice that a religious institution has a business reason to prefer one face over the other, the whole question of "what to do about dry spells" starts to look less like a spiritual problem and more like a design problem.
A Short History of Manufacturing the Mountain
The desert fathers get invoked a lot in pieces like this, usually as the patron saints of quiet. But it's worth being specific about what they actually built, because it wasn't just silence. It was a whole vocabulary for what silence does to a person over time.
In the fourth century, a monk named Evagrius Ponticus, writing from the Egyptian desert, catalogued eight afflictions that came for the solitary monk — and one of them, acedia, wasn't doubt or despair exactly. It was the peculiar boredom of belief that has run out of mountain to climb. The monk who has already renounced the world, already fasted, already prayed the hours, and still feels nothing. Evagrius didn't treat this as evidence the monk had failed. He treated it as a known stage, with its own name, that you were supposed to walk through rather than escape.
A few decades later, John Cassian carried that Egyptian desert teaching west and wrote it down in his Institutes, composed around 420 AD, giving European monasticism its first real manual for what to do with a soul that had stopped feeling anything at all.
A century and a half after that, John of the Cross gave the tradition its most famous image for the same phenomenon. He wrote his poem on the dark night of the soul after his own Carmelite brothers imprisoned him in Toledo in 1577. The image wasn't absence as failure. It was absence as a stage of the relationship, the way a parent stops carrying an older child specifically because the child is ready to walk.
Here's the pattern I keep noticing: the oldest Christian writers on dry spells treated the dryness as data. Something the soul was doing, not something wrong with the soul. The newer the tradition, generally, the more likely it is to treat the same dryness as a malfunction — a sign the worship set needs a key change, the small group needs a better curriculum, the conference needs a bigger stage.
When the Programming Doesn't Work
This isn't just my read on the mood of American evangelicalism. It's been measured. In 2007, Willow Creek Community Church — one of the most influential megachurches in the country, and one of the most self-consciously programmatic — commissioned a survey of its own congregation called REVEAL, led by Greg Hawkins and Cally Parkinson. The finding that made news at the time was blunt: attendance at more church programs did not reliably predict spiritual growth. A meaningful share of committed, engaged members described themselves in the survey's own language as "stalled" — going through the motions, showing up, and feeling nothing move.
Willow Creek had spent years building exactly the kind of mountaintop machinery described above: excellent music, tight production, layered ministries for every age and need. And the machinery ran into the same wall Evagrius named in the fourth century. You can build a very good elevator to the summit. It will not stop some people from feeling like they're standing in a parking lot.
That finding is worth sitting with, because of what it implies about the institutions asking the question. If more programming reliably produced more felt closeness to God, dry spells would be a solvable engineering problem — add a service, tighten the setlist, book a better speaker. REVEAL suggested the opposite: that felt closeness and institutional output aren't the same axis at all, and an institution built to deliver one will keep mistaking it for the other because that's the only lever it has.
What Mother Teresa's Letters Actually Showed
It's worth going to an extreme case, because it clarifies the pattern instead of complicating it. In 2007, Brian Kolodiejchuk edited a collection of Mother Teresa's private correspondence, published as Come Be My Light. In those letters, written to her spiritual directors over several decades, she described what she called an interior darkness — a felt absence of God that did not resolve with more service, more prayer, or more institutional success. During roughly that same span, her order expanded internationally and she received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. The Catholic Church later canonized her in 2016. The felt presence she wrote about experiencing earlier in her religious life, by her own account, did not return.
I don't bring this up to be morbid. I bring it up because it's about as clean an example as exists of felt spiritual experience and outward institutional flourishing moving in completely different directions at the same time, in the same person, for decades. If a woman running one of the more visible religious institutions of her era wrote candidly about a decades-long dry spell while the institution itself grew, that dry spell was never a referendum on the institution. It was something else entirely, something the institution had no instrument to measure and therefore no reason to trust.
A Comparison Across Eras
Laid side by side, the tools each era built for closeness to God, and what each tradition actually said about the silence in between, look like this:
| Era / Tradition | Tool for the "mountaintop" | What it said about the valley |
|---|---|---|
| Desert monasticism (3rd–5th c.) | Isolation, silence, fixed hours of prayer | Named the dryness (acedia), treated it as a stage to walk through |
| Medieval mysticism (12th–16th c.) | Pilgrimage, contemplative prayer, mystical writing | Framed absence as intimacy maturing past feeling (the "dark night") |
| Reformation-era Protestantism | Preaching, catechism, personal Bible reading | Treated assurance as a matter of doctrine, not mood |
| 20th-century revivalism | Tent meetings, altar calls, mass crusades | Largely treated the emotional high as the point; little theology of the low |
| 21st-century megachurch / conference culture | Worship production, conferences, curated small groups | Often reads dryness as a program gap — the fix is more or better content |
Notice the drift. The traditions closest to the founding communities had the most developed vocabulary for spiritual absence. The traditions built around scale and production have the least. That's not an accident of history. It's a function of what each institution was actually optimized to deliver.
The Incentive Problem Nobody Names
Here's the part that rarely gets said outright, and I think it's worth saying plainly: an institution that depends on attendance, giving, and measurable engagement has a structural incentive to treat your dry spell as a problem it can fix, because "we can fix this" is the pitch that keeps you showing up. A theology that says "this dryness might be maturity, and the honest answer is to sit in it and tell no one," is theologically defensible and institutionally useless. Laid side by side, the incentive looks like this:
- A fixable diagnosis generates an attendance bump, a new small group, a reason to buy the conference ticket.
- A maturity diagnosis generates none of those — no bump, no group, no ticket to sell.
- Only one of those outcomes shows up on the institution's books, which is exactly why it's the one institutions default to naming.
I don't think this makes church leaders cynical. Most of them, in my experience, genuinely believe the programming helps, and often it does. But belief in your own product and structural dependence on your own product are hard to fully separate once your salary, your building fund, and your sense of calling all run through the same pipeline. The system doesn't need anyone to lie. It just needs everyone to have a reason to prefer the diagnosis that comes with a next step they can sell you.
I've written before about how institutions train people to read their own experience through an institutional lens rather than trusting what they're actually noticing, and a dry spell is one of the clearest test cases there is, because the institution's explanation and your own experience can point in completely opposite directions and only one of them has a marketing budget.
What the Dryness Might Actually Be
So what do you do when nothing happens? I don't think the honest answer is a technique. I think it's a reframe, and the reframe is this: the feeling was never the currency. It was always a byproduct, sometimes present, sometimes absent, correlated with faithfulness about as loosely as good weather is correlated with a good marriage. Evagrius knew this in the fourth century. Teresa of Ávila knew it when she wrote about prayer continuing to matter even when it felt like talking to a wall. The instinct to chase the feeling, and the parallel instinct to panic when the feeling doesn't show up, are the same mistake in two directions.
There's a version of this that shows up outside religion too, in anyone who has tried to sustain a discipline for years rather than months. The excitement fades. What's left is either nothing, or it's something quieter and less photogenic that only shows up once the excitement is gone. I think the dry spell is often that second thing arriving, disguised as the first thing leaving. The soul that's bored of the mountaintop machinery might be the soul finally ready to notice something the machinery was always drowning out.
None of this means dry spells are always fine, always secretly good, always a sign of hidden maturity. Sometimes a dry spell is exhaustion, or depression, or a diet of bad theology finally catching up with a person. I'd rather not overstate the case in the other direction. But I'd also rather not let an institution built to sell you the next service tell you which one it is, when the institution has never once benefited from you concluding "I'm fine, I just need to be quiet for a while."
A Different Kind of Faithfulness
What would it look like to actually build a faith life around the assumption that most of it will be quiet? Not dramatic, not felt, not confirmable by a worship leader's key change. Picture it less as a schedule of mountaintop events and more as tending a garden you don't get to watch grow:
- You water it. You don't dig it up every week to check the roots.
- Some seasons it does something visible.
- Most seasons it just sits there being alive in a way you can't verify from where you're standing.
That's a harder sell than a conference. It's also, I think, closer to what the earliest Christian communities that left us any record of their inner life were actually describing. The mountaintop was never the point. It was just the part that was easy to photograph.
FAQ
Is a spiritual dry spell a sign something is wrong with my faith? Not necessarily. Christian writers as far back as the fourth-century desert monk Evagrius Ponticus treated periods of spiritual flatness as a recognized stage rather than a failure, and later figures like John of the Cross built entire theological frameworks around absence as a normal part of maturing faith rather than a symptom of it collapsing.
Why do churches focus so much on emotional "mountaintop" experiences? Conferences, elaborate worship production, and large gatherings are measurable and repeatable in a way that quiet, private faithfulness isn't. An institution that depends on attendance and giving has a practical reason to emphasize the parts of faith it can schedule and market, even when the tradition's own history says the quiet parts matter just as much.
Does more church programming actually produce spiritual growth? Not reliably. Willow Creek Community Church's 2007 REVEAL survey, conducted by Greg Hawkins and Cally Parkinson, found that increased participation in church programs did not consistently correlate with self-reported spiritual growth, and a notable portion of engaged congregants described themselves as spiritually "stalled." The practical implication isn't that Willow Creek was running bad programs; it's that felt closeness to God and institutional output may sit on different axes entirely, so tuning the programming lever won't reliably move the other one.
Did any well-known Christian figures experience long dry spells? Yes. In Come Be My Light, the 2007 collection of Mother Teresa's private letters edited by Brian Kolodiejchuk, she wrote of what she called an interior darkness and a felt absence of God, spanning several decades even as her order grew and she received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. Her case matters here because it separates two things usually treated as one: felt spiritual experience and institutional success. If they diverged that sharply for someone that devoted, an ordinary dry spell isn't evidence of failure either.
What should I actually do during a dry season? There's no universal technique, but the older Christian tradition generally counsels continuing the ordinary disciplines without expecting them to produce a feeling, treating the absence itself as information rather than failure, and being cautious about any institutional explanation that happens to come bundled with something to purchase or attend.
If you want to think further about how institutions shape what we notice in our own spiritual experience, I've written more on that in how systems train you to think and in spiritual maturity as outgrowing institutional need.
Last updated: 2026-09-01
Jared Clark
Writer, Christian Counterpoint
Jared Clark is the creator of Christian Counterpoint, where he examines institutional patterns in religious communities through the lens of critical analysis and honest inquiry.