In twenty years of training Christian leaders in leadership development rooted in spiritual formation, we at The Leadership Institute have learned that the negative perception of Christians is an unfortunate result of professed but unpracticed faith. Even Christians affirming spiritual formation ideas may be little changed unless they engage in spiritual formation practices.

For example, the regular practice of solitude and silence coupled with prayer has become a place of deep transformation, producing hypocrisy’s opposite—integrity. Hypocrisy is a dissonance between profession and practice. In regular solitude, God uncovers our pretending, our appearance managing, and our malformed images of Him. More genuine communion with God develops a growing likeness to Him in us.

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