Battle for the Heart
A spiritual formation journey for Christians ready for a richer life in biblical community.
A nine-month process with two retreats and a small group curriculum.
What this is, in two minutes.
For a while, you've longed for something more.
You have been walking with God for a while now.
You have been in the small groups, served on the teams, read the books, listened to the podcasts. Most of it has been good. Some of it has been deeply good.
But underneath it all, something else has remained consistently true.
You're tired of surface relationships where you have to pretend you're okay.
You’ve wrestled with painful questions about God and life, only to encounter easy answers that leave you feeling unseen and alone.
You’ve experienced real growth. But there are also moments when, like Paul, you wonder why you keep doing the very things you don’t want to do.
Deep down, you long to feel fully alive and experience the freedom, joy, peace, and connection Jesus spoke of.
You may not have had words for it before. But part of you knows: the life you were created for requires honesty, risk, and a willingness to step out from hiding.
This is the battle.
Will you embrace it and let yourself be seen? Or will you choose a safe, conventional path?
If someone you know invited you to the Battle for the Heart, it’s because they encountered Christ-centered transformation here that was difficult to explain but too meaningful not to share.The journey, in four parts.
Nine months. Two retreats. Two seasons of small group. The path is structured to do something specific in each season, and to compound across the whole.
Battle for the Heart Retreat
Four days · in person
You travel with a team of four to five people. You step out of the noise of your normal life. Through biblical teaching, silent reflection, and guided community work, you begin to see your own heart at four levels: desires, feelings, thoughts, and choices. For many, it is the first time they have language for what is actually happening inside them. You leave the retreat changed, and more importantly, you leave with a team and a path forward.
Fourteen weeks with your team
Fourteen weeks · weekly meeting at home
You return home, but you do not return alone. Once a week, you meet with the same group to keep going. Structured curriculum takes you deeper into your own story and into the love of God. The work happens in the rhythms of your real life: at your kitchen table, in your week, with the people. This is where transformation moves from a mountaintop experience to something that holds.
Battle for Your Domain Retreat
Three days · in person
Several months in, you go away again with your team. The work goes deeper. You begin to integrate what you have discovered about your heart with your actual domain: your family, your work, your church, your neighborhood. You are no longer fighting only for yourself. You are learning to fight for the people you love, from a place of being loved.
Twelve weeks of integration
Twelve weeks · weekly meeting at home
You return home one more time. Twelve more weeks with your team to let the work settle into who you are becoming. By the end, what started as a retreat has become an experience that has reshaped your life. You finish where most discipleship can only point: as someone whose life and leadership flow from being loved, not from striving to be loved.
Love is only transformational when it's received in vulnerability. Knowing about God's love is not what transforms us. It's opening in the risk of vulnerability. That's what transforms us.
Here is what you would be saying yes to.
Battle for the Heart is not a weekend, a workshop, or a quick reset. It is a structured nine-month process, and the depth on the other side of it is real because the commitment going in is real. We name the cost honestly because we want you to choose this with your eyes open.
Time
Nine months, from your first retreat to the close of the second small group season.
Two retreats
A four-day Battle for the Heart retreat to begin. A three-day Battle for the Domain retreat several months in.
Two seasons of small group
Fourteen weeks of weekly meetings after the first retreat, and twelve weeks of weekly meetings after the second retreat, all with the same team you traveled with.
A team of four or five
Battle is walked together, not alone. We recommend forming a team of friends from your faith community.
A willingness to be vulnerable
Battle does not work as a spectator program. The teaching, the curriculum, and your team will invite you into a degree of honesty about yourself and your story that most of us have not practiced. We ask this of you because the depth you came looking for is on the other side of it. There is no other path there.
Attendance of Men and Women at Retreat
At all retreats, your small group will be the same gender as you. At most retreats, men's and women's teams attend sessions together in the same room, and the teachers leading sessions are both men and women. We host a men-only and women-only retreat once a year at our Alabama location.
Who this is for.
Battle for the Heart is for Christians ready for renewal, and willing to do the work it takes. Two kinds of people most often walk this path.
The long-time believer. You have been a Christian for years, maybe decades. You know your Bible. And you sense a need and a desire for renewal, and to know God on a much deeper level.
The pastor or ministry leader. You have been pouring out for years, and you can feel the difference between leading from a healed place and leading from a striving one. You want the second half of your ministry to be different from the first.
Battle is walked in gendered teams. Men walk with men. Women walk with women. Couples often attend the same retreat and meet with their teams separately, which is part of why the work goes as deep as it does.
Start with Wholehearted Living. Wholehearted Living is the on-ramp to Wellspring's deeper work, and the place where you and your team begin. We ask that you complete it before registering for Battle for the Heart—it is where you come to sense there is more to your heart, and Battle is where you go after it.
This is not for everyone. If what you are looking for is a weekend that energizes you and then fades, Battle is the wrong tool. If you want to passively learn, Battle will not let you. We tell you this at the top because we have watched what the work requires, and we would rather lose you here than lose you halfway in.
What life on the other side looks like.
On the other side of Battle, you are not a different person. You are the same person, more closely aligned with who God created you to be. The shame, the numbness, the busyness do not run your life anymore. You hear God's voice in a fresh and different way. Your closest relationships go to depths you did not know existed. You lead and serve from a place of being loved, not from striving to be loved. Your family, their work, your church begin to feel the difference.
One of the clearest pictures of this comes from Will Reinmuth, lead pastor of All Souls Community Church, who has walked through Battle twice and brought nearly fifty people from his congregation behind him.
At the end of the weekend, we all got together in a big circle. Fourteen of them were from my church. Person after person started sharing about what God has done in their lives through the Battle process. How they know him more. How they're more alive. How they have deeper friendships than they've ever had. How they hear God's voice and understand his love like never before. By the time it got to me, I could barely speak from a deep sense of gratitude for what God had done. It was heaven. It was heaven.
Battle for the Heart is not a mountaintop experience that fades on the way down. It is a slow, deep change that holds, because the work was done with a fellowship over nine months, in real life, not on a weekend.