Jemimah Wright explores how influencer Madison Rose built a successful career teaching manifestation alongside one of the movement’s biggest names, only to discover after the devastating loss of her father that neither success nor spirituality could heal her grief. She says it was Jesus who finally gave her the hope and identity she had been searching for.
When I met and married my husband after years of waiting and praying, I remember someone saying, ‘oh well done, you manifested him’. I tried to explain that if I had manifested him I would have done it when I was 24, not 44, and that he was actually an answer to prayer, nothing that I could have made happen in my own strength. She wasn’t convinced.
The world of manifestation promises that our thoughts create our reality. Through vision boards, affirmations and visualisation, followers are encouraged to believe they can attract wealth, success and happiness simply by aligning their mindset with their desires.
Recently influencer Madison Rose, who once taught manifestation as part of a multimillion-dollar business, says she has completely turned her back on the movement after becoming a Christian.
The content creator, who has almost 100,000 Instagram followers, shared her testimony in a reel, revealing how the suicide of her father prompted her to question everything she had believed about manifestation and ultimately led her to faith in Jesus Christ.
READ MORE: Should Christians ‘manifest’ things? Or is it a dangerous new age practice?
In a recent reel she said: “I am a Christian who used to be in manifestation culture.”
She said: “I am a Christian who used to be in manifestation culture.” She explained that she wasn’t simply interested in manifestation – she built her career around it. Madison spent around five years as one of renowned personal development speaker Bob Proctor’s top global consultants, travelling several times a year to Toronto to train with him alongside her father. Together, they built what she describes as a multimillion-dollar business teaching manifestation because they genuinely believed they had found the key to success and fulfilment.
“We truly believed that this was the key to life,” she says.
Everything changed when Madison’s father died by suicide. She describes his death as the moment “the veil truly dropped”. Despite achieving the success they had pursued for years, she found herself wrestling with painful questions. If manifestation really held the answers, why had it failed to bring lasting peace?
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The tragedy prompted her to search more deeply for truth, eventually leading her to faith in Jesus Christ. She says, she has completely rethought the practices that once defined her life. Now she is a Christian, she has this advice for her followers:
1. Trade vision board for asking God for his vision for you
2. Trade affirmations for what Jesus says is true about you (write them down and repeat them often so your brain gets onboard)
3. Bring your wants to him, ask him to take them away if they are not in his highest plan for you
One follower, @creativebyrob, commented on her reel that the issue was not vision or repeating truth in themselves, but where they originate.
“I don’t think the problem is vision or repeating truth,” the commenter wrote. “The problem is the source.
“I don’t think the problem is vision or repeating truth,” the commenter wrote. “The problem is the source. When the source is your ego, you end up chasing yourself. When the source is God, you end up becoming who He created you to be. Noah built the ark because God gave him the vision. Nehemiah rebuilt the wall because God put it on his heart. Jesus Himself prayed, ‘Not my will, but Yours be done.’ That’s a completely different journey right there. Manifesting and affirmations aren’t wrongful actions. They’re powerful tools when they’re aligned with God’s will and rooted in His truth, not just your own desires.”
Today, instead of creating her own vision, Madison says she asks God to reveal His. She has also abandoned affirmations. “I don’t use affirmations to tell me who I am,” she explains. “I go to Scripture to see what God said about who I am. It’s so much easier to just go read what God originally said about you and know that that is the truth,” she says. “That’s where I go for my identity.”
Perhaps the greatest contrast she draws is between manifestation’s emphasis on controlling outcomes and Christianity’s call to surrender. Rather than declaring what she wants and attempting to attract it, Madison says she now places her desires before God with open hands.
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“If I really want something,” she explains, “I go to God and say, ‘God, I really want this, but I don’t know if it’s in your plans for me. If it’s not, please strip it from my desires.’”
Reflecting on her father’s life, Madison says that although he appeared to achieve many of the goals they had pursued through manifestation, he ultimately struggled profoundly and took his own life. Instead, she now prays for God’s will above everything else.
“I want your will to be done in my life above all other things. Not mine, because mine is flawed and imperfect, but you know all things. You created me, and you have plans, hope and a future for me. I want that more than anything, and I happily surrender to that.”
Madison challenges her followers to surrender their ambitions to God and root their identity in Scripture rather than in self-belief. Her story echoes a growing number of testimonies from former New Age practitioners who say they have found lasting hope in Jesus Christ instead of spiritual practices centred on self-empowerment.
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