The Global Flourishing Study is a 5 year longitudinal study of human flourishing across 22 countries. A series of papers including Meros scholars provides a wealth of information on cross-cultural adult and childhood-related indicators of adult flourishing. Connecting real-world data with program design models is an opportunity we, the Christian development community, need to be pursuing. Participation in religious services is associated with numerous aspects of human flourishing, including happiness and life satisfaction, mental and physical health, meaning and purpose, character and virtue, and close social relationships. Evidence for the effects of religious communities on these flourishing outcomes is growing stronger with such studies. The associations with flourishing are much stronger for communal religious participation than for spiritual-religious identity or for private practices. While the social support is an important mechanism relating religion to health, meaning/purpose, hope, love, and worship participation continue to be strong drivers of flourishing across cultures.
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