The more prosaic, conservative end of the evangelical Christian spectrum has a different take. They too lay emphasis on God’s desire for a “personal relationship,” but there is an unspoken understanding that this relationship operates differently from any other personal relationship. God communicates indirectly with us through scripture, spiritual leaders, and circumstances, but refrains from communicating directly with the individual, purely in order to prove our “faith”.
(By ‘faith’ they generally mean a simple kind of belief-subscription: the belief that God exists and wrote the Bible; or, a unilateral choice to ‘allow Jesus into your heart’ — both very different and collapsed ideas from what Bunyan and St. Paul meant by the word.