A few weeks ago, my family and I were driving across Texas to visit our two college-aged kids who are working at a Christian camp for the summer. We were making good time on a familiar route when suddenly all the lights on the dashboard lit up, and then our van lost power.
After several kind “Good Samaritans” couldn’t get the van working again, a mobile mechanic came to the rescue. The mechanic’s diagnosis was simple: a failed alternator. The essential component of the van stopped working, and so we couldn’t get where we wanted to go.
As I waited for repairs, I reflected on a parallel truth in the Christian life. Just as our van needed its fundamental systems working properly to reach our destination, believers need grounding in the essential truths of our faith to experience spiritual growth. Too often, we focus on secondary features while neglecting the core components that power everything else.
Throughout church history, believers have consistently affirmed certain core truths found in Scripture: the Trinity, salvation by grace through faith, the authority of Scripture, and Jesus’s death and resurrection, to name a few. These aren’t arbitrary human opinions, but biblical truths that have unified Christians across denominations and centuries.
Today, however, we’re navigating an age of disorganized discipleship. There’s no shortage of spiritual content available online—but there is a shortage of clarity. Many people have a shallow understanding of the gospel and other essential Christian doctrine.
In an age of digital overload and disorganized discipleship, church leaders must help believers cut through the noise by returning to the essentials of the Christian faith—the foundation for clear and lasting spiritual formation.
This isn’t a problem we can ignore, hoping it will resolve itself. The mission of the church matters, and that mission is compromised when God’s people don’t understand the essentials of their faith.
The Challenge: Digital Overload and Disorganized Discipleship
Today’s Christians navigate an unprecedented landscape of spiritual influence. On social media, we are being discipled by a thousand voices—many of whom contradict one another. Instagram theologians, YouTube preachers, and TikTok devotionals flood our feeds with spiritual content, creating an overload of information but a disorganized discipleship strategy.
To be clear, new Christian content isn’t the problem. I’m grateful for the men and women faithfully sharing biblical truth online. But here’s the challenge: not all content is grounded in Scripture—and most believers aren’t equipped to tell the difference. Church leaders have the responsibility to disciple people to discern truth in this flood of online content.
How are people discerning what is true? Recent research reveals that most American adults rely on feelings rather than Scripture to discern moral truth, with only 44% turning to the Bible for guidance—roughly equivalent to those who trust cultural norms or public policies. We’re seeing the effects of this shift in real time. Social media is filled with people openly deconstructing their faith and sharing their spiritual journeys online. According to Barna, 42% of adults have deconstructed the faith of their youth. Barna also reports that the next generation of Gen Z Christians are “marked by uncertainty and questioning.”
The pandemic only amplified this reality. As political and cultural tensions grew, many walked away from the church—not because of doctrinal issues, but because of secondary disagreements. Sadly, we watched as non-essentials were elevated, and essentials were forgotten or confused.
