In a cultural moment saturated with aesthetic Christianity, five-minute devotionals and Instagram-worthy quiet times, many believers are quietly wondering: Is this it?
The answer, increasingly, seems to be no.
Discipleship—real discipleship—is having a moment. Not because it’s trendy, but because people are starving. After decades of sermon soundbites and spiritual self-help, there’s a growing sense among Christians, especially younger ones, that something essential has been lost. Something ancient. Something deep.
“We’re not trying to create something new,” Jen Wilkin says. “We’re trying to retrieve something that’s been lost.”
Wilkin, along with pastors JT English and Kyle Worley, has spent years studying how churches form people. And the short version? We’re not doing great.
Despite rising spiritual interest among Gen Z, theological literacy is plummeting. In a recent State of Theology survey, 43% of evangelicals said Jesus was a good teacher but not God. Over half said God accepts the worship of all religions. Nearly two-thirds believe everyone is born innocent.
These aren’t just theological trivia questions. They’re the bedrock of Christian belief. And the fact that so many self-professing believers are getting them wrong points to a deeper problem: We’ve confused conversion with formation. We’ve prioritized emotion over transformation. We’ve settled for shallow.
“Discipleship means being a learner,” English says. “But somewhere along the way, we started acting like learning was optional.”
One of the reasons discipleship has faltered is because the church, especially in the West, has quietly trained people to believe that faith is mostly about how you feel.
“I saw it especially in women’s spaces,” Wilkin says. “You’d go to work all week and use your full intellect. Then on Sunday, you’d be expected to take your brain off and just ‘feel’ things about God.”
That divide—between head and heart—has been devastating.
“There’s a false idea that thinking too hard about your faith will kill it,” she says. “But the life of the mind is essential to the health of the heart.”
“For decades, churches emphasized getting people saved and keeping them morally in line,” Worley says. “That’s heart and hands. But they left the head behind. And now we’re reaping the consequences.”
English remembers being a new Christian in college, eager to learn the Bible. When he asked his pastor for help, the response was, “You should go to seminary.”
That moment stuck with him—not because his pastor meant any harm, but because it revealed a systemic gap.
“We’ve outsourced depth to academic institutions,” he says. “But Jesus didn’t tell his followers to go get degrees. He told them to make disciples.”
That command wasn’t just about evangelism. It was about teaching people to obey, to grow, to mature. In other words, to become someone entirely different from who they were before.
“You shouldn’t have to leave your local church in order to grow in your faith,” English says. “But that’s the message a lot of people get.”
“It’s become normal to think the pastor loves God with his mind,” Wilkin adds, “and the rest of us just show up to feel something.”
She calls it the “expert-amateur divide”—a trained professional dispensing knowledge while everyone else listens passively and maybe jots down an application point or two.
“That’s not discipleship,” she says. “That’s religious consumption.”
Going deeper in your faith isn’t convenient. It’s not efficient. It won’t give you a quick dopamine hit or go viral on TikTok. But it will change you.
“Depth always requires dissonance,” English says. “It’s like working out—you need to feel the resistance in order to grow.”
That growth doesn’t just shape your theology. It changes how you live. How you think about money. How you treat people. How you process suffering. “When you start to see the whole story of the Bible,” Wilkin says, “your own story starts to make more sense.”
And it’s not about knowing all the right answers. It’s about learning how to think theologically about everything—not to be the smartest person in the room, but to live wisely and faithfully in a world constantly pulling you in a dozen other directions.
“Everyone’s a theologian,” Worley says. “The question is whether you’re a good one.”
For those just realizing how much they’ve missed, the temptation is to feel overwhelmed—or worse, ashamed.
Wilkin pushes back against that instinct.
“If you’re just now realizing that no one taught you how to go deeper in your faith, that’s not your fault,” she says. “The church has failed you. But now that you see it, you have the opportunity to change.”
That might mean reevaluating the kind of church community you’re part of. It might mean seeking out better resources. It might mean getting together with friends and committing to actually study—not skim—the Bible. But wherever you start, the point is this: start.
You don’t have to be a theology nerd. You don’t need a Greek lexicon or a seminary library. You just need to be willing.
Surface-level Christianity might feel easier. But it doesn’t hold up when life gets complicated. It doesn’t offer much when your faith is tested. It doesn’t form you into the kind of person Jesus was calling when he said, “Come, follow me.”
But deep discipleship does.
