You don’t have to know who Philip Anthony Mitchell is to have heard him preach. His sermons travel in clips, racking up tens of thousands of views before many people ever learn his name.
The same thing happens with N.T. Wright. A brief clip can circulate for weeks, reaching people who may never read one of his books but still walk away with something he said lodged in their head.
This is increasingly how discipleship works now. The people forming our faith are no longer limited to the people in our churches. They’re pastors we follow, theologians we quote, creators we trust and increasingly, according to new research, even artificial intelligence.
Which raises a question most of us probably don’t ask often enough: Who is discipling you?
Barna’s 2026 State of the Church research found that nearly one in three U.S. adults believes spiritual advice from AI can be as trustworthy as advice from a pastor. Among Gen Z and Millennials, the number rises to roughly two in five.
On the surface, it’s a story about AI. But it’s also measuring something much bigger: spiritual authority is shifting.
A pastor may still be trusted, but so might a podcast host, an online theologian or a chatbot capable of producing an answer in seconds. Authority is becoming less about someone’s official role and more about whether they seem useful, convincing or available at the right moment.
The shift didn’t begin with ChatGPT. Barna and National Religious Broadcasters found that six in 10 U.S. adults engage with Christian media in some form, and about half do so weekly.
In many ways, this is a good thing. A sermon can reach someone who hasn’t stepped inside a church in years, and a 60-second clip can introduce someone to a theologian they might otherwise never encounter.
But access and formation aren’t the same thing. LifeWay Research’s recent work on discipleship found that Gen Z churchgoers attend worship more frequently than older generations on average, yet they received the lowest overall score on the study’s measures of discipleship and lagged in consistently applying their faith.
A person can be physically present in church and still spend most of the week being shaped somewhere else. Mark Dever, the longtime pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church and founder of 9Marks, has spent years writing about what discipleship actually requires.
His definition is simple: Christians helping other Christians follow Jesus. “The Christian life is the discipled life and the discipling life,” Dever writes in Discipling. A few lines later, he puts it even more plainly: “Christianity is not for loners or individualists.”
Both ideas run against the logic of the internet. Online, we can build an entire spiritual life around people who never know we exist. We can listen to their sermons, quote their books and turn to them whenever we have a question.
Some of them may genuinely help us follow Jesus, but they still don’t know us. “The discipling life is an others-oriented life,” Dever writes. His model for it is almost aggressively inefficient. As he points out elsewhere, “Christianity did not start with a mass-market product rollout.”
A screen can deliver teaching extremely well. What it can’t easily provide is the rest of discipleship: proximity, accountability and the slow work of being known.
The problem starts when we stop noticing the difference between being influenced by someone and being known by someone. For real discipleship to happen, Dever writes, “we must know others, be committed to them, and let them know us.”
The last part may be the hardest. Our feeds know our preferences. They know which preacher we’ll stop scrolling for and which topics will keep us watching. But knowing our preferences isn’t the same as knowing us.
A clip can challenge you, but it can’t notice the pattern you keep repeating. A podcast can give you wisdom, but it can’t know whether you’re using that wisdom to justify something you’d rather not confront. AI can answer a theological question, but it can’t share your life.
The local church can, at least when it’s functioning as more than a weekly event. Dever has described his own ministry philosophy in similarly unflashy terms. His plan was to “preach, pray, develop personal discipling relationships, and be patient.”
Patience may be one of the biggest differences between discipleship and content. Content has to keep moving. People take longer.
They repeat mistakes, need to hear the same truth more than once and change in ways that are difficult to measure with views or engagement. “The work of discipling occurs in the present, but it has its eyes set on the Last Day,” Dever writes.
It’s a radically different timeline from the one most of us live on online. Christian media is part of this ecosystem, including this publication. A RELEVANT clip featuring Mitchell has drawn more than 65,000 views on YouTube, while content featuring Wright has generated more than 70,000 engagements on Instagram.
Those numbers show a genuine hunger for serious conversations about faith. They also show how much spiritual influence can now happen in passing.
A sermon clip can matter. A podcast can be wise. Digital Christian content can supplement a healthy spiritual life, but the problem comes when the supplement quietly becomes the whole diet.
“Being a disciple of Jesus means orienting our lives toward others,” Dever writes. Someone has to be close enough to actually see your life for that to happen.
Most of us are being formed by more voices than we realize. Some are in our churches, while others are in our feeds. The goal isn’t to panic about digital Christian content or pretend it doesn’t matter.
It’s to know the difference between a voice you learn from and a person who knows you. Whether we’re paying attention or not, something is teaching us how to follow Jesus.
The question is whether anyone following alongside us knows our name.
