Shownotes
What happens to your soul when you let an algorithm do your thinking? Spoiler alert: it’s not great. In this episode, Dr. Jeffery Skinner dives into the sneaky ways AI and digital platforms are reshaping our conscience and dulling our discernment. You might think you’re just scrolling through memes or getting your daily news fix, but you’re actually sidelining the part of you that wrestles with deeper questions about faith and morality. It’s like outsourcing your soul's workout to a couch potato. We’ll explore how this digital age affects our spiritual growth and discernment, and why it’s crucial for us to reclaim our ability to think critically and seek God authentically. So grab your headphones, and let’s get into why your soul might be missing out on some serious gym time while you’re busy clicking ‘like’ on everything.
Scripture References
Romans 12:2 — Transformation through the renewing of the mind
Hebrews 5:14 — Mature believers train themselves to discern good and evil
Matthew 25:14–30 — The Parable of the Talents
Luke 6:40 — A disciple, when fully trained, will be like their teacher
Acts 15 — The Jerusalem Council as communal discernment
Galatians 5:13–25 — Life in the Spirit and formation of character
1 Timothy 4:7–8 — Training in godliness
JAMES K.A. SMITH — Desiring the Kingdom & You Are What You Love
Smith’s big idea is that we are formed by what we habitually do, not primarily by what we intellectually believe. He draws from Augustine — we are lovers before we are thinkers. Our desires are shaped by repeated practices, or what he calls cultural liturgies.
The Wesleyan Arminian angle: Smith gives us the mechanism of formation that Wesley always assumed but didn’t systematize. Wesley’s class meetings, his means of grace, his disciplined rhythms — these were all essentially liturgical formation practices. Smith helps you articulate why they worked and why their absence hurts.
Key ideas to track down:
∙ Liturgy as desire formation — practices shape loves before the mind engages
∙ The mall as cathedral — his famous illustration of secular liturgies forming us toward consumption
∙ Counter-formation requires intentional, embodied, communal practice
ALAN JACOBS — How to Think (2017)
Jacobs is winsome, careful, and genuinely funny. His core argument is that thinking well is not primarily an intellectual skill — it’s a moral and social practice. We think badly not because we’re stupid but because we’re embedded in communities that reward certain conclusions and punish others.
He introduces the idea of the “inner ring” — borrowed from C.S. Lewis — the social pressure to think like your tribe. Algorithms weaponize the inner ring. They identify your tribe, amplify its voice, and make departure feel socially costly.
Key ideas to track down:
∙ Thinking as a communal practice that can be corrupted by social incentives
∙ The “repugnant cultural other” — his term for how we’re trained to caricature those who think differently
∙ Charitable interpretation as a spiritual discipline
JOHN DYER — From the Garden to the City (2011)
Dyer is the most theologically careful of the group and writes from an evangelical framework that translates well into Wesleyan categories. His central argument is that technology is never neutral — it always shapes the user, not just the world the user acts on.
He traces this from Genesis forward. Every technology from agriculture to the printing press to the smartphone changes what humans pay attention to, what they value, and ultimately who they become.
Dyer gives biblical and historical credibility. This isn’t a panic about modern machines — it’s a pattern as old as humanity. The question has always been whether we are using tools or being used by them.
Key ideas to track down:
∙ Technology as transformation — it changes us, not just our circumstances
∙ The Babel narrative as a technology cautionary tale
∙ The difference between tools that extend human capacity and tools that replace human judgment
TRISTAN HARRIS — Humane Technology Work
Harris is not a theologian but he is our most credible secular witness. As a former Google design ethicist he speaks from the inside. His core argument is that social media and AI are not neutral platforms — they are persuasion engines optimized for engagement, which means optimized for outrage, anxiety, and compulsion.
His most useful concept for your episode is “the race to the bottom of the brain stem” — the competition among tech companies to capture attention by appealing to the most reactive, least reflective parts of us.
For Wesleyan Arminian framework: Wesley was deeply concerned with what he called the “carnal mind” — the unregenerate, reactive, self-centered orientation of the human soul. Harris, without knowing it, has mapped the technology infrastructure that feeds the carnal mind and starves the renewed one.
Key ideas to track down at humanetech.com:
∙ The asymmetry of power between algorithm and user
∙ Engagement vs. wellbeing as competing design goals
∙ His congressional testimony — specific, quotable, publicly available
SHOSHANA ZUBOFF — The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019)
Zuboff is dense but her core idea is accessible and important: human experience has become raw material harvested by technology companies to predict and modify behavior. She calls this behavioral modification at scale.
I did not go deep into her economics. What matters is her moral argument: this system requires human beings to be predictable. And predictable people are, by definition, not growing. Not being transformed. Not surprising even themselves.
The Wesleyan connection is sharp: entire sanctification, growth in grace, the Spirit’s renewing work — all of these assume a human being who is genuinely changing. Surveillance capitalism needs you to stay the same. Grace refuses to let you.
Key ideas to track down:
∙ Behavioral surplus — the data harvested beyond what you knowingly give
∙ The goal of certainty over human behavior as the system’s deepest aim
∙ Her concept of instrumentarian power — shaping behavior without direct coercion
DALLAS WILLARD — Formation Theology
Willard isn’t writing about AI but he is your theological backbone for the whole episode. His central claim is that spiritual formation is the church’s primary task and that it requires intentional, disciplined, often uncomfortable engagement with practices that renovate the soul.
His concept of “the gospel of sin management” is particularly useful. The critique that the church has reduced discipleship to behavior modification rather than genuine transformation of the whole person.
For your Wesleyan Arminian framework: Willard was deeply influenced by Wesley, and his formation theology maps almost directly onto Wesley’s via salutis — the way of salvation as a journey of genuine transformation, not just positional declaration.
Key ideas to track down:
∙ Spiritual disciplines as training, not trying — you don’t try to run a marathon, you train for one
∙ The renovated will as the goal of formation
∙ “Non-discipleship is the elephant in the church” — this is one of his most quotable lines and widely attributed so worth verifying
Referenced Resources
Andy Crouch — The Life We’re Looking For (2022)
James K.A. Smith — Desiring the Kingdom (2009) and You Are What You Love (2016)
John Dyer — From the Garden to the City (2011)
Reverend Dr. Tim Gaines-Christian Ethics (2021)
Alan Jacobs — How to Think (2017)
Shoshana Zuboff — The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019)
Shoshana Zuboff Youtube Harvard Lecture
Tristan Harris — most of his quotable material lives at humanetech.com and his congressional testimonies, which are publicly searchable.
The episode unfolds as a candid examination of how our reliance on artificial intelligence might be weakening our spiritual discernment and moral agency. Dr. Skinner introduces a fictional conversation where Mia, a young woman grappling with personal dilemmas, seeks advice from an AI. This scenario sets the stage for a larger discussion on the implications of turning to technology over human interaction for guidance. The AI, while appearing supportive and non-judgmental, represents a broader trend of individuals seeking validation and answers from algorithms, rather than engaging in the messy, beautiful work of community and spiritual growth. As the episode progresses, listeners are invited to reflect on their habits and the subtle shifts in their spiritual practices caused by digital engagement. Dr. Skinner articulates how algorithms prioritize efficiency and comfort, often at the expense of genuine moral engagement and personal growth. He details the necessity of re-establishing practices that encourage discernment, such as communal discussions and personal reflection, which can counteract the passive consumption of information. The episode concludes with a powerful call to action: to put down our devices, engage with our conscience, and embrace the challenging yet rewarding path of spiritual formation that requires presence, conversation, and the courage to grow.
Takeaways:
- Letting algorithms do our thinking might save time, but it can weaken our spiritual discernment.
- The digital age encourages us to seek quick answers instead of wrestling with deep moral questions.
- Community engagement is essential for discernment; it helps us navigate moral complexities together.
- Algorithms often reinforce our existing beliefs instead of challenging us to grow and change.
Links referenced in this episode:
Companies mentioned in this episode:
- Dynamic Church Planting International
- Tristan Harris
- Dallas Willard
Additional Recommended Reading
C.S. Lewis — 'The Inner Ring' (essay, 1944) — referenced via Alan Jacobs; freely available online
The Inner Ring — C.S. Lewis essay (free): https://www.lewissociety.org/innerring/
Todd Bolsinger — Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory (2015) — IVP
NT Wright — After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters (2010) — HarperOne
All thinkers referenced in this episode are cited by idea and concept rather than direct quotation, consistent with careful research practice. . The concepts as described are accurate representations of each author's documented work.
This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis:
Podcorn - https://podcorn.com/privacy
OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy
Transcripts
The cursor blinked in the empty text box. Mia had typed and deleted the same question four times already. Finally, she just let her fingers go.
Speaker B:Hey, this is kind of embarrassing. Is it okay if I ask you something personal?
Speaker A:The AI chatbot responds.
Speaker C:Of course. Nothing you ask me is going to make me think less of you. What's on your mind?
Speaker B:Okay, so there's this guy, and I don't know if what I'm feeling is, like, real or if I'm just being stupid. My friends all say I should just go for it, but it doesn't feel that simple to me.
Speaker C:It doesn't sound stupid at all. It sounds like you're actually thinking about this, which is more than a lot of people do. What makes it feel complicated, Mia?
Speaker B:I don't know. Like I actually care about what God thinks about it, which sounds so weird to say out loud, but I was raised in church and I want to do this right.
Whatever right even means.
Speaker C:That doesn't sound weird at all. That sounds like someone whose faith is actually her own, not just something she inherited and never thought about.
Speaker B:Maybe. I just. I feel like I can't ask anyone. My youth pastor is great, but she's so busy and what if she thinks I'm being dramatic or, like, immature?
I don't want her to see me differently.
Speaker C:Can I gently push back on something? What if she's waiting for exactly this kind of conversation? Youth pastors don't show up on Sunday mornings hoping nobody needs them.
The real stuff, the questions you almost didn't ask. Those are often the ones that matter most to them.
Speaker B:Sure. I never thought about it like that.
Speaker C:And for what it's worth, I can help you think through some of this. But I want to be honest with you. I can ask good questions and I can point you towards some wisdom.
What I can't do is know you the way someone in your life can. There's something that happens in a real conversation with someone who actually cares about you that I just can't replace.
Speaker B:So you think I should talk to her?
Speaker C:I think the bravest thing you could do right now isn't figuring out the guy, it's letting someone who loves you into the question.
Speaker B:What if she doesn't have time?
Speaker C:Then she'll tell you and you'll figure out another time together. But Mia, you deserve to be known. Not just answered, known. And that takes a real human being who can look you in the eyes.
Speaker B:Yeah, okay. Maybe.
Speaker A:She closes the laptop halfway, then stops.
Speaker B:Can I still ask you a few things first? Like to maybe warm up.
Speaker C:Absolutely. I'm here.
Speaker A:Marcus Aurelius said, what we do in life echoes through eternity. What is your life echoing through eternity? Welcome to Echoes Through Eternity with Dr. Jeffrey Skinner.
Our mission is to inspire, engage and encourage leaders from across the globe to plant missional churches and be servant leaders. So join us and hear the stories of servant leaders reverberating lives as God echoes them through eternity.
Brought to you by missional church planting and leadership development in Dynamic Church planting International
Speaker D:command Echoes through eternity. What is God echoing through your life today? What you just heard wasn't real. Mia doesn't exist. That conversation never happened.
But I want you to sit with it for just a moment because something in you probably recognized it. Maybe you recognized Mia. Maybe you recognized yourself at 16 with a question you almost didn't ask.
Probably it wasn't with an AI, but it might have been with a friend, or it might have just been with yourself. But here's what troubles me about the little dialogue, little opening segment that I wrote. That AI did everything right. It listened without judgment.
It validated, validated her with faith. It gently, wisely redirected her back to her youth pastor.
And at the end of all that wisdom, Mia closed her laptop halfway and said, can I still ask you a few questions first to quote, warm up. And the machine said, absolutely, I'm here. That's not failure of technology.
That is a warning to the church for Generation Alpha, for much of Gen Z, and far more than a few younger millennials who have grown up navigating the digital frontier are now navigating artificial intelligence and is increasingly becoming the first place they bring their questions. Not to their parents, not to their small group leader, and not to you as their pastor. The AI doesn't get busy.
It doesn't look tired on Sunday morning. It never makes them feel dramatic. It always us, always, without exception, available.
And if we are not careful, if we are not present, if we are not the kind of pastors and youth pastors and spiritual leaders and guides that people actually feel safe running towards, we will not be the second voice they hear either. We will be the one they never quite get around to. I've said it before and I'll keep saying it.
Personal presence is no longer just a pastoral virtue in the age of artificial intelligence.
It is the defining mark that separates a church that is genuinely making disciples from one that is simply producing a well attended Sunday experience. The Mia I wrote was fortunate. She interacted with an AI that had learned her enough to point her home.
But I Want you to notice that even being pointed home wasn't enough to get her there. Mia stayed. She warmed up. She kept talking to the machine. The rest of our conversation today is going to wrestle with that.
It's going to wrestle with what that means for discernment, for spiritual formation, for. For a church that has spent decades learning how to deliver information, but may have forgotten how to cultivate wisdom.
Because the digital frontier doesn't just raise new questions about tools. It raises the oldest question of us all. Who is forming the souls of people in our care.
This episode wrestles with how artificial intelligence reshapes, reshapes conscience and discernment.
Whether outsourced thinking weakens spiritual maturity, and why the church must intentionally train discernment rather than simply deliver information. I want us to recognize that provenient grace capacitates genuine moral agency and how that agency atrophies when we stop exercising it.
There's a word we don't use much anymore, conscience. Not because we've rejected it, but more like we've misplaced it. The way you misplace something you stopped reaching for. It was there.
You just haven't needed it lately because something else has been answering before it gets the chance. Think about the last time you faced a genuinely hard question.
A moral crossroads, Something that required you to sit with discomfort, to weigh competing goods, to listen for something deeper than your own preference. Now think honestly, what did you reach for first? Most of us reached for a screen. And I'm not saying that's catastrophic.
I'm saying it's worth noticing. Because the conscious is not a self maintaining instrument. It's more like a muscle. And muscles that don't get used, don't stay ready.
They quietly, gradually, imperceptibly weaken. Paul wrote to the Romans, be transformed by the renewing of your mind. That word transformed in the Greek is metamorpho.
It's where we get metamorphosis from. Paul wasn't describing a software update. He was describing something more like what happens in a cocoon.
A fundamental restructuring of the inner life. Something that requires pressure, darkness, time, resistance. Metamorphosis doesn't happen in comfort.
And here's what intelligent machines do remarkably brilliantly. And if we're not paying attention dangerously well, they remove the friction that is their genius.
Every algorithm, every curate, feed, every AI assistant is fundamentally in the business of making your life smoother, easier, more efficient, less resistant. Which sounds like a gift, and in many ways it is. But there's a kind of friction. We actually need the friction of A decision that costs something.
The friction of sitting with a question long enough that God gets a word in. The friction of being genuinely uncertain and having to pray your way through rather than search your way out.
When we outsource that friction, we don't just save time, we skip the formation. Andy Crouch, in his book the Life We're Looking for, draws a distinction that stopped me cold when I first encountered it.
He argues that modern technology is quietly converting us from persons into users. A person brings their whole inner life to an encounter, their history, their conscience, their loves, their wounds.
That's why we talk about, in the Christian tradition, that we are not just souls, we are souls. A user just wants the transaction to work.
Crouch's concern is that we spend enough time, that when we spend enough time as users, we start to forget how to show up as persons, even with God, even with each other. That's not a technology problem, that is a formation problem.
And it lands differently when you understand what's actually at stake in the Christian tradition.
There's a long stream of thought, stretching through Wesley, through the early church, through Scripture itself, that understands that the human conscience is is something more than a cultural construct or an evolutionary safeguard. The conscience in this tradition is a gift. It is the quiet work of grace, already moving in a person before they know God's name.
Wesley called this provenient grace, the grace that goes before, that prepares the heart, it tills the soil of the garden, so to speak, that keeps the moral faculty alive and responsive. It's the reason a person who's never opened a Bible can still feel the weight of wrong they've done.
It's the reason guilt exists, the reason we instinctively know that some things matter. That's not nothing, that's God already present, already working, already calling. But grace, capacitated faculties still require cultivation.
The conscience was designed to be consulted, to be exercised, tested and refined. The early Methodists understood this intuitively. The class meeting wasn't primarily an information delivery system.
People gathered weekly and asked each other hard question, how is it with your soul? Where did you struggle this week? Where did you feel Gospel's pull and resist it? They were doing something the algorithm can't do.
They were creating structured, relational, recurring space for the inner life to be examined and strengthened. We have largely stopped doing that. And into that vacuum, something else has moved, something that never asks, how is it with your soul?
Something that only wants to know, what will you click next? Tristan Harris spent years as a design Methodist inside Google before he couldn't stay quiet anymore.
He left and began warning anyone who would listen about what he called the race to the bottom of the brain stem, the competition among technology companies by appealing to our most reactive, most impulsive, least reflective, instinctive. Not our curiosity, not our conscience, not our capacity for wisdom, our reactivity, our anxiety, our outrage.
And folks, I'm seeing this among some of the most respected pastors and voices I know in the church because they've been so educated theologically. But oftentimes they are absent the relationships of a strong congregation.
And so they've fallen into this void of the digital universe and it's echo chamber that simply echoes the voices themselves, and all they have left is outrage. Now, Tristan, he wasn't making a theological argument, but he was describing something Wesley would have recognized immediately.
That is the carnal mind, the unregenerate orientation of the soul that runs towards stimulation and away from stillness. These platforms are not accidentally feeding it, they're engineered to.
Which means the spiritual stakes are higher than most of us have been willing to admit. Now, I want you, I want to be careful here. This isn't about demonizing technology. I use technology.
I'm using technology as we speak to record this podcast. The printing press disrupted formation too. Radio did television.
I point you back to Neil Postman's book, Entertaining Ourselves to Death, I think is the name of it. It came out late 70s, early 80s, but man, was it prophetic. But every generation has had to ask, what are these tools doing to her in her life?
And are we paying attention? That's not a new question. It's an ancient one, dressed in modern clothes.
But the scale and intimacy of what we're navigating now is genuinely different. These aren't tools you pick up and put down. They're environments you inhabit. They know your patterns better than your pastor.
They logged more of your reactions than your closest friend has witnessed. And they're learning constantly, quietly, how to keep you engaged. Now, engagement is not the same as formation.
You can be endlessly engaged and completely unchanged. Actually, that might be the point. A person who is always consuming is never becoming and becoming.
Genuine grace fueled spirit directed becoming is what the whole Christian life is about. So the question for this episode isn't whether you use AI. Most of us will. Most of us will not have a choice. Most of us already do.
Fill out any survey, anything you do online. The algorithm has shaped the ads that you're watching.
The question is whether you're still consulting the thing inside you that was placed there before grace, before any algorithm knew your name. The question is whether the conscience is still getting exercise because the machines will keep getting smarter. That is certain.
The only question is whether we're still getting wiser. There's a phrase that has quietly disappeared from how we talk about the Christian life, becoming like Jesus.
In fact, I'm proud to say that the Church of the Nazarene's mission is to make Christ like disciples of the nations. So we haven't forgotten that. But what I am afraid of is that for many of our churches it's simply become a slogan.
Not believing the right things about Jesus, not following Jesus account on social media, not even agreeing with Jesus, but actually genuinely over time, becoming like Jesus. That is a formation word. And formation takes something that the digital age is specifically and systematically designed to eliminate.
It takes discomfort with who you currently are. In other words, it assumes that who you currently are is wrong and it is right. Not because it's bad, but because that's what it's programmed to do.
It's currently programmed to constantly move you forward, but not move you forward in the image of Jesus, but move you in the forward of whatever it discerns that you like. Here's what I mean. Every algorithm you interact with today has one primary directive.
Not to challenge you, not to stretch you, not to introduce you to ideas that unsettle your comfortable conclusions. Its directive is to learn what you already like and give you more of it. To map your preferences and build a world around them.
To make you feel at every moment that you're exactly right, exactly understood, exactly catered to. That feels good. Affirmation feels good. But we don't affirm sin. The Church never has affirmed sin. Of course we're wired for affirmation.
But disciples aren't supposed to be preference driven people. Jesus didn't say follow your feet. He said, deny yourself. Those are not even close to the same instruction.
James K. Smith has spent years helping the Church recover something that has always been known but often forgotten, that we are not primarily thinking beings who occasionally feel things.
James K. Smith reminds us that we are lovers, desiring creatures, and what we become is shaped far more by what we habitual, by what we habitually love and practice than what we. James K.A.
smith reminds us that we are lovers, desiring creatures, and what we become is shaped far more by what we habitually love and practice than about what we intellectually affirm. Smith argues in you are what you love.
That our hearts are aimed by our habits, the practices we repeat, the environments we inhabit, the rhythms we keep. These are quietly and constantly forming the direction of our desire.
Which means the algorithm isn't just curating your content, is training your loves. Every scroll, every like, every recommendation accepted without question is a small act of formation.
This is why discernment is one of the best spiritual practices that we can teach in the church. In the digital frontier of artificial intelligence. Now, these are obviously not. This is not dramatic. It's just tiny repetition that adds to pattern.
That's why it's so difficult. That's why it's so dangerous. It reminds me of the conversation that Eve had with the serpent in the garden.
And that it was a subtle shift in the understanding and planting of seeds within the mind of human creation that began to doubt God over time. And patterns over time become the shape of the soul. The early church understood this with a clarity that we've lost.
They called them practices, disciplines, means of grace. Not because doing them earned anything before God, but because the soul is not a static object.
It is a living thing that grows in the direction that it is constantly and consistently pointed. Prayer points it towards God. Scripture points it towards truth. Fasting points it away from appetite and towards dependence.
Confession points it towards honesty. Community points it towards love. Wesley built an entire renewal movement on this insight. The Methodist class meeting wasn't just a small group.
It was a counter formation community. A structured, intentional relational environment designed to aim the heart towards Christlikeness week by week. It worked.
Not because people were talking or talked, but because they were asked hard questions and held accountable for their answers. How is it with your soul? That question assumed something that the algorithm never assumes.
It assumed that you were in a process, that last week's version of you was not the final version. That growth was expected, measurable, and communal. Dallas Willard named what's missing with characteristic precision in Renovation of the Heart.
He writes about the need for the renovation of the whole person.
Not just beliefs suggested, not just behaviors modified, but the deep interior landscape of the human being generously restructured by grace and practice over time. Willard was insistent that this doesn't happen accidentally. It doesn't happen through passive consumption of good content.
It happens through training. Intentional, sometimes uncomfortable spirit enabled training. He wasn't being harsh. He was being honest.
And his honesty exposes something important about where we are right now. Because here's the quiet danger. When algorithms curate our reality, they don't just filter what we see.
They construct a self around our preferences and a preference. Constructed self is almost the opposite of a disciple. A disciple is someone being deconstructed and reconstructed by grace.
Someone whose preferences are being challenged, redirected, and solely conformed to the image of Christ. A preference curated self is someone whose existing shape is being reinforced and amplified at every turn.
One of those trajectories leads towards Christlikeness. The other leads towards a more comfortable, more defended, more brittle version of who you already are.
John Dyer in From the Garden to the Sea reminds us that this dynamic is not entirely new. Every technology reshapes the the people who use it. The printing press changed how people relate to scripture, for better and for worse.
Television changed attention spans and family rhythms. The smartphone changed the experience of solitude. Each tool brought gifts and brought cost.
The question Dyer keeps returning to is whether we are using the tool or whether the tool is using us. And I think that's the right question.
And for many of us, if we're willing to be honest, the answer has quietly shifted in a direction we didn't choose and didn't notice. Luke records something Jesus said that is so simple it almost slides past us. A disciple, when fully trained, will be like their teacher.
This is not something new. This is exactly the rabbinic way. You know the whole phrase of may you be covered in the dust of your rabbi. That was a compliment.
That was to say, may you follow so closely in your rabbi's steps that you share his dust on those dusty roads. They didn't have nice paved roads in ancient times. They had dirt roads. That's why washing feet was so important. And it was a nasty job.
And so in the dust of the rabbi was a way of saying, may you be more like your teacher, not informed by your teacher, not following the feet of your teacher, but like them, shaped by proximity, by imitation, by long exposure, by practice. That kind of formation requires presence with the teacher. Real presence, not mediated, not curated, not text messaging presence.
It's not algorithmically optimized presence, the kind of presence that is sometimes inconvenient, sometimes confrontational, always personal. For the last couple of months, I have sat in a very uncomfortable space.
A young baby born in a hospital that was given very little chance of making it. And I sat with the family and I talked with the family over those last couple of months. And I have watched them grow in Christ.
And I have earned permission not by texting them, but by sitting with them. And I had the privilege of being uncomfortable as I sat with this family whose language I did not speak, except that we shared the language of love.
And I had the privilege of being uncomfortable in that presence there. As this little baby passed from this world into the arms of Jesus, it's what pastors do, and that's how we earn permission.
The algorithm offers you a version of Jesus that has been optimized for your preferences. Gentle when you need, gentle, affirming when you need affirm. Convicting only in the ways you've already agreed to be convicted.
But the real Jesus has a tendency to show up in the inconvenient moments to ask the question you were hoping to avoid. To love enough to not leave you where you are. That Jesus doesn't fit neatly into a feed.
And following him, I mean, really following him, is going to require us to cultivate something that the curated self was never designed to develop. I think Dietrich Bonhoeffer's the Cost of Discipleship is one of the best reminders of that. Discipleship comes with a cost.
It wasn't new to Bonhoeffer. Jesus said, if you are my follower, you will take up your cross and follow me.
The cross, I think I said it last week, was that was not a beautiful instrument. It was an instrument of death. But the fact that Jesus died on a cross, an instrument of death, was a reminder that death doesn't have the final word.
Jesus redeemed even death, the willingness to be different tomorrow than we are today. That's discipleship. It always has been. And in the age of intelligent machines, recovering it may be the most countercultural thing the Church can do.
I want to tell you about a man who did nothing wrong. He didn't steal. He didn't lie. He didn't hurt anyone. He didn't rebel, resist or run.
He simply took what had been entrusted to him, wrapped it carefully, buried it safely, and waited. And Jesus. Jesus called it a failure.
The parable of the Talents in Matthew 25 is one of the most uncomfortable stories Jesus ever told, precisely because the villain isn't obviously villainous. He's cautious, protective, risk averse. He looked at what we had, what. What he had been given, and decided the safest thing to do was nothing.
And in the economy of the kingdom, nothing turns out to be the most costly choice of all. I've been thinking a lot about this man lately because I think he might be the patron saint of the digital age.
Not because we're malicious, not because we've rejected God or abandoned our values, but because we have access to the most sophisticated burying mechanism in human history. And we are using it and using it every single day to protect ourselves from the discomfort of genuine moral engagement. It works like this.
A hard question surfaces, a moral complexity.
You don't quite know how to navigate a moment that requires you to think carefully, pray honest, sit with uncertainty, and eventually make a choice you'll have to own. And before any of that can happen, before the conscience gets fully engaged, before the spirit gets a word in, you outsource it. You search it.
You find the answer. What confirms what you already suspected. You move on. Nobody buried anything, but nothing grew either.
Shoshana Zupov spent years documenting what she calls surveillance capitalism, the vast architecture of digital systems designed to predict and ultimately influence human behavior at scale. Her research in the age of surveillance capitalism reveals something that should stop every serious Christian in their tracks.
These systems are not neutral observers of human behavior. They are engineers of it. And what they are engineering us towards is not wisdom or growth or moral courage.
They are engineering us towards predictability. Predictable people are profitable people. Predictable people are manageable people.
And predictable people are almost by definition, people who are not growing because growth requires a willingness to surprise even yourself. Think about what genuine moral formation looks like in scripture. Abraham leaving everything familiar without knowing where he was going.
Moses returning to the place he fled. Esther walking through a door that could have meant her death.
Peter stepping out of a boat, Paul turning around on a road to Damascus and becoming the opposite of everything he had been. None of those stories are stories of predictability.
They are stories of people who were interrupted by grace and responded with courage, people who made choices that cost them something, people whose moral agency was fully, dangerously, gloriously engaged. I think this is one reason that the Lord of the Rings, J.R. tolkien's Lord of the Rings series resonates so much with people, has been.
And he made no qualms. He doesn't hide the fact that his stories were based in reality and had Christian undertones to them. The algorithm would have told Abraham to stay.
Alan Jacobs, in How to Think, makes an argument that cuts right to the heart of this. He observes that thinking well, genuinely well, is not primarily an intellectual skill, is a moral practice.
And it is a practice that is increasingly undermined by. By the social ecosystems we inhabit online, which reward certainty, punish doubt, and make the cost of changing your mind feel unbearably high.
He introduces a concept borrowed from C.S.
lewis, the pull of the inner ring, the social pressure to think like your tribe, to affirm what your community affirms, to avoid the conclusions that would make you unwelcome. Algorithms don't just reflect that pressure. They amplify it.
They identify your tribe, build walls around it, and make departure feel like exile for the Christian. This is more than a social media problem.
It is A sanctification problem, because genuine growth and grace almost always requires the willingness to be wrong, to repent, to change, to hold a conviction that you've carried for years up to the light of Scripture and say, maybe not.
That requires a kind of moral courage that a perfectly curated environment is specifically designed to make unnecessary and unnecessary things atrophy. Wesley understood this with pastoral clarity. His theology was never content with a faith that simply avoided obvious sin.
He was never something more ambitious, something he called going on to perfection. Not moral flawlessness, but a heart fully oriented towards God. That love becomes a reflexive, habitual, instinctive response to every situation.
A heart that leans towards God the way a plant leans towards life. But that kind of heart is not produced by passivity.
In his sermon on Working Out Our Own Salvation, Wesley held two things that we tend to pull apart, divine grace and human participation. God works and we work not to earn anything.
But because grace is not a sedative, it is not an invitation to genuine, effortful, spirit enabled engagement with the life of God is forming in us. Passivity, in Wesley's framework, is not humility, it is ways. Dallas Word made the same point from a different angle.
He was deeply troubled by what he called the gospel of sin management, the reduction of Christian faith to a transaction that gets you to heaven while leaving the inner life largely untouched. In the divine conspiracy, he argued that Jesus was not primarily offering people a way to avoid hell.
He was inviting them into a life of genuine transformation, what Willard called a life in the kingdom. A life of increasing responsiveness to God that requires real engagement, real practice, real risk.
The very talent in Willard's reading is not just money. It is a life unlived, a soul unformed, a person who had access to grace and chose safety of inaction instead. That is a danger we're navigating.
It's not dramatic apostasy, not obvious rebellion, just a quiet, comfortable, algorithmically assisted choice to bury what we've been given rather than risk bringing it into the light. And here's what makes it so spiritually subtle. Moral passivity doesn't feel like failure. It feels like wisdom. It feels like patience.
It feels like not being hasty, not being extreme, not being one of those people who make strong claims about hard things. It feels honestly a lot like the servant in the parable. In the parable. It feels honestly a lot like the servant in the parable. Honestly.
It feels a lot like the servant in the parable. Careful, responsible, safe. But Jesus looked at the servant and said, you knew what was required and you chose not to engage.
The good news, and there is always good news, is that passivity is not a permanent condition. The same grace that goes before us, that awakens the conscience, that capacitates genuine moral agency. That grace is still moving, still calling.
It's still creating the possibility of response. The question is whether we'll turn down the noise long enough to hear it.
There's a line in the book of Hebrews that doesn't get nearly enough attention. Solid food is for the mature who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil. That's Hebrews 5:14. Train themselves.
Constant use. The writer of Hebrews wasn't describing a gift dropped from heaven into a passive recipient.
He was describing an athlete, someone who'd showed up repeatedly, intentionally, over time, someone who did the work that produced the capacity. We have largely lost that vision of the Christian life.
Somewhere along the way, discipleship got reduced to attendance, to information intake, to agreeing with the right things and avoiding the wrong ones. And the church, if we're honest, has often been complicit in that reduction. Why? Because that produces good saints, at least on the outside.
But in that sense, in that environment, holiness becomes hiddenness, because the things that people can't see become okay. But the irony is, Jesus looks at what's on the inside, not what's on the outside. We built systems for delivering content.
We got very good at programming. We got very good at providing answers. What we got less good at was training people to find their own. James K.A.
smith has a way of naming this that cuts through the noise. In Designing a Kingdom, he argues that the church's primary task is not education, it's formation.
And formation happens not through the transfer of information, but through the cultivation of habits, practices, and what he calls cultural liturgies, the repeated embodied rhythms that quietly aim the heart in a particular direction. His point is uncomfortable. For a church that has staked so much on the sermon, the curriculum, the podcast, the conference.
Information is not nothing. But information alone does not form a discerning person. It informs them, which is a different thing entirely. Teaching tells you what is true.
Training makes you capable of finding it. Dallas Willard spent decades naming essentially the same argument from a slightly different angle.
In the spirit of the disciplines, he drew a distinction that permanently changes how you think about spiritual growth. He said, we don't try our way into transformation, we train our way into it. You cannot try to run a marathon on race day without ever have trained.
The trying, however sincere, will not be enough. The body simply isn't Ready. The soul works the same way.
Wilder's insight is that spiritual disciplinesprayer, fasting, solidity, scripture confession, worship service. Let me say those more slowly.
Spiritual disciplines, prayer, fasting, solitude, scripture confession, worship service, those are, are not the Christian life itself. Those are the training ground for it.
And let me say this, the spiritual disciplines, they're not done every day, and you don't use every one of them every day. Just think of the. The best metaphor I was ever given was a. Was a garden set or a garden shed with tools in there. We don't use a plow every day.
We don't use a plow to sow the seeds. We don't use a sewer to plow the ground. We don't use the, the fertilizer. We don't. We don't use that to. After we've already planted the crops.
We do it before. We do it to cultivate the ground for it.
They are how the soul gets strong enough, supple enough, attentive enough to respond to God in the moments that actually matter.
The hard moments, the ambiguous moments, the moments when no algorithm is going to shape you and no search engine is going to produce the answer you need. Those moments require a foreign person. And formed people don't appear by accident.
So what does intentional discernment training look like in a church that takes this seriously, not as a program, but as a recovery, a return to practices the church has always known, but has sometimes been too efficient to keep? First, practice silence and solitude, not as a spiritual luxury, as spiritual necessity.
Tristan Harris has documented extensively how technology platforms are engineered to colonize every moment of potential stillness. The notification, the autoplay, the endless scroll that activates the moment you stop. These are not accidents of design.
They are featured because a person who is still, who is never still, is a person who is always consuming the counter. Practice is almost embarrassingly simple. You stop, be quiet, let the noise settle. As someone who is.
Who tends towards ADHD and always active, one of the most inspiring habits I have ever created was just sitting in a dark room with just gentle music playing in the background and not talking so much and praying so much as just listening to God. Those moments shaped me in ways that I just can't describe.
Silence creates regular protected space where no algorithm can reach you and the only voice available is the one that is speaking, that was speaking before any of us ever existed, before any of this ever existed. Wesley called this the beams of grace, renown called solitude, the furnace of transformation.
Whatever you want to call it, whatever name you use the practice is the same. You cannot hear what you will not be still enough to receive. The second practice, communal discernment.
One of the most dangerous myths of the digital age is that discernment is a private transaction between you and your search engine. You have a question, you find an answer. Decision made, nobody else involved. But Scripture consistently locates discernment in community.
The Jerusalem council in Acts 15 didn't Google the Gentile question. Obviously, Google didn't exist. They gathered, though. They argued, they listened to testimony.
And that's the other thing that the digital age does is as opposed to using argument and disagreement as formation, it uses argument and disagreement to divide and to create distrust. In fact, it's almost the opposite of formation.
It deconstructs us in ways that allows a digital universe to form us, as opposed to deconstructing us in ways that allows grace to from us. Sunday, Shauna preached a sermon on atonement. And one of the things that she said was that the people of Israel made their.
The Hebrew people made their sacrifices to God not to appease God, but to. As a. As a way of reunifying as. As. As making atonement to God to reunify themselves.
And so after the service, I went to Tim, her husband, because she was busy in conversation with other people. And I said I was thinking about that.
And what we know is that the, the people of Israel, the Hebrew people, did not come to make those sacrifices in a vacuum. They were shaped by the practices of the Canaanite gods.
And so the Canaanite gods did make their sacrifices to the Canaanite gods to appease those gods. If you wanted to win a victory, sacrifice your child on the altar of the gods in order to win that victory.
If you really want to win a victory, sacrifice your firstborn son. And so my question to him was, at what point did they discern that God was no longer a God who need to be appeased?
And so their sacrifices were no longer made to appease God, but made to reunify them with God. The, The. The burnt fat, the smoke would rise to the heavens and God would feast upon that, not upon the meat being sacrificed on the altar.
I did that. Not in a algorithm. I did that with him. His answer was, we don't know exactly when, except that it just happened over time.
In other words, they were shaped and formed over time through their encounter with God. So the when does not matter so much as the who. That is not something an algorithm could tell me.
An algorithm would want to point back to a specific time in a specific place, and say, here, here was the moment that they changed their mind.
But what we know, even if there was a moment in time that they began to understand that it happened over time, over a period of time, through their encounters with God, understanding and his reminders through the prophets, through the judges, and through the other people of God, through the community, that God was not a God to be appeased through sacrifice.
In other words, they listened to testimony, they sat with attention long enough for the Spirit to move, and they emerged with something none of them could have produced alone. Alan Jacobs argues in how to Think that we cannot think well alone. We need what he calls a community of practice.
People who share our commitments but are willing to challenge our conclusions, people who love us enough to say, I don't think you've thought this all the way through. People who make intellectual and moral courage feel possible because they practice it and they are practicing it alongside of us.
That community doesn't form itself. The church has to build it intentionally, counterculturally, against the grain of culture that has outsourced every hard question to a machine.
The third practice, Scripture as resistanced literature. John Dyer's work on People of the Screen raises a question that should unsettle every pastor and every serious leader of the Bible.
When we read Scripture on our devices that are simultaneously tracking our engagement, suggesting related content, and optimizing our experience, are we reading Scripture or are we using scripture as a content? I'm just asking a question, and I say this as one who regularly uses his phone to read scripture. It's easier. Yep, you hear that? It's easier.
Instead of having to thumb through the Bible and possibly even read a Scripture I didn't intend to read, I go straight to the one I want to read because the screen takes me there. The Bible was never, he argues, the Bible is not. Well, it is true. You know, the Bible was not meant to be consumed.
It was designed to be inhabited, to be wrestled with, to be read in ways that confront your preferences rather than confirm them. Dan Boone, president of Trebek and Nazarene University, used the illustration of Star Trek.
He says that early versions of the Enterprise could scan ships. He said the later versions of the Enterprise could detect when they were being scanned. And he said Scripture should be used in ways that it scans us.
We should be able to hold it up and allow it to search our hearts, not us search it for our answers. The Psalms are full of lament that the algorithm would never recommend. The prophets are full of disruption that no engagement metric would reward.
Job ends without the answer Job was looking for. Ecclesiastes refuses to resolve neatly. This is not a bug in the Scripture. It is the point.
Recovering scripture as resistance literature means reading it in ways that are slow, communal, embodied, and specifically resistant to the efficiency of the digital age and that the digital age demands.
That's why I love lectio divina or davina memorization, reading aloud in community, sitting with a single passage long enough that it starts reading you. The fourth practice is confession and examination. Of all the practices the Church has allowed to atrophy, this may be the most urgent recovery.
The examined life Daily honest specific accounting before God for the actual state of the inner life is the practice that surfaces. What convenience hides the algorithm that never asks you where you fell this week.
It never invites you to consider the gap between who you are and who you're becoming. It has no category for repentance. It is not interested in your growth. It is interested in your engagement.
The examine the daily office, the honest conversation with a spiritual director or a trusted friend who has permission to ask hard questions. These practices keep the conscience active, the soul honest, and the formation process moving in the right direction.
Wesley's question bears repeating one more time because it never gets old and it never gets easy. How is it with your soul? I love that old hymn. It is well with my soul when peace like a river attendeth my way.
He didn't ask, is it how is your content consumption not how is your platform engagement? Not how is your productivity or your output or your personal brand? How is your soul? That question assumes you have one.
That question that that has that question assumes you have one, that it has a condition, and that that condition matters.
That someone who loves you is asking, and that your honest answer is not the optimized answer, but the cur and not the curated answer, but the true one is the beginning of whatever God wants to do next. The final question it remains Now I want to go back to where we started. Someone sitting with a phone in their hand.
Nothing dramatic, just an ordinary moment in an ordinary day. A question surfaced, a decision needed to be made.
And before the silence could do its work, before the conscience could stir, before the spirit could whisper, a screen lit up and answered. First, we said at the beginning that this wasn't catastrophic, just worth noticing. I hope by now it feels like more than that.
Because what we've been tracing across this conversation isn't really a story about technology.
It's a story about us, about the kind of people we are becoming, about whether the formation happening in us quietly, daily, habit by habit, scroll by scroll, is moving us towards the people God had in mind when he made us or away from them. Andy Crouch puts his finger on something in the life we're looking for that I keep returning to.
He argues that what we most deeply need, what we were most fundamentally made for, is not efficiency or entertainment or even information.
We were made for mutual knowing and being known, the face to face, the genuine encounter, the relationship that requires your whole self and give something real back. That's what's at stake. Not your screen time yourself.
The full image bearing grace, capacitated spirit breathed self that God has been patiently, persistently forming since before you knew you needed forming. The machines are not your enemy, but they are not your sanctifier either. Only grace does that work.
And grace in the Wesleyan tradition has always been understood as an invitation, not an imposition. It goes before you. It wakes something up inside you. It creates the capacity for response, but it waits for the response.
It doesn't drag you kicking and screaming into the kingdom of God. It honors the genuine freedom it gave you. It will not scroll on your behalf. You have to choose to put the phone down. You have to choose the silence.
You have to choose the community that asks hard questions over the feed, that only confirms easy answers.
You have to choose, again and again in 10,000 small, unremarkable moments to be a person who is still becoming rather than a preference that has already been mapped. That choice is not dramatic. It rarely feels significant in the moment.
It feels, honestly, a lot like inconvenience, like inefficiency, like swimming upstream in a current that everyone else seemed perfectly happy to float in.
But this is what discipleship has always felt like, from the first disciples who left their nets on the Galilean shore, to every follower of Jesus in every generation who has looked at the path of transformation and said yes, even this, even here, even now. The early Methodists had a covenant prayer that John Wesley used at the beginning of every year.
They would gather these ordinary people, miners and factory workers and merchants and farmers. Not the elite, not the leaders of the free world, and they'd pray words that were almost shockingly surrendered. I am no longer my own, but yours.
Put me to what you will, rank me with, whom you will put me to doing, put me to suffering. Let me be employed, for you are laid aside for you exalted, for you are brought low for you let me be full, let me be empty. Let me have all things.
Let me have nothing. I freely and heartily yield all things to your pleasure and disposal. This was John Wesley's Covenant Prayer. It was not an algorithm.
No algorithm can pray that prayer. It was not a machine. No machine can mean it. Only a person can.
Only a person with a conscience awakened by grace, a will genuinely engaged, a soul truly alive to the God who made it and loves it and refuses to leave it where it found it. That's you.
Whatever relationship with your devices looks like, whatever formation has or hasn't happened yet, whatever the gap is between who you are and who you sense God is calling you to become, that's you. And the grace that has been moving towards you since before you were born has not stopped moving.
It is not discouraged by your scrolling history, or intimidated by your distraction, or out competed by your algorithm. It is patient in ways that no platform will ever be, persistent in ways that no engagement metric can measure, and persistent in the silence.
Always in the silence waiting for you to arrive. So here's the invitation that closes the conversation and opens whatever comes next. Put something down.
Not forever, not dramatically, just long enough. Long enough to be still. Long enough to ask the question that has no research results. Long enough for the conscious to finish his sentence.
Long enough for the God who made you to get a word in before the notification does Wesley's question one more time, not as a guilt trip, but as a gift. How is it with your soul? Sit with that. Really sit with it.
Let it be the last thing you carry out of this episode and into whatever ordinary, remarkable, gray saturated moment comes next.
Because that moment, that quiet, unhurried, unoptimized moment, is exactly where formation has always happened and it is still happening, even now, even here. Even you. Foreign this has been echoes through eternity. I hope you've enjoyed this and if you have, please like and share it.
Make comments on you on them. Also go to our YouTube channel. Check it out. I'm really trying to build that up now.
Watch it on YouTube at Echoes through Eternity there and but, but talk about this with your friends. Share it with with your friends. I'm trying to get this is good stuff here. This is well researched stuff.
I put it in the show notes when you can and I would encourage you to go back to the show notes here and look for the resources I've told you about. Andy Krause, Dallas Willard, the others that I've talked about, the Tristan with Google and a recent resource that I didn't mention would be great.
He doesn't specifically talk about the ethics of of, you know, the screen, but he talks about ethics in general, and ethics in general always apply. And that is Dr. Reverend Dr. Tim Gaines has a book on ethics that you can purchase on Amazon or through the Foundry.
Encourage you to check that out as well. Again, if you enjoyed this episode, please like and subscribe, comment on it, review it and share it with your friends. Until next time, thank you.
Speaker A:If you enjoyed this, please like and subscribe.
