You've Consumed Enough. God Is Sending You Online.
Why Christians cannot treat the internet as neutral territory anymore.
I want to invite you to a place you visit dozens of times a day but have probably never named correctly. It is not a physical place, and yet it has the power of a house of worship: it tells you what to love, what to chase, and what kind of life is worth living.
The place is the screen in your pocket.
Imagine you are an anthropologist from another world, sent to Earth to study the religious rituals of the twenty-first century. You would look for cathedrals, mosques, synagogues. You would find some — sometimes full, often half-empty. But then you would notice something else: billions of people who stop what they are doing, pull a rectangular object from their pocket, and enter a silent ritual — eyes fixed, finger sliding upward in a repetitive motion that looks strikingly like a digital rosary.
A notification summons them with a faithfulness most churches would envy.
You would note immediately: this is the most practiced ritual on the planet.
Nobody is preaching. And yet, it forms you — not with arguments, but with repeated desire.
I say this as someone who was discipled by hustle culture online while planting a church offline. “For the Lord,” I told myself. But the screen was preaching a different sermon, and I was listening more hours per week than I spent in any prayer room.
If you are a Christian who spends time online, you have probably reached at least the stage of the cautious consumer. You filter, you discern, you set limits. And that is good.
But I think we stopped too early.
Because the real problem is not what you consume. The real problem is what remains unspoken in that space — and who is forming everyone else while you are busy protecting only your own heart. I believe God has something to say about the online world that does not stop at “be careful what you consume” — and most of us have not heard that part yet.
The online world is not an appendix.
Ephesus, around the year 53. The apostle Paul had just been thrown out of the synagogue. Three months he had preached there, and now the door had closed. The door that should have been home — the most religious, the most familiar, the safest. And I sometimes try to imagine what that moment looked like: the disappointment, maybe the frustration, and then the decision. He moves to the School of Tyrannus.
The School of Tyrannus was not a Christian space and not a place of prayer. It was a public amphitheater of debate and formation — the place where the orators, philosophers, and rhetoricians of Ephesus came daily, a heavily trafficked space of influence and public thought-shaping. People came there of their own free will, daily, repeatedly, to be formed. And Paul entered that space with the Gospel. Acts 19:9-10 says he did this daily, for two years.
I sometimes try to picture the bustle around him — curious glances, skeptical voices, the noise, the exhaustion of coming back again and again. And yet the Scripture says something staggering:
All who lived in the province of Asia heard the word of the Lord. Not just those in Ephesus. Everyone in the province of Asia. From a public school of rhetoric.
What Paul did is a pattern of the Kingdom. He did not wait for a cleaner space, a safer space, a more spiritual space. The synagogue was that space — and they threw him out. He took the real infrastructure of public formation and turned it into a platform for the Word of the Lord. He did not flee from it. He occupied it.
And here is the question that provokes me: where do people go today — of their own free will, daily, repeatedly — to be formed?
Not to the library. Not to public seminars. Sometimes not even to church — however much we wish otherwise. The answer is painfully obvious: their phone, their laptop, the platforms that know better than any pastor what moves them, what irritates them, what captures their attention without them being able to say exactly why.
And here is the reframe that changed how I read the New Testament: the Kingdom advances by occupying the real formation infrastructures of the age. Paul did not stay in the synagogue’s equivalent of “safe Christian spaces.” He entered the space where people were already being formed — and he formed them differently.
The problem is not that Christians spend too much time online. The problem is that we are leaving unoccupied one of the great spaces where people are already present — of their own free will, daily, repeatedly.
If you are not paying attention, the online world is not just informing you. It is discipling you.
Let me tell you what this liturgy looks like from the inside — because I lived it.
In my early twenties, I was part of a team planting a church. Bible studies, prayer meetings, team gatherings. I was in ministry. But in parallel, every single day, I was feeding from another source: financial gurus, hustle culture, the promise that if you work hard enough and smart enough, you will reach financial freedom — and from that freedom, more impact for the Kingdom.
Every video I watched, every article I read, every feed I scrolled through was shaping something. Not just my goals. My affections.
I was not “in the world” in the classic sense. I was in ministry. But I was being formed by a different altar. And with every hour I spent in that other liturgy, I could feel something shifting — a kind of distance in prayer, an appetite that was slowly dimming, like a fire nobody was adding wood to. Less hunger for fellowship with God. Less desire for knowing Him. Less openness to the work of the Holy Spirit. My tongue still spoke the language of the Kingdom, but my heart was beginning to worship other things.
The online world preaches without words — through images, rhythms, promises, and comparison. John captures the mechanics precisely: the desires of the flesh, the desires of the eyes, and the pride of life (1 John 2:16). These are not new forces. But they have never had an infrastructure this efficient, this personalized, this omnipresent.
And so the cautious consumer is a necessary step. The awakening is good. Discernment is good. To close, to filter, to guard your heart — these are true things.
But if all you do is guard your own heart, who stays to speak in that space? Who contradicts the false gospels that work on others without pause, without resistance, without alternative?
Your silence is not modesty. It is surrender of territory.
I understand the Christians who withdraw from the digital space. That place can be genuinely exhausting — aggressive in ways the physical world does not permit. Anonymity lowers inhibitions, reaction speed eliminates thought, and the algorithm rewards scandal more than nuance and truth. Pulling back feels mature. It feels like wisdom. And for certain seasons, there may be a real need for pause and silence.
But permanent silence is not neutral.
Heavily trafficked spaces never stay empty. When the witnesses go quiet, other liturgies speak, other gospels repeat themselves without interruption.
The “good news” of aesthetics — that your value depends on how you look.
The “good news” of productivity — that if you are not busy, you are not someone.
The “good news” of self-actualization — that the most important project of your life is yourself.
These gospels do not ask you to believe in them explicitly. They only ask you to watch them repeatedly. And they work.
I saw this when I was a pastor. A young man would come after the Sunday service and tell me: “Today’s sermon touched me.” And I believe he was sincere. But by Thursday I would see him on Instagram reposting content about what the ideal life looks like at twenty-something: apartment, body, travel, financial freedom. And I wonder: which voice rang louder on Friday morning, when he woke up alone, asking himself whether his life was enough? The Sunday sermon, or the feed where he had cumulatively spent twenty hours that week? I know the answer. And it hurts.
On the other side, I saw young mothers in our community who felt insufficient. They read their Bibles, they prayed, they had a real life of faith. But every day, between nursing sessions, they scrolled through dozens of posts from mothers who seemed to manage everything — body restored two months after birth, impeccable house, active career, baby sleeping through the night. Nobody was preaching to them explicitly: “You are not enough.” But that visual service, repeated five times a day, was doing exactly that.
And I ask myself: if no Christian is present in that space with a different voice — a voice that says their value does not depend on performance, that grace is not measured in productivity, that Christ does not demand perfection but presence — who will contradict those gospels? Who will speak where they already are, of their own free will, daily?
This is why personal filtering, however necessary, is not sufficient. We do not live only for ourselves. We are part of a body. And if the body goes silent in the spaces where its members are formed daily, we have not solved the problem. We have abandoned it.
My silence online is not modesty. It is surrender of territory.
But if silence is surrender, the answer is not more noise. We do not need more Christians posting more often or louder. We need a different kind of person: a digital gospeler.
The digital gospeler does not ask “what gets traction?” but “what do I repair here?”
The difference is not volume. Not posting frequency or algorithm mastery. It is a fundamentally different question.
The typical online creator asks: what gets traction, what grows, what captures attention?
The generic Christian creator asks: how do I say something Christian, how do I put a verse or a spiritual reference into my content, how do I stay relevant without being offensive?
The digital gospeler asks a different question: what is crooked here, what is forming people wrongly in this niche, and how can the Gospel concretely repair this place?
That question changes everything. You stop relating to the online space as a distribution channel for Christian ideas. You start seeing it as a formation territory that needs restoration.
I do not believe the digital witness is an optional specialization for a few Christians with media talent. I believe it is a mandate that flows from the way the Kingdom moves in the world. Paul did not stay in the synagogue. He occupied the School of Tyrannus — entered daily, for two years, into the real infrastructure of public formation. And all of Asia heard because he occupied the real space with the real truth of the Gospel.
If this piece named what you have been sensing, the next question is: how do I become present online without being captured by online? That is why I built The Digital Missionary Field Guide, a free 6-day email course. It will help you see your corner of the internet more clearly and find a faithful way to show up there. Subscribe here and the first email lands in your inbox within minutes.