Discipleship in a Distracted Age

Following Jesus has always been slow, ordinary, and unhurried. Our age is none of those things.

To be a disciple is, at root, to be an apprentice — someone who learns a way of life by staying close to a master. The first disciples did not enroll in a course; they followed a person, ate with him, walked the dusty miles with him, and slowly became like him. Formation happened in the accumulation of unremarkable days.

This is precisely the kind of formation our age makes difficult. We are not so much wicked as scattered. The phone in our pocket is engineered to fragment our attention into ever smaller pieces, and a mind trained to scroll struggles to sit still long enough to be changed. We have more access to Scripture than any generation in history and, often, less capacity to dwell in it.

The danger is not only that we sin more. It is that we are formed — deeply, by repetition — into people who cannot pay sustained attention to God or to one another. Discipleship requires the very thing distraction destroys.

So the recovery of discipleship in our moment will be unglamorous. It will look less like a conference and more like a set of small, stubborn habits.

Keep a fixed time with Scripture, and keep it slow. Read less, and read it again. The goal is not to cover ground but to be covered — to let a passage read you. A single psalm, prayed daily for a week, will form you more than a chapter skimmed and forgotten.

Recover the practice of presence. Put the phone in another room. Eat a meal without a screen. Pray without multitasking. These are not legalistic rules; they are the trellis on which attention to God can grow.

Be a part of the local congregation. Distraction promises a customized, frictionless faith; the local congregation offers the opposite, and that is its gift. Showing up week after week among people you did not choose is itself a discipline of attention — a refusal to treat the body of Christ as one more feed to be curated.

None of this is fast, and that is the point. Jesus is not in a hurry with us. He is forming a people over a lifetime, in the slow grammar of habit and grace. In an age that prizes speed and novelty, the most countercultural thing a Christian can do may simply be to stay — to keep showing up, keep paying attention, and keep following, one unremarkable day at a time.

— Sunny