Advancing the stories and ideas of the kingdom of God.
Dylan Musser
College students are being catechized by YouTube. Here’s how the church can offer something richer—and more real.
“Who (or what) has shaped your faith the most?”
As a campus minister, I have asked this question to many college students over the years. Lately, I have noticed a shift in their answers.
Last fall, I sat across from a freshman at Vanderbilt University. We were chatting over tacos when I posed the question. I watched the gears spin in his head. Would it be a church from back home? A great book? An older mentor who discipled him? Maybe his parents?
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He leaned back.
“YouTube.”
I stared blankly, trying my best not to show my surprise.
It hit me: What we were doing—eating lunch alongside one another—discipler and disciplee—might be an entirely new experience for him. In the digital age, disembodied social interactions have become the norm. Ideas are acquired by scrolling and shaped by video consumption. For many students, face-to face discipleship feels foreign. YouTube is not the problem; the problem is the way digital media is reshaping us to prefer a mediated and often passive experience.
But something is lost when discipleship becomes mediated by a screen. What college students need today is embodied discipleship—a way of life that doesn’t simply provide them with answers but captures their imaginations and awakens them to the beauty of life with God in the real world. They need to see that discipleship is not merely about information transfer but spiritual formation—a formation that happens best through physical presence with other saints.
In this way, embodied discipleship becomes what Tim Keller called “counter-catechesis.” It pushes back against the digital liturgies shaping them each and every day. Pastors and campus ministers have a crucial opportunity to show young people how physical discipleship is a truer and better way.
In 2011, Mark Zuckerburg coined a term that has now become ubiquitous in conversations about digital technology: frictionless. In this frictionless world, my screen demands nothing of me (other than my undivided attention). It is my ever-present companion, and the algorithm always agrees with me, curating my feed to my own self-serving ends.
But for all our efforts to build a world of ease, Christians know that on this side of Genesis 3, much of life is marked by frustration and futility—including the slow and sometimes painful work of our discipleship efforts. Physical discipleship is messy. It’s inconvenient. It disrupts. It demands from us and challenges us. But it’s also more rewarding.
One way I’ve seen this play out is in the simple act of reading a theology book with students. In an age of waning attention spans, giving extended thought to a physical book is challenging. When I want to walk through a book such as Knowing God by J. I. Packer with a student, I know it’s going to be a challenge. But over and over again, I see the fruit that comes from grappling with the medium of printed text, undistracted by hyperlinks and notifications. Reading side by side—wrestling through paragraphs and chapters, pushing through questions and critiques—we grow, not just in what we know, but also in how we will love and follow Jesus.
This type of spiritual formation doesn’t happen in isolation, and it rarely happens through passive consumption. Watching a YouTube video on your phone can be informative, but it’s not the same as working out truth together, face to face. That’s not to say digital content is useless. I have sent plenty of video clips and podcasts to my students. But the aim is still the same: to come together physically and discuss it together, not to consume it alone.
We shouldn’t view physical presence in our discipleship as a hurdle to overcome. It’s a God-given blessing. The friction that comes from embodied relationships meets a need that ChatGPT cannot. We cannot expect to begin looking more like Jesus without the physical presence of his body in our lives.
We need the kind of healthy friction that comes with being proximate, visible, and accessible to one another.
This is God’s chosen means of forming us, and the local church is the ideal context in which that happens. In embodied relationships, we risk being exposed and challenged, but there can be no truly Christian formation without it.
Positioning college students close to people who embody the beauty and challenge of following Jesus makes the gospel more compelling to them. When pastors and campus ministers invite students into their homes and the ordinary rhythms of their personal lives, the gospel becomes more than a theory or idea—it becomes an embodied reality.
This kind of life-on-life relationship is no trite thing. It’s not of secondary importance. Jesus didn’t think so when he said, “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (John 13:35).
In our college ministry, one of the primary ways we do this is through a monthly event called “Family Dinner.” All students and staff are invited. We open our home and include the kids. It’s loud. It’s chaotic. Drinks spill and conversations are interrupted. But for many college students, stepping into the home of a real family is a respite.
In this environment, they witness the truths of the gospel applied in real time. They see grace extended in a parent’s patience. Generosity in sharing a meal. Joy in the stories exchanged. Forgiveness in how a mess is handled.
These glimpses of the gospel in ordinary life turn abstract ideas into a lived and believable faith. It is one way the gospel becomes credible.
From the moment we are born we are wired to see and respond to faces. It has been noted that deciphering human facial expressions form the basis for how we understand people, long before we ever learn to communicate with words. As psychiatrist Curt Thompson notes, “We are all born into the world looking for someone looking for us.”
This innate longing—to be seen, known, and understood—has now been monetized; co-opted by tech companies to collect data on us. Rather than turning toward one another, we turn toward our ever-present screens. In doing so, the now-ubiquitous facial recognition software (“Face ID”) on most smartphones provides a false sense of being seen and “recognized.”
It is only in physical proximity to one another that we learn the persuasive power of empathetic attentiveness. And empathy, as Nicholas Carr recently noted in an interview with Russell Moore, “requires attentiveness to other people.” You won’t learn to love what you don’t look at.
This is one of the greatest losses in a screen-mediated world: It becomes far too easy to live a lie and forget that we’re interacting with people who are made in the image of God.
In Romans 12, Paul describes what genuine love should look like for a Christian. He says to “rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn” (v. 15).
ChatGPT can’t do that. Google won’t even try.
But, dear pastor, you can.
When we put down our devices and turn toward one another, we allow ourselves to be seen and known in moments of joy and grief. In doing so, we imitate Jesus himself, who rejoiced at a wedding (John 2:1–11) and wept at a funeral (John 11:33-35)—and did both perfectly. He didn’t disciple from a distance. Neither should we.
One of the temptations of online life is the neglect of the people right in front of us. Heartbreaking stories prove this point to be true both physically and emotionally. In our hyper-connected world, we can begin to develop what Jeffrey Bilbro has described as, “telescopic morality”—when the things happening outside of the physical space we inhabit become more important than the person that is suffering and sitting right next to us.
As Christians, it is good and right to care deeply about events shaping our world. But if our concern for the global comes at the cost of presence with the local—like a suffering neighbor right beside us—then something has gone wrong.
Embodied discipleship can restore that balance. It teaches us what David Brooks calls “the art of seeing others and making them feel seen, heard, and understood.” When this is done well, we make room for lasting change—the kind that begins right where we find ourselves.
In a culture that prioritizes convenience and ease, physical discipleship is often inconvenient. We cannot swipe, click, or scroll past the physical people right in front of us. But when we neglect embodied discipleship, we fail to display one of the churches most compelling offers in an isolated and lonely world—community and belonging.
In her remarkable book, The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World, Christine Rosen notes that “mediated life is becoming normal life.” It is in this cultural environment, however, that Christianity offers a better way.
These habits of embodied presence aren’t just helpful—they’re holy. Every act of in-person, face-to-face discipleship stands as a quiet rebellion in a cultural moment where digital life accelerates by the day. It reminds us, the students we walk with, and the world around us that true formation happens in the soil of proximity, vulnerability, and love.
As C.S. Lewis reminds us, “there are no ordinary people.”
For all of its benefits, our technology can never satisfy the longing to see deeply and be deeply seen.
The gospel of Jesus Christ offers something far better than the screen-mediated life.
Paul reminds us that one day we will all, “with unveiled face, [behold] the glory of the Lord…” (2 Cor. 3:18, ESV). And we will see “face to face” what we have only been able to see dimly, and we will “know fully, even as [we are] fully known” (1 Cor. 13:12). On that day, all of our longings will be met with unmediated pleasure—not by pixels, but by the person of Christ.
Until then, embodied discipleship is a preview of what’s to come. A foretaste of glorious coming attractions.A glimpse of life as it was always meant to be.
Dylan Musser is the campus director for the Navigators at Vanderbilt University & a Fellow at the Hendricks Center for Cultural Engagement at Dallas Theological Seminary.
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