Carey Nieuwhof’s annual trends report dropped, and as usual, it is worth your time. Check out The 7 Disruptive Church Trends That Will Rule 2026. I want to respond to a few of them.
The Gen Z Surge Is Real (And We Better Not Blow It)
I’ll keep this brief because Carey covers it well. Gen Z is showing up. Young men are returning. The data is encouraging, and anecdotally, we’re seeing it too.
I recently spent a few days with a prominent pastor who has been leading in the church for over 40 years. It was one of the privileges of my life to spend some time with him. He meets with small cohorts of thousands of pastors each year. Which means, he has a true boots-on-the-ground perspective on what God is doing across our country. I asked him about this spiritual resurgence among Gen Z and young men. And having lived through the Jesus movement of the 60’s he said the trends are remarkably similar.
He has been saying for the past 3-5 years that God is “lurking in the bushes and waiting to pounce” and that over the past year or so (in CS Lewis language), “Aslan is loose and on the move.” Renewal is upon us. I then asked, having lived through the Jesus movement, how should the church respond?
He said plainly, “whatever evangelism, outreach, soul-winning initiatives you’ve been thinking about… don’t wait, do them now.” He believes this window of unusual gospel receptivity will only last three or four years and so there’s an urgency to the moment. “Go get the souls right now,” was his clarion call.
It’s happening. The question is, “Are we ready for it?” These aren’t people looking for a slightly better version of what our culture already offers. They’re looking for something altogether different. And if we hand them a watered-down, celebrity-pastor, slick-production version of church, we’ll lose them as fast as we found them. Instead, we need to offer them a tried and true, historically grounded, authentic faith in Jesus.
But Here’s Where I Want to Push Back: Discipleship by Algorithm
In Carey’s fifth trend he writes that most people are now discipled more by algorithms than by their pastor or church. He’s right. He’s also right about trend #3 that evangelism is getting bolder and more direct. In both trends he doesn’t exactly offer any advice. He recommends re-thinking how we use social media and not getting drawn into the political partisan soup. But that’s about it.
Here’s my hot take: The answer isn’t gaming the algorithm on social media. It’s closer proximity to actual people. It’s not better teaching, it’s better training.
Churches have been trying to play the algorithm’s game for years. We post sermon clips. We create devotional content. We try to out-inspire the influencers. And we’re losing. We’ll always lose that game because algorithms are designed to feed people what they already want. But the gospel does something else entirely. It disrupts. It reorients. It calls people into a different story. The only answer is life-on-life proximity, it’s inhabiting the same space as another human.
The Real Problem: We’ve Confused Discipleship with Information Transfer
During my tenure as a pastor, discipleship in most churches (including mine) has looked like this: teach people more stuff. Give them more Bible knowledge. More theology. More content. Discipleship is a curriculum.
Believe me, I love content. But discipleship isn’t primarily about information. It’s about formation. And formation requires proximity.
Think about Acts 4. Peter and John stand before the Sanhedrin, and the religious leaders are astonished. Luke tells us why: “They took note that these men had been with Jesus.” Not that they had memorized Jesus’ teachings. Not that they had completed a twelve-week course. They had been with him.
The Sanhedrin also noticed something else: these were “unschooled, ordinary men.” They didn’t have the credentials. They didn’t have photographic memories. They didn’t have seminary degrees. What they had was proximity to Jesus, and that proximity produced two things the algorithm can never deliver: wisdom and power.
Information can be downloaded. Wisdom has to be caught. Power has to be received.
A Word About the Charlie Kirk Effect
I want to say something carefully here when it comes to boldness and evangelism. Charlie Kirk did something remarkable. He took biblical topics into hostile environments and didn’t flinch. He was a model of courage under pressure.
But here’s my concern. Kirk had a photographic memory. When you watch the clips you can almost see his eyes and his mind cataloguing through his knowledge base. When the average person in your church watches someone like him operate, with instant recall, encyclopedic knowledge, and rapid-fire apologetics, they’re not thinking, “I could do that.” They’re thinking, “I could never do that.”
And they’re right. Most people can’t summon five counterarguments in three seconds. And if we make that the model for evangelism, we’ve accidentally communicated that sharing your faith requires a skill set that 95% of believers will never have.
The disciples didn’t have that either. What they had was a story. They had an experience. They had been changed, and they could talk about it. “I was blind, but now I see” doesn’t require a seminary degree or a mastery of the current state of geo-politics.
So What’s the Path Forward?
If algorithms are discipling our people 49 hours a week, and we get maybe two hours on Sunday (if we’re lucky), we’re not going to win by producing better content. The only path forward is to show up in person, build real relationships and train people in actual skills. Algorithms will never be able to reproduce these things.
That’s the shift we’re making at our church. We’re moving from inspiration to training. From “WOW, that was a great sermon” to “AHA, I know what to do next.” From content consumption to skill development.
We’re building environments where people don’t just hear about prayer, they practice it. Where they don’t just learn about evangelism, they try it and debrief it. Where they don’t just memorize a script, they learn some great questions and then adapt them for their own context.
This is apprenticeship. The biblical word is discipleship. And it’s what Jesus actually did.
A Simple Framework
Here’s what we’re teaching our people. Discipleship happens through three movements:
1. Information – You learn something true.
2. Imitation – You watch someone model it.
3. Innovation – You try it yourself, in your own context, with your own words.
We used to stop at step one. And then wonder why nothing changes.
One More Thing
Carey’s right that no matter what you say as a pastor, you’re fighting an uphill battle against the algorithm. But the algorithm can’t look someone in the eye. It can’t sit across the table from a struggling marriage. It can’t show up at a hospital room. It can’t pray with trembling hands over someone’s kid.
The church’s superpower has never been information. We are the people of incarnation. Of presence. Real people in real rooms doing real life together.
The window of opportunity might be small. The gospel receptivity of our nation might be fleeting. The time is now to get personal and get proximal with people who are hungry for Jesus.
