The Most Effective Evangelizer on the Internet
What the Neeza Powers story is really about — and why Paul saw it coming
I have been following Neeza Powers since Day 1.
Not Day 50, when the podcasts started booking him. Not Day 95, when Isabel Brown called him the most effective evangelizer on the internet. Day 1. The first video, posted from somewhere in Vermont, showed a man who had spent a decade as Nicole sitting in front of a camera and saying that something had happened to him in the woods that he could not describe in any language other than Jesus.
I was in his corner. I rooted for him. I shared the videos. I sent them to friends. I told them, more than once, watch this — this is what God does.
I was skeptical, too. I want to be honest about that, because the skepticism is part of what indicts me. The growth speed bothered me. The constant filming bothered me. The way certain pieces of his old life never quite got laid down bothered me. The visible appetite for the spotlight bothered me most of all.
But I told myself a story about it. We live in a world of social media, I said. This is the medium through which young men are reachable. The constant filming isn’t exposure — it’s accountability. The viewers aren’t an audience — they’re a congregation. The platform isn’t a danger — it’s a discipleship tool.
I told myself that story for ten months. And I told it loudly enough to drown out the older, slower voice in the back of my head — the one that kept whispering Paul’s word into the noise.
Neóphytos.
The story I told myself wasn’t only about Neeza Powers. It was about us.
Something has gone wrong with the way the church meets new Christians online, and we are watching it unfold in real time.
Ten months ago, Neeza Powers was a viral phenomenon. Day 1 of being a Christian. Day 13. Day 50. First time at church, first men’s Bible study, first read-through of the Sermon on the Mount. Hundreds of millions of views. A clothing company with his sister. A partnership with the Hallow App. A Daily Wire interview where Isabel Brown called him the most effective evangelizer on the internet.
Last week, he showed up to Mass dressed as a woman. Posted a confession. Deleted it. Reposted defiantly. He’s getting married. He’s retransitioning. The OCIA confirmation (the Catholic version of baptism and membership class, which I didn’t know before watching his content) he was working toward will not happen — at least not the way it was being filmed.
Three months before that, a TikTok investigator demonstrated that almost every detail of his testimony — the puberty blockers at sixteen, the decade as Nicole, the iCarly childhood — was fabricated. He transitioned at twenty-nine. He’s nearly a decade older than he claimed. The platform that built him kept building.
His tradition is not mine, and that is not what this piece is about.
A real person is at the center of this. A real soul. Ryan Miller, who platformed him first and is now doing the hard public work of telling the truth about it, said it well: this is not about tearing someone down. It is, however, about telling the truth.
And the truth is this: Paul saw it coming.
What Paul Knew About New Christians
Paul wrote a letter to a young pastor named Timothy and gave him a list of qualifications for elders. Most of them are character traits. One of them is a clock.
“He must not be a recent convert,” Paul writes, “or he might become conceited and incur the same condemnation as the devil” (1 Tim. 3:6).
The word translated as recent convert is neóphytos. Literally, newly planted. It is the language of horticulture — a sapling, the kind of plant whose root system has not yet reached deep enough to hold it through a storm. Paul did not invent the word. Greek farmers already had it. He picked it up because it said something about new Christians that no theological vocabulary said quite as well.
The danger Paul names is not moral failure. It is typhōtheis — to be wrapped in smoke, fogged, puffed up. Not pride as a character flaw a person wrestles with. Pride as an atmospheric distortion around someone whose root system isn’t ready for the weight being placed on top of it. The new convert may be sincere. May be gifted. May, in many ways, be right. The problem is not the person. It’s the position.
Paul wrote this to govern who got to lead a local church in Ephesus. The category translates cleanly to our moment. The pace does not.
We have built a machine that takes the newest, rawest, most viral testimonies the church can find and grants them — overnight — the cultural authority Paul reserved for elders. We hand new believers podcast tours, partnerships, clothing company deals, and book deals before their own pastors have figured out their last names. Then we are surprised when the smoke comes.
This is what neóphytos was meant to prevent. And we have built an entire content economy that structurally cannot honor it.
What Apollos Got That Neeza Didn’t
There is a positive case in Acts that almost no one talks about anymore.
A man named Apollos shows up in Ephesus. Luke describes him in a string of compliments any algorithm would recognize: eloquent. Mighty in the Scriptures. Fervent in spirit. Teaching accurately the things concerning Jesus (Acts 18:24–25). By every metric the Christian internet measures, Apollos is a star.
And he is theologically incomplete. He knew only the baptism of John. He has the gospel half-built. The cross is missing.
What happens next is the line the church has forgotten how to read.
A husband and wife in the crowd — Priscilla and Aquila, tentmakers, no titles, no microphones — hear him speak. They do not interrupt him. They do not film a stitch. They do not take to social media to expose his theological gaps for the good of the flock. Luke uses one verb: προσελάβοντο (proselábonto). They took him to themselves. They brought him home. Privately. Off-platform. And there, in someone’s living room, they explained to him the way of God more accurately.
Then Apollos goes to Achaia, and Luke tells us he ministered there with greater power.
The private discipleship made the public ministry possible. The platform came after the formation, not before.
This is the pattern the church was built to run. A gifted, sincere, theologically incomplete believer is not muzzled. He is also not handed a microphone. He is taken into a home and walked through what he doesn’t yet know — by people whose names history barely remembers, who never wrote a book, who tentmade for a living and discipled apostles on the side.
Apollos had a Priscilla and Aquila. Neeza Powers had a podcast tour.
That is the whole story, in one sentence. And it is the indictment not of one man, but of the entire infrastructure that platformed him.
Reading the Moment Through Eden
This is where Redemptive Correlation does its work — not bringing Scripture down to fit the cultural moment, but bringing the cultural moment up under Scripture’s gaze. The internet age has its own questions about formation, visibility, and authority. The four-act story of Scripture answers them.
In Creation, image-bearing was always meant to be formed in proximity. Adam was named in a garden, not a feed. Eve was given to him as flesh, not followers. The first humans were known by God face-to-face, and they were known by each other in the same way. Formation was embodied, slow, and local. There was no shortcut to maturity, because there was no need for one.
In the Fall, the serpent’s first promise was visibility without formation: you will be like God, now, no apprenticeship required. Eat the fruit and skip the patience. The whole platform economy is structured around that same offer. Be known before you are formed. Speak before you are shaped. Grow your platform now; figure out the rest later. This is not a new temptation. It is the oldest one, with better lighting.
In Redemption, Christ called twelve men to be with him (Mark 3:14) before he sent them out. Mark gives the order plainly: with-ness, then sent-ness. The Son of God did not skip formation. He spent three years walking, eating, arguing, and sleeping next to twelve men before any of them were trusted with the gospel publicly. If Jesus would not shortcut formation for the men who would write the New Testament, the rest of us are not exempt.
And in the coming Restoration, the telos is not a bigger platform. It is a city in which we know as we are known (1 Cor. 13:12) — face to face, embodied, in communion. Every shortcut to that telos is a counterfeit of it. The viral testimony, the overnight evangelist, the new convert handed a microphone — these are not the Restoration arriving early. They are the Fall’s old promise, dressed in better clothes.
The story Scripture tells about formation has not changed. The internet has just made it easier to ignore.
To the believer who shared the videos
If you reposted a Neeza video — and I did, more than once — you didn’t do something evil. You did something instinctive. You saw a man who looked like he’d been pulled out of the fire, and you wanted to celebrate. That instinct is not the problem. The problem is what we do with it.
The next time a baby Christian goes viral, ask one question before you share: Who is in the room with this person off-camera? Not who’s interviewing them. Not who’s booking them. Who is sitting in their living room asking the questions Priscilla and Aquila asked? If the answer is I don’t know or probably no one — you have your answer about whether to amplify.
This is not gatekeeping, but rather an act of grace. The kindest thing you can do for a sapling is let it root.
To pastors, content creators, and platform-builders
If you are in the business of putting people on stages, microphones, podcasts, or partnerships — Paul’s word for you is neóphytos. Know it. Honor it. Build a question into your booking process: How long has this person been a Christian, and who is shepherding them privately? If the answer is months and no one specifically, the answer to the booking is no.
This will cost you. It will cost you content, revenue, virality, and the dopamine of being first. It will save other people what it cost Neeza Powers.
Ryan Miller, to his great credit, is publicly modeling what taking responsibility looks like. He is not the villain of this story. He may, in fact, be one of the only people in it telling the truth about what went wrong without flinching. That posture — telling the truth, taking responsibility where needed, calling all of us back — is the posture the rest of the Christian internet has refused to adopt. Adopt it.
Here is what we have learned, if we are willing to learn it.
The church is supposed to have living rooms before it has stages. It is supposed to have Priscilla-and-Aquila relationships before it has podcast bookings. It is supposed to honor the difference between a sapling and an oak, even when the sapling is photogenic and the algorithm rewards us for ignoring it.
We are not going to fix the Christian internet. But we can stop being surprised by what it produces. And we can build, in our own churches and homes and discipleship relationships, the patient kind of formation Paul commanded and Acts modeled — the kind that took Apollos from accurate-but-incomplete to mighty in public, but only after a private conversation in a tradesman’s home.
Pray for Neeza Powers. Pray for Ryan Miller. Pray for the people whose names you don’t know, who are about to go viral next.
And ask the Lord: Where, in my church and in my life, am I making room for what the algorithm cannot give?
This piece is part of Reading _____ Through Eden — a thread within Theologetics applying the four-act story of Scripture (Creation, Fall, Redemption, Restoration) to questions of visibility, formation, and authority in the internet age.
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And if you are a new Christian reading this who has felt the weight of being platformed too soon — or if you are the friend, pastor, or family member of one — please reach out. I will pray for you, be there for you, and gladly walk side by side with you in your new journey. Hear me one this: this piece names a real and painful pattern, and the last thing I want is for it to land as critique without care.