Why Content Can't Replace Covenant
Reading The Church Through Eden
There’s a version of Christianity that is deeply informed, totally unaccountable, and completely alone.
Most of us know someone living it. Some of us have lived it ourselves.
When the Screen Felt Safer
I spent the better part of ten years dedicating my life to the local church. From volunteering and working in it vocationally, to literally majoring and minoring in it in college, I believed in the mission, vision, and primacy of the local church being the hope of the world.
That wasn’t a bumper sticker for me. I had organized my actual life around it. I’d logged the hours — Sunday school classrooms, elder meetings, student ministry on Wednesday nights, the unglamorous machinery that keeps a church running. Bill Hybels said it first, but I meant it personally: there is nothing like the local church when it’s working right.
And then 2018 happened.
I was a student ministry associate pastor at the time, and I was renting a room from the HR and payroll coordinator at our church — who happened to be the executive pastor’s daughter. It was a handshake deal. She wanted me to mentor her son, be a kind of big brother to him. I was just trying to save money and be close to the work I loved. When I didn’t meet expectations she’d never actually said out loud, things deteriorated fast. The personal bled into the professional. My hours got cut. My pay got docked, slowly, until I could see exactly where it was heading. I quit before the number hit zero.
The wound wasn’t theological. That’s the part I had to sit with. I still believed everything I’d always believed about the church. The doctrine was intact. But the people who were supposed to represent the body had hurt me through it, and so I did what most people do when the church injures them: I moved to the couch.
For a stretch, I hopped between churches on Facebook on Sunday mornings. Put a different congregation on the TV each week. I watched sermons from churches I’d never step foot in, in cities I’d never visit, from pastors who had no idea I existed. And I’ll be honest with you — it felt good to be anonymous. The screen couldn’t betray me. Nobody there knew what had happened or had a stake in my life. I could receive the content and give nothing back, and that felt, for a moment, like freedom.
But something was missing from the start. I couldn’t have named it right away, but it was there — a low-grade awareness that I was watching faith happen instead of living it.
What brought me back wasn’t an argument. It was people. Getting back into faith-adjacent work, being around people who made me want to be better. And then Alley and me finding a church together in Bozeman — sitting together, knowing people, being known by people. Having skin in the game. Having a spiritual family and a personal stake in other people’s lives. The other half of our faith getting lived out in public, not just processed in private.
That’s what I’d been missing on the couch. And here’s the tension I’ve never fully resolved: I now run a digital theology platform. I believe formation happens through embodied community, and I’m writing this to you on a screen. I’m not going to pretend I’ve got that perfectly sorted. But I’ve sat with the question long enough that I think I know what’s actually at stake in it.
Consuming Without Covenanting
You’re probably not that different from me.
If you’re reading this, you’re likely someone who cares about theology — maybe more than most people in your life. You’ve got a podcast queue, a Substack inbox, maybe a few Instagram accounts you follow that actually make you think. You know the difference between N.T. Wright and John Piper. You’ve formed opinions. You’ve been shaped, at least in part, by content.
And there’s a real question underneath all of that: Is this enough? Does the content do the thing?
It’s not a small question. According to Barna’s 2025 State of the Church research, even the most faithful young churchgoers — the Gen Z Christians leading what researchers are calling a post-pandemic attendance resurgence — are present at their local church an average of 1.9 times per month. That’s the highest frequency of any adult generation right now, and it’s still fewer than half the Sundays in a year. Among all churchgoing adults, Barna found an average of 1.6 times per month — roughly two out of every five weekends. Barna’s VP of Research noted that this helps explain the frustration pastors feel trying to build momentum: the congregation they preach to on any given Sunday is substantially different from the one that showed up two weeks ago.
Meanwhile, the theological content pipeline runs every single day. And a growing class of influencer theologians — figures with no institutional ties, no congregational accountability, no one who knows their name or their sin — are shaping doctrinal formation among young believers at a scale that outpaces most pastors’ reach. Barna has also documented what they call “worship shifting“: 52% of practicing Christian Millennials say they regularly replace in-person church with digital options at least half the time. Not supplement. Replace.
The appeal makes complete sense. Digital theology has no potluck drama. It has no elder board conflict. It doesn’t ask anything of you except your attention, and in exchange it gives you access to the best theological minds in the world at no social cost. You can learn Bavinck’s doctrine of God on your commute. You can follow a Reformed theologian with 200,000 followers who has thought more carefully about the atonement than your local pastor has. The access is genuinely remarkable, and the quality is often genuinely high.
But here’s what I want you to sit with: the question was never whether the content is good. The question is whether content alone can do what the church was designed to do.
That’s the surface question — “do I need the institutional church, or just good theology?” But the root question goes deeper than the institution. What you’re really asking is this: Can I belong without being known? Can I be formed without being present?
That’s not a scheduling question. That’s an anthropological one.
What we’re experiencing isn’t primarily a church attendance problem. It’s a disembodiment crisis. The digital age has given us an unprecedented ability to learn theology without submitting to community, to receive teaching without accountability, to consume without covenanting. And we have discovered — quietly, without ever fully deciding it — that we prefer the frictionless version. We’ve learned to receive the benefits of Christian formation while opting out of the conditions that actually produce it.
The fig leaves are just higher resolution now.
The question Redemptive Correlation forces us to ask isn’t “is the church worth attending?” It’s “what kind of creature are you, and what does that creature actually need?” Because the answer to that question changes everything about how you evaluate what digital content can and cannot do for you.
The Garden Was Never a Lecture Hall
Creation: God’s First Gift Was a Place and a People
God’s first act after creating humanity was not to deliver a sermon. It was to place them. He planted a garden, set them in it, gave them each other, and gave them a shared vocation: tend this, keep this, be fruitful, fill this. The first context for spiritual formation was not content delivery — it was co-located, embodied, vocational community.
Eden was not a lecture hall. It was a garden with dirt under the fingernails. God walked with them in the cool of the day — present, physical, near. The pattern is set from the very beginning: knowing God happens in a place, with a people, through shared work. This is the original design for what we now call “church.”
Fall: What Isolation Actually Is
The first consequence of sin in Genesis 3 is hiding. Before the curse, before the exile, before the pain in childbirth or the thorns in the ground — Adam and Eve hide. From God. From each other. The Fall introduces autonomy disguised as freedom. They cover themselves. They blame each other. They are driven from the place God prepared for them.
This is not incidental detail. It is the architecture of the problem. Sin doesn’t just create guilt; it creates isolation. It severs the placed, embodied, communal life God designed. And every substitute we build — including digital community that offers theological stimulation without covenantal vulnerability — echoes the fig leaves of Genesis 3. It covers the problem without solving it.
“Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths. And they heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves.” — Genesis 3:7–8
Redemption: The Gathered Body as Restoration in Progress
When God begins rebuilding what the Fall destroyed, He does not send a curriculum. He calls a people. Abraham is not given a book; he is given a family and a land. Israel is not given a podcast series; they are given a tabernacle, a priesthood, feasts they must attend bodily, and a land they must cultivate together.
And when Christ comes, He does not upload content. He calls twelve men to walk with Him, eat with Him, fail in front of Him, and be restored by Him. The church that forms after Pentecost is described in irreducibly embodied terms: they broke bread together, shared possessions, met daily in the temple courts, ate together in their homes (Acts 2:42–47). Luke could not have been clearer: this is a placed, physical, covenantal community.
Paul’s ecclesiology reinforces this. The body metaphor in 1 Corinthians 12 is not decorative. It is structural: you cannot be a hand without being connected to a body. The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you.” A Christian formed exclusively by digital content is like an organ receiving nutrients through an IV drip — technically nourished, but disconnected from the body it was designed to serve.
This does not mean digital theology is bad. It means it is incomplete. A sermon clip that convicts you on Tuesday is a gift. But without a community that knows your name, sees your sin, bears your burden, and holds you accountable through the mess of real life, that conviction has nowhere to go.
Restoration: The New Jerusalem Is Not a Livestream
Revelation 21–22 describes the telos of God’s redemptive work as a city. Not a cloud. Not a library. Not a content platform. A city — the most concentrated form of embodied human community imaginable. The nations bring their glory into it. God dwells among His people, face to face. The tree of life stands in the middle of it, accessible to all.
If this is where the story ends — in a placed, physical, communal dwelling of God with humanity — then the church is not an institution we attend. It is the imperfect, in-progress preview of God’s final design. To opt out of embodied church in favor of digital theology is to choose content about the garden over life in the garden. It is to prefer a photograph of Eden to the dirt.
Gardeners, Not Spectators
If you’re reading this on your phone while skipping church for the third week in a row — this is not a guilt trip. Guilt doesn’t produce covenant. But it is an honest question: what is forming you? The algorithm that feeds you content calibrated to your preferences? Or a community of imperfect people who know your name, disagree with you sometimes, and show up when your life falls apart?
The church is inconvenient by design. It is supposed to be. You cannot love your neighbor in the abstract. You cannot practice forgiveness with people who never offend you. You cannot learn patience from a comment section. The friction of embodied community is not a bug — it is the mechanism by which God forms you into the image of Christ.
This week, do something that digital theology cannot do: sit across from another believer — not a screen, a person — and confess something real. Share a meal. Pray out loud, awkwardly, with someone who can see your face. Let yourself be known. That is the garden. That is where formation happens. That is what no content platform, including this one, can replace.
WE (Closing)
Imagine churches that didn’t compete with digital theology but completed it — communities where the sermon clip that convicted you on Tuesday became the small group conversation that changed you on Wednesday. Imagine a generation of Christians who consumed theological content ravenously AND showed up to their local church faithfully — not because they had to, but because they understood that a garden needs gardeners, not spectators.
That’s the vision of Redemptive Correlation applied to ecclesiology. The church is not an institution in decline. It is the preview of the garden-city, and it has always been messy, always been imperfect, always been the place where God insists on forming His people through the inconvenience of proximity. The digital tools we build — including Theologetics, including every sermon clip and theological carousel — are seeds. But seeds need soil. And the soil is the local church, with all its dirt and all its life.
We are building toward a New Jerusalem. You cannot livestream your way there. You have to walk in together.
This piece is part of the Reading ______ Through Eden series — applying the Creation-Fall-Redemption-Restoration arc to the questions our culture is actually asking. The framework behind this series, Redemptive Correlation, is explored in full in my forthcoming book, which is currently in editing and under proposal. If this kind of culturally engaged, theologically grounded thinking is what you’re looking for, you’re in the right place — and the book goes deeper than any single article can.
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