Formed or Deformed? Discipleship in a Distracted Age

by David Richter

Every Sunday morning, just before church begins, millions of people receive a quiet notification on their phones: “Your screen time was up 18% this week.” It’s a simple report, but it feels like a verdict. Without realizing it, our habits, desires, and imaginations have been shaped all week long not by Scripture or Christian community, but by the endless scroll of newsfeeds, videos, and curated ads.

We didn’t set out to be discipled by algorithms, yet slowly and subtly, we are. This is the cultural moment Thiago Silva addresses in Discipleship in a Post-Christian Age (Wipf and Stock, 2025) – a time when the strongest competition for our hearts is not overt hostility but the quiet, relentless pull of distraction.

To make sense of this challenge, Silva turns to C.S. Lewis, who faced his own disorienting age marked by the trauma of world war, the rise of secularism, and the spread of relativism.

As Silva notes, Lewis saw clearly that the modern world was not neutral; it was catechizing people with rival visions of truth, beauty, and goodness. His response was not retreat or accommodation but a robust discipleship: awakening minds with reason, stirring hearts with imagination, and anchoring lives in embodied Christian community. Silva argues that Lewis’ prescription is just as urgent today, when cultural liturgies form us as powerfully as they did in Lewis’ own time.

Crucially, Silva begins by grounding discipleship not in nostalgia or technique but in the Bible’s holistic vision of following Christ. Jesus called people into obedience, mission, and worship, not merely to receive information. The Great Commission (Matthew 28:18–20) demands both teaching and imitation, while Paul insists that discipleship involves nothing less than transformation of the mind and life (Romans 12:2). For Silva, this means discipleship is apprenticeship to Jesus – being conformed to him by grace, empowered by the Spirit, lived out in community, and expressed in mission.

Silva’s vision is a helpful corrective to much of what passes for discipleship today. Churches too often reduce spiritual formation to programs or behavior management. Silva calls us back to the biblical reality: discipleship is whole-life transformation, shaping thought, desire, relationships, and action for Christ and his kingdom.

At the center of the book stands Silva’s Lewis-inspired framework: reason, imagination, and community.

• Reason grounds discipleship in truth. Christians need clarity of thought to resist relativism and to confess the gospel faithfully in a culture of shifting claims. But Silva reminds us that reason alone is not enough.

• Imagination engages the way we perceive reality. Here, Silva highlights Lewis’ apologetic method: imagination as a pathway to truth, story as a bearer of meaning, and hospitality and community as contexts for questions to be asked safely. In a culture where narratives and experiences often outweigh arguments, imagination opens doors for the gospel to be seen as both credible and beautiful.

• Community embodies discipleship in lived practice. Against the pull of individualism and isolation, the church becomes the place where reason and imagination are reinforced. Worship in particular plays a vital role: liturgy, song, confession, and sacrament shape hearts and minds, forming us week by week as people oriented toward God rather than the self.

Silva shines in the way he integrates biblical theology, cultural analysis, and Lewis’ wisdom. His diagnosis of secularism, relativism, and individualism is clear and compelling, and his call for holistic discipleship resonates with Reformed emphases on covenant community and whole-life faith.

The book is also practical. Silva offers concrete suggestions for congregations – apologetics training that takes imagination seriously, worship practices that form love as well as belief, and intergenerational mentoring that roots believers in the church’s shared life and mission.

The book has a few limitations worth noting. Silva’s analysis leans heavily Western, especially American, without much attention to the global church’s complexity. Some readers may also wish for more sustained engagement with contemporary critics of Christianity and the rising tide of hostility towards a faith that is no longer seen as outdated or wrong, but dangerous. Yet these are minor compared to the book’s overall strength.

Perhaps Silva’s most important contribution is his reminder that discipleship is counter-formation. Secularism is not simply an intellectual challenge; it is an embodied way of life that trains desires through daily habits. People are catechized by TikTok, online shopping, and career ladders just as surely as by creeds. The church cannot answer this challenge with information alone. It must cultivate practices, rhythms, and communities that retrain our loves, reorient our minds, reshape our imaginations, and empower our actions by the light of the gospel.

Lewis’ influence runs throughout the book. Silva treats him not as a distant academic but as a guide for our own cultural moment, showing how Lewis combined rational clarity with imaginative depth and communal warmth. That combination, Silva argues, is the kind of discipleship the church desperately needs today – one that engages both heart and mind while sending believers into the world as sacrificial witnesses to the gospel.

Conclusion

Discipleship in a Post-Christian Age is both sobering and hopeful. It reminds us that the church’s deepest problem is not cultural hostility but shallow formation. Yet it also points to resources we already have: the Word of God, the power of the Spirit, the wisdom of the saints, and the beauty of the gospel. With Lewis as a guide, Silva calls us to recover discipleship that is thoughtful, imaginative, communal, worshipful, and missional.

For pastors, elders, parents, and lay leaders, this book is a timely companion. It insists that the way forward is not to reinvent Christianity or retreat in fear, but to recover the depth, wonder, and beauty of following Christ. In a fragmented world, Silva offers a vision of discipleship that can form believers who love what is true, desire what is beautiful, live what is good, and worship the God who is all in all.

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David Richter serves as a teaching elder in Nashville Presbytery and is on the board of the Alliance for Mission and Renewal.

Originally posted in byFaith magazine.