Here’s a thought experiment.

Imagine a Gen-Z pastor. He just started a small church with two other men. The church is growing steadily, and he’s been tapped to be the youth pastor once enough teens join the congregation. He even went to Bible school. There’s only one problem: This pastor hates reading.

Not only does he hate reading, but this pastor has, on occasion, expressed a general distaste for education. It’s simply not for him. He doesn’t think it matters for communicating the gospel—especially to younger generations.

This pastor scrolls through Instagram reels during every free moment: waiting in line at the cafe, waiting at stoplights, sitting on planes, immediately after waking up, and before going to bed. He doesn’t register this as a bad thing. His constantly scrolling, drifting mind is a mere fact of life, along with the fact that he hasn’t read a book from cover to cover since high school or that his Instagram is often inundated with charlatans, trolls, and “AI-generated slop content.”

If you don’t know a pastor like this, it may not be long before you do. The internet and AI revolutions have thrust the church into a new era of pastoral leadership, where many young pastors are shaped by—and shepherding folks formed by—a post-literate digital world marked by disembodied diets of low-calorie “brain rot” ephemera.

Meanwhile, biblical illiteracy is growing. In 2022, a comprehensive survey found that 26 percent of evangelicals think the Bible is more made-up than historical (up 9 percent since 2016); 56 percent think God accepts the worship of every religion (up 8 percent since 2016); and from 2020 to 2022, 13 percent more evangelicals agreed with the statement “Jesus was a great teacher, but he was not God.” How much these stats have to do with our collective brain rot is unclear, but it’d be naive to think the two are unconnected.

I often hear that today’s digital technologies pose no greater threat to the church than the television did back in the 1950s. The church just needs to adapt to the times, and biblical illiteracy will sort itself out. But speaking as a Gen-Zer myself, I’m not sure that strategy will work.

Here are three reasons I’m concerned.

1. We aren’t an oral culture.

It’d be less concerning if we were reading the written word less but memorizing, listening, and thinking with more frequency. But all these cognitive processes are on the decline simultaneously—a natural result of a world (especially now with AI) where we can delegate most mental tasks to machines.

In ancient times, illiteracy posed no problem for worshipers of Yahweh. Scripture was written down for preservation, not mass consumption: The Dead Sea Scrolls would only have been decipherable by trained scribes. Jewish boys were expected to memorize large portions of Hebrew Scripture. Rabbis expected their students to memorize their sayings.

The same applied to pagans. Pythagoreans reportedly had to recite the previous day’s lesson verbatim before they could get out of bed in the morning. In ancient Greece, bards sang stories using a rhythm of stressed and unstressed syllables to aid memorization. Literacy was less crucial because orality meant people more easily retained what they heard and could commit much of it to memory.

But we’re not in an oral culture like that anymore. The problem with Gen Z—and now Gen-Z pastors—is that we’re fast approaching the illiteracy of the ancients, hundreds of years after Scripture memorization fell out of fashion. That means a digitally mediated, cloud-based scripturality will never have a serious chance of producing well-rounded disciples of Jesus Christ.

While we frequently consume oral media—audiobooks, podcasts, and vibey worship music—it tends to flow in one ear and out the other. We no longer pay attention, process, internalize, and commit valuable content to memory, especially as we increasingly outsource our memory and thinking to AI.

2. Reading contextualizes life.

Reading Scripture helps pastors rightly interpret their experiences, rather than haphazardly interpreting Scripture in light of their experiences.

A digitally mediated, cloud-based scripturality will never have a serious chance of producing well-rounded disciples of Jesus Christ.

A highly online life, combined with low biblical literacy, can warp our faith, turning it into an adornment on our curated, expressive individualism or a supplement to the more authoritative voices of our online tribes. When pop culture and doomscrolling fill a pastor’s waking hours, it won’t be long before his preaching becomes tethered more to the news cycle than to the Good Book.

If pastors are constantly scrolling X or TikTok, their sermons will lose their moorings in real life. Or, just as bad, they’ll preach a watered-down and unspecific gospel, addressing everything and nothing, jumping from one anecdote to the next without any unifying theme. I’m not catastrophizing: This is the natural state of a phoned-addled mind. Phone addiction is lethal for conversational depth; it erodes capacities for empathy, memory, and higher processing.

We Gen Zers have become experts at separating our spiritual and digital lives. But the reality is that our spiritual vitality is either hampered or helped by how we use our spare time.

3. Post-literate pastors will lack wisdom.

Post-literate pastors will lack the wisdom—patiently cultivated over time—that gives birth to real spiritual insight. This is as true of chemistry and literature as it is of theology.

Some of the world’s greatest breakthroughs in the arts and sciences came from laymen using in-between time to tinker, doodle, or daydream. Descartes discovered coordinate geometry by staring at a fly on his bedroom ceiling; Thoreau came up with much of his material while walking through the woods; Dostoevsky wrote a book based on notes he took in prison. Unhurried, unmediated thinking time has catalyzed many of civilization’s greatest epiphanies and innovations. But digital distractions are quickly crowding out this sort of time in our lives.

Martin Luther didn’t start the Reformation in a fit of spontaneity. It began when he read through Romans and let the truth of grace-through-faith seep into his soul. Did Tim Keller or Don Carson reach millions by spending every free moment on social media? Did they scour the web for sermon illustrations and then let ChatGPT do the rest? Far from it. Behind each “most-viewed” sermon clip on TikTok is something TikTok can never teach: hours of prayer; fasting; and painstaking, hair-splitting, life-giving study.

Challenge to Gen-Z Pastors

Johann Hari recently described his screen-addled godson as “whirring at the speed of Snapchat, somewhere where nothing still or serious could reach him.” If that description starts to characterize the up-and-coming generation of pastors, the future is grim.

Post-literate pastors will lack the wisdom—patiently cultivated over time—that gives birth to real spiritual insight.

I want my generation’s pastors to succeed. But I believe that will require them to be better readers and learners. So if you’re a seminary professor or a mentor of aspiring pastors, train them to be rigorous readers and don’t bless their entrance into ministry until they’ve proven an aptitude for reading.

And if you’re a reading-averse pastor yourself, recognize the dangers of doomscrolling and how it’ll model bad habits for your congregation. Commit to changing your habits—swapping time on smartphones for time in your study with a stack of books and a pen.

No matter how technologically advanced we become, pastors will never outgrow their need for God’s Word. We need to read Scripture not just to know facts about God but to know him intimately, personally, developing a deeper and richer communion with him where contemplation gives way to transformation (2 Cor. 3:18; Rom. 12:2).

It’s time we start asking how attuned we are to that need—and whether or not modern technology is deafening us to God’s still small voice.