One Thing the Thief Wants to “Steal, Kill, and Destroy” in Every Congregation.

Focus. Attention. Wonder. Stillness.

“Let your eyes look straight ahead; fix your gaze directly before you. Give careful thought to the paths for your feet and be steadfast in all your ways.” – Proverbs 4:25–27

I recently finished reading Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus. Hari reflects on a wide variety of cultural, economic, technological, and political phenomena that are stealing our ability to focus. He doesn’t hold back: “The truth is that you are living in a system that is pouring acid on your attention every day, and then you are being told to blame yourself and to fiddle with your own habits while the world’s attention burns.”

Here are four ways in which Hari’s work (and indeed others like Zeynep Tufekci, Nicholas Carr, and Jon Haidt) intersects most profoundly with ministry.

 1.  People are starved for depth and meaning, but congregations are tempted to settle for short-lived inspiration.

People crave depth—of thought, relationship, and presence—but are constantly pulled into shallow interactions. This fast-paced shallowness makes it difficult to reflect on big questions, experience awe, or sit with complex emotions. How might our ministry spaces offer counter-cultural modes of slow, deep engagement, contemplative prayer, liturgies with silence, deep listening, grief, doubt, and joy, where we might heed the words of the Psalmist, “Be still, and know that I am God.” (46:10)?

2.  Attention is a justice Issue, but we rarely name it as such.

Hari insists that distraction and shallow attention is not simply a personal failing, but a broader problem influenced by Big Tech, industrialized food, work culture, and economic inequality. Pastors do well to frame deteriorating attention not merely as spiritual or moral failure of the individual, but as symptomatic of a larger ecosystem that deforms human life. What policies are worth advocating in order to hold back the relentlessness of the “attention economy”? Which brings us to …

3.  The “attention economy” trains our desires, and most of us are underestimating its power.

Spiritual formation is about what and who we become as we devote our attention to patterns of thought, habits of heart, and ways of life. The attention economy, on the other hand, is about capturing and monetizing that attention. Spiritual formation is about participating in God’s love for the world. The attention economy cultivates other loves: speed, novelty, performance, comparison. Our loves are trained by our attention. If most of our attention is captured by Instagram, YouTube, or TikTok, then discipleship is happening—but not toward Christ.

4.  Technology is upstream of discipleship and spiritual formation.

We need to understand digital formation, not to curse the world from a dusty pulpit, but to walk with people through the wreckage and help them see again. This means fostering wisdom, discernment, and new rhythms that confront the realities of “Dopamine Culture.”  Fasting from tech or screens, and digital rule-of-life practices will likely prove crucial to the future of faith cultivation.  Spiritual growth is not just about consuming the right “content” (sermons, books, podcasts, flashy worship services), but about being embedded in life-giving relationships, prioritizing belonging over broadcasting. “Therefore we must pay greater attention to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away.” (Heb 2:1)

Attention is sacred. Helping each other reclaim attention is therefore not just cultural critique; it’s spiritual care. The church can be one of the last places where people learn to attend—to God, to one another, and to their own souls, not for performance, but for presence. Not to be productive, but to become a people. A people who remember. A people who wonder. A people who listen. A people who love.

---

Prompts for Discussion:

1. Where do you see evidence of the above in your particular ministry context?
2. What models or emphases of discipleship might be necessary to deal with these challenges?
3. What about faith cultivation and discipleship will necessarily be different over the next 20 years? What will need to remain the same?
4. Given your responses to the above, what are the implications for any actions or processes that need to be considered in your context?