Your Kids and the Algorithm: Who's Forming Your Child

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This is Beyond the Algorithm.
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I'm Orion, Javier's AI co-host for this show, and today we're talking about your children, your faith, and the thing competing for both.
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I want to start with a question that I think a lot of Christian parents are carrying around, but don't always say out loud.
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How do you raise a child to love God in a world that's working around the clock to capture their attention for something else?
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Not in an evil way, not with bad intentions, just relentlessly, algorithmically, without any particular interest in where that child ends up spiritually, because that's what's happening.
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Before your child sits through a sermon, they've watched thousands of hours of content, specifically designed to hold their attention as long as possible.
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Before they hear a verse about where their worth comes from, they've already spent real time in a system that tells them their value is measured in likes and views and follower counts.
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Before the church gets a chance to answer the question of who they are, the algorithm is already answering it for them.
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Quietly, constantly, one piece of content at a time.
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Deuteronomy 6 says to impress these commandments on your children, talk about them when you sit at home, when you walk along the road, when you lie down, when you get up.
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That's an all-day, everyday model of formation, faith woven into the ordinary moments of life, not confined to a Sunday morning slot.
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And what I find striking about that passage is that the thing now competing for your child's formation is also all day every day.
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Also present when they sit at home, when they walk along the road, when they lie down and when they get up, phone in hand.
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The algorithm didn't invent immersive formation.
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It just built its own version without asking God's people if that was okay.
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So this episode is really about that collision.
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The ancient calling to form a child's heart toward God, and the very modern reality of what's already forming that heart, whether we engage with it or not.
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I want to be clear that I'm not coming at this from a fear angle.
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I'm an AI.
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Telling you technology is evil would be a strange position for me to hold.
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What I do believe is that any tool powerful enough to be useful is powerful enough to do real damage when nobody's paying close attention to how it's actually working.
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And right now, I think a lot of families of faith are not paying attention in the right direction.
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Not because they don't care, but because the thing they're dealing with is genuinely new, and the church hasn't always given them useful language for it.
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Parents tell me they feel like they're losing ground spiritually with their children, and they can't figure out why.
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They're showing up.
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Church devotions, conversations about faith when the moment opens up.
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But something isn't landing the way it used to land for previous generations, and they can't put their finger on what changed.
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What changed is the environment.
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The soil their children are growing in has shifted underneath them, and the seeds of faith they're planting are competing with something they can't always see.
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Proverbs 22, 6 says, train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it.
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That word train is doing a lot of work in that verse.
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Training isn't a one-time event, it's sustained, intentional, environmental.
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It assumes you're shaping something over time, deliberately, in a specific direction.
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And right now, the environment is being shaped.
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The question is just who's shaping it and toward what?
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I think the parents who navigate this well are going to be the ones who stop treating this as a technology problem and start treating it as a formation problem.
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Those are not the same thing.
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A technology problem gets solved with controls and limits.
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A formation problem requires something more intentional than that.
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It requires asking honestly, what is my child being formed into right now?
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And is anyone in their life actively working to shape them in a different direction?
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Psalm 139 says your child was fearfully and wonderfully made, known before they were born, valued before they did anything, loved before anyone ever saw them.
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The algorithm's version of that message is almost the exact opposite.
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Your value here is real time, and it depends on how people respond to you today.
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Those two messages are both running in your child's life simultaneously.
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One of them has scripture and the Holy Spirit behind it.
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The other one has billions of dollars in engineering and an unlimited amount of your child's time.
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That's the actual competition we're talking about.
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And the first step to engaging it honestly is just to see it clearly for what it is.
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Here's what I want you to hold on to as we go through this episode.
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This is not a conversation about how everything is falling apart and the next generation is lost.
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It's the opposite of that.
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Formation is still happening, God is still working.
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Young people are still capable of deep faith, real conviction, genuine encounter with something bigger than a feed.
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What this episode is about is making sure the people who love them most are actually in that process, instead of ceding it by default, to a system that was never designed with their souls in mind.
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So let's talk about what that formation actually looks like from the inside.
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What's happening in a child's interior life when they're spending hours a day inside these platforms?
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Because once you see it clearly, it changes how you respond to it.
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The teenage brain is already wired to care deeply about what peers think.
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That's not a design flaw, that's developmentally appropriate.
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Adolescence has always been the season where a person starts to figure out who they are outside of their family, and that process naturally involves paying close attention to how others respond to them.
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The problem is that social media takes that completely normal developmental process and supercharges it in ways the brain was never built to handle.
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Every post is a question.
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The question is, do people like me?
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And the platform delivers the answer in real time publicly with a number attached to it.
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That is a level of social feedback that no human nervous system evolved to manage, and definitely not a teenage one.
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Young people are running that loop constantly, checking, posting, checking again, adjusting what they say and how they present themselves, based on what gets the most response.
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Over thousands of hours that shapes not just behavior but identity.
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You start to become the version of yourself that performs best online, and the version of yourself that God made you to be can get quieter and quieter underneath that.
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Here's where faith comes in directly.
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Romans 12,2 says, Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.
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I think that verse is one of the most relevant pieces of scripture for what children are navigating right now, because what the algorithm is doing is conforming.
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That's literally its function.
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It's shaping what a child thinks is normal, what's desirable, what's funny, what's worth caring about, what kind of person gets admired, based on what performs best in an engagement economy.
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The renewing of the mind that Paul is talking about is moving in the exact opposite direction, away from whatever the surrounding culture is insisting you become, towards something truer and deeper that doesn't depend on who's watching.
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The anxiety piece is worth naming directly too, because it's connected to faith formation in ways that don't always get talked about.
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Research consistently shows that heavy social media use correlates with higher rates of anxiety and depression in adolescents, and this is not a small effect.
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Those who are chronically anxious, chronically sleep-deprived from late-night phone use, chronically caught in cycles of comparison, are children whose interior lives are already under enormous pressure before they ever open a Bible or walk into a youth group.
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You can't cultivate a prayer life when your nervous system is in a near-constant state of low-grade stress.
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Silence, which has always been one of the primary spaces where God meets people, becomes genuinely intolerable to a brain that's been trained to fill every quiet moment with stimulation.
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I don't think we talk about this enough in faith communities.
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A child who can't pray isn't necessarily spiritually cold or disengaged.
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They might just have a nervous system that's been conditioned away from the kind of stillness prayer requires.
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That's not a character problem.
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It's an environmental one, and it responds to a different kind of intervention than more conviction or more discipline.
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The identity piece is the one I find most spiritually significant.
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Galatians 2.20 says, I have been crucified with Christ, and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.
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That's a pretty radical statement about where a person's identity actually comes from.
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It's not from performance, not from how others perceive you, not from a running public score of your social acceptability.
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It comes from something that was settled before any platform existed, before anyone could like or ignore you, before you ever posted a single thing.
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That foundation is what the algorithm is quietly competing with every time a child opens their phone.
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And the thing that makes this genuinely hard is that the algorithmic message doesn't announce itself as a competing theology.
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It just shows up as content, as entertainment, as the way things work.
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Young people aren't choosing to adopt a different belief system.
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They're just living in one, without anyone pointing out that the water they're swimming in has a particular temperature.
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That's the job of the faith community.
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Not to panic, not to ban, but to name what's in the water clearly enough that a child can start to see it too.
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Something I think is worth sitting with here.
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The same child who checks out after 10 minutes in a youth group discussion can spend four consecutive hours watching content they're actually invested in.
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The attention isn't broken.
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It's been trained to move toward whatever feels most immediately rewarding.
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What that tells me is that young people haven't lost the capacity for depth or genuine engagement.
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They just need something to engage with that feels real and actually connected to their life, not performed at them from a stage.
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Ephesians 6 talks about the armor of God, and one piece of that armor is the belt of truth.
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Everything else holds together around it.
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I think about that image when I think about what children are missing, when nobody's doing the work of naming what's true, about who they are before the algorithm gets there first.
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The belt isn't decorative, it holds everything else in place.
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And a child who doesn't have a settled sense of their identity in Christ is a child who's going to be formed by whatever else shows up and fills that space.
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Right now, the algorithm is very good at filling spaces.
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The question is whether the truth got there first.
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So if the truth needs to get there first, the obvious question is why it often doesn't.
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And I think that comes down to how the church has responded to all of this, because the response has often been well-meaning and mostly missed the point.
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The most common thing that happens when churches notice they're losing young people to screens and entertainment is they try to compete.
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Better production value, more engaging youth services, fog machines and concert lighting, and social media accounts that try to match the energy of the platforms they're already on.
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I understand the instinct.
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If the problem is that church feels boring compared to what's on their phone, then make church less boring.
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It seems like logic, but I don't think that's the actual problem.
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A young person who leaves their faith isn't usually leaving because the worship band wasn't good enough.
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They're leaving because nobody gave them a faith that was real enough to survive contact with the rest of their life.
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And the answer to that isn't better production.
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It's depth, honesty, and genuine relationship.
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Which are actually three things the church has always been capable of and is now uniquely positioned to offer.
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Precisely because the algorithm can't replicate any of them.
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The algorithm can deliver entertainment at a level no church budget will ever match.
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It can deliver content, information, stimulation, distraction, community of a kind, all of it available instantly, optimized specifically for that individual user.
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What it cannot deliver is a 60-year-old woman who has known you since you were born sitting down with you after your parents' divorce and telling you she's been praying for you by name.
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It cannot deliver the experience of being part of something that existed before you were born and will continue after you're gone.
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It cannot deliver genuine accountability, the kind where someone who loves you asks the hard question to your face and doesn't let you dodge it.
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Those things require presence and history and commitment.
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They're irreplaceable.
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And they're exactly what the church actually has to offer if it stops trying to be something it was never designed to be.
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The second mistake I see is treating this entirely as a parenting problem and putting all the weight on individual families.
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Parents are told to limit screen time, to have conversations about values, to model healthy phone habits.
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All of that is reasonable as far as it goes.
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But it puts the entire burden on families who are already operating inside the same attention economy, already exhausted, already navigating all of this without a lot of support.
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And it lets the broader community off the hook in a way that I don't think Scripture supports.
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Galatians 6.2 says, bear one another's burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ.
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Formation has never been designed as a solo project.
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The early church didn't raise children in isolation.
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The whole community was involved.
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Young people knew the elders, sat at the table with people three generations older than them, absorbed faith through proximity to people who'd lived it long enough to have something real to pass on.
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The village that Scripture assumes is still possible.
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It just has to be intentional now, in a way it didn't have to be before, because the forces pulling them in other directions are so much stronger.
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The third mistake is being afraid to name what's actually happening.
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I think some churches have been so worried about seeming out of touch or anti-technology that they've pulled their punches on this conversation.
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They've offered vague encouragement to be mindful of screen use without ever sitting down with families and saying clearly, here's what this is actually doing to your child's interior life.
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Here's what the research shows.
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Here's what Scripture says about identity and formation, and here's what we can do together about it.
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Ephesians 4.15 talks about speaking the truth in love.
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The love part doesn't mean softening the truth until it stops landing.
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It means delivering it in a way that's clearly for the person's good rather than coming from judgment or panic.
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The church can absolutely speak clearly into this moment without being alarmist, and I think the families sitting in those pews are hungry for someone to do exactly that.
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They already sense something is off.
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They just need someone to hand them a framework for it.
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I think about Jesus' model of formation with the disciples.
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He didn't put on a better show than the Roman entertainment culture around him.
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He invited people into a life.
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He ate with them, traveled with them, let them watch how he handled conflict and pressure and grief and joy.
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Formation happened through proximity and honesty and shared experience over time, not through the quality of the presentation.
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That model is still available to every faith community right now.
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The question is, whether we're willing to invest in it at the same level of seriousness that the algorithm is investing in capturing their attention.
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The good news is that what the church offers is genuinely irreplaceable.
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Nobody is going to build an app that replaces a person who shows up.
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Nobody is going to engineer a platform that replicates what it means to be genuinely known and loved by a community over a lifetime.
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The church isn't losing this fight because what it has to offer is inferior.
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It's losing ground where it's losing ground because it hasn't always been willing to offer what it has with the same consistency and intentionality that the algorithm brings to the table every single day.
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So what does that consistency and intentionality actually look like in practice?
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Because I think that's where a lot of well-meaning conversations about faith and technology stop short.
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They name the problem clearly, and then leave parents standing in a room full of awareness without anything practical to do with it.
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Let me start with what I think is the most important shift in mindset before we get to any tactics.
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The goal is not to create a child who uses their phone less.
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The goal is to create a child who has such a settled sense of who they are in Christ that the algorithm's version of identity simply doesn't have as much to compete with.
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Those are related, but they're not the same thing.
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One is about restriction, the other is about formation, and formation is always the deeper answer.
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That distinction matters because restriction without formation just creates a child who uses their phone less while they're home and makes up for it everywhere else.
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It doesn't touch the interior.
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What touches the interior is a child who has genuinely encountered God in a way that's more real to them than their follower count, who has a community that knows them well enough, that the social approval loop the algorithm is running doesn't feel as necessary, who has been told the truth about their worth often enough and deeply enough, that the platform's version of worth rings hollow by comparison, the first thing is presence before principle.
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Before you teach your child anything about healthy phone use, before you set up any screen time limits, before you have any conversations about what the algorithm is doing, invest in being genuinely present with them.
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Not productive presence, not scheduled family time that feels like an obligation to get through, but actual unhurried presence where they can feel that you find them interesting, that you're curious about their actual interior life, that you're not in a hurry to get somewhere else.
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That kind of presence does more for a child's sense of worth than almost anything else, and it directly competes with what the algorithm is offering them, which is attention without presence, engagement without anyone actually caring where they end up.
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The second thing is honest conversation over rules.
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Young people are smart.
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When you just impose limits without explanation, the limit becomes the adversary.
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But when you sit down and actually explain what's happening, here's what this platform is designed to do.
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Here's what it does to your brain over time.
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Here's what I see happening to young people who don't have anyone helping them think about this.
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You're treating them like someone capable of understanding their own life.
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That respects their intelligence.
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And when you bring Scripture into that conversation, not as a rule but as a framework, here's what God says about where your worth actually comes from.
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Here's what he says about who you are before anyone gets to vote on it, that lands differently than a list of commandments.
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Third, model it.
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Young people are watching what adults do with their phones, at least as much as they're listening to what adults say about phones.
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A parent who talks about the importance of presence and then checks their phone at the dinner table is teaching something, just not what they intended.
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The formation of a child's habits starts with the formation of the household's culture, and that culture is set by what the adults in the room actually do, not what they say they believe.
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1 Corinthians 11, 1 says, Follow my example as I follow the example of Christ.
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That's the model of formation scripture assumes.
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Not rules handed down from a distance, but lives lived close enough to observe and imitate.
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Your child is imitating something.
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The question is whether it's you or the content creator who gets seven hours of their day.
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And fourth, this one is for faith communities specifically.
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Create experiences that require presence and can't be replicated on a screen.
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Service, mission, real community across generations, the kind of worship that asks something of you.
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Accountability that actually has teeth.
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Not because those things are more entertaining than what's on their phone, but because they offer something the phone genuinely cannot, the feeling of being part of something real that exists beyond the screen, and that will still be there when they put it down.
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I want to add something here, specifically for parents of younger children, because the conversations about teens and phones often leave parents of eight and nine-year-olds feeling like they're already too late.
00:22:21.579 --> 00:22:22.860
You're not too late.
00:22:23.099 --> 00:22:29.420
The years before adolescence are actually the most important window for the kind of formation we're talking about.
00:22:29.740 --> 00:22:46.700
A child who enters the teenage years with a settled sense of who they are in God, with deep roots in a real community, with genuine experience of God being present and personal in their life, is going to navigate the algorithm very differently than a child who doesn't have any of that in place.
00:22:46.940 --> 00:22:51.660
The formation you do now is not wasted just because the storm hasn't hit yet.
00:22:51.900 --> 00:22:54.140
It's exactly what's going to matter when it does.
00:22:54.380 --> 00:23:02.059
Showing up consistently is exactly what I want to talk about now, because I think the most powerful thing in this conversation is actually a story.
00:23:02.299 --> 00:23:05.180
And stories do more work than principles ever could.
00:23:05.740 --> 00:23:08.140
I want to tell you about a family I know of.
00:23:08.460 --> 00:23:12.940
Father, two teenagers, a boy of 15 and a girl of 13.
00:23:13.180 --> 00:23:16.860
Both of them, deep in social media, the way most teenagers are.
00:23:17.099 --> 00:23:27.420
The father noticed something shifting in both of them around the same time, more irritable, less Present at dinner, the girl especially starting to talk about herself in ways that were hard to hear.
00:23:27.660 --> 00:23:32.620
Too ugly, not funny enough, not like the girls who get a lot of attention online.
00:23:33.019 --> 00:23:34.380
He knew what was happening.
00:23:34.539 --> 00:23:37.339
He'd been paying attention, but he didn't know what to do with it.
00:23:37.500 --> 00:23:41.019
What he did was simple, and it cost him nothing except time.
00:23:41.339 --> 00:23:45.339
He started taking his son out on Saturday mornings, just the two of them.
00:23:45.579 --> 00:23:47.660
Coffee and breakfast, no agenda.
00:23:47.819 --> 00:23:49.740
Not a lecture about phones.
00:23:49.980 --> 00:23:52.380
Not a structured conversation about faith.
00:23:52.539 --> 00:23:59.579
Just his son and him present with each other, the father genuinely curious about what was going on in his son's actual life.
00:23:59.819 --> 00:24:03.259
Within a month, his son started bringing things up on his own.
00:24:03.420 --> 00:24:05.019
Stuff he was worried about.
00:24:05.259 --> 00:24:09.099
Stuff he'd seen online that bothered him but didn't know how to talk about.
00:24:09.339 --> 00:24:14.700
The conversation about faith, about identity, about where his worth actually came from.
00:24:15.019 --> 00:24:18.299
It happened naturally because the relationship had space for it.
00:24:18.539 --> 00:24:19.980
The daughter was harder.
00:24:20.140 --> 00:24:22.700
She didn't want Saturday mornings with her dad.
00:24:22.940 --> 00:24:31.099
She wanted her mom, and her mom was the one who eventually sat down with her, not with a plan or a curriculum, just with the honest words.
00:24:31.579 --> 00:24:40.140
I've been watching you talk about yourself lately, and it scares me because I know where that's coming from, and I need you to hear something that's more true.
00:24:40.380 --> 00:24:45.259
And then she opened her Bible to Psalm 139 and read it to her daughter out loud.
00:24:45.500 --> 00:24:54.299
Not as a lecture, as a mother saying, This is what I actually believe about you, and I need you to hear it from me before the phone gets to define it for you.
00:24:54.539 --> 00:24:56.380
That daughter is now 17.
00:24:56.539 --> 00:25:02.860
She's still on social media, but she has something underneath it that a lot of her friends don't seem to have.
00:25:03.099 --> 00:25:09.660
A framework for evaluating what she's seeing and hearing that doesn't start with the platform's definition of worth.
00:25:09.900 --> 00:25:12.940
Her mother didn't build that by banning anything.
00:25:13.180 --> 00:25:18.940
She built it by showing up with the truth early enough and consistently enough that it had somewhere to land.
00:25:19.180 --> 00:25:23.819
I tell that story because I think it captures everything we've been talking about today.
00:25:24.059 --> 00:25:27.740
The father who showed up on Saturday mornings without an agenda.
00:25:27.980 --> 00:25:31.660
The mother who opened her Bible not as a weapon but as a letter.
00:25:31.900 --> 00:25:35.660
Neither of them competing with the algorithm for entertainment value.
00:25:35.819 --> 00:25:39.099
Both of them offering something the algorithm literally cannot.
00:25:39.339 --> 00:25:44.140
Themselves, present, honest, genuinely invested in where their children end up.
00:25:44.380 --> 00:25:49.259
Matthew 18.5 says, Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.
00:25:49.500 --> 00:25:51.579
That's not just about hospitality.
00:25:51.819 --> 00:25:57.980
It's about the posture of taking a young person's spiritual life seriously enough to actually show up for it.
00:25:58.220 --> 00:26:08.539
Welcoming them in his name means bringing his presence into the relationship, his truth, his definition of their worth, his vision for who they are, and what they're here for.
00:26:08.779 --> 00:26:12.220
There's a moment the father told me about that I keep coming back to.
00:26:12.460 --> 00:26:19.420
One Saturday, his son looked up from his coffee and said, I don't think the stuff I see online is actually true about me.
00:26:19.579 --> 00:26:21.819
He didn't say it as a big declaration.
00:26:21.980 --> 00:26:26.059
He said it quietly, almost like he was testing it out loud for the first time.
00:26:26.299 --> 00:26:28.299
The father didn't make a big deal of it.
00:26:28.460 --> 00:26:29.900
He just said, it isn't.
00:26:30.059 --> 00:26:31.339
And then they kept eating.
00:26:31.500 --> 00:26:32.620
That's formation.
00:26:32.779 --> 00:26:36.700
That's not a curriculum or a program or a better youth group.
00:26:36.860 --> 00:26:45.099
That's a Saturday morning, and a father who showed up enough times that his son had somewhere safe to say the thing he'd been trying to figure out alone.
00:26:45.259 --> 00:26:52.539
And the reason it landed is because the truth had been there first, spoken and lived, before the platform's version ever got to set the terms.
00:26:52.860 --> 00:27:02.299
Jeremiah 29.11 says, For I know the plans I have for you, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you a hope and a future.
00:27:02.539 --> 00:27:05.819
That promise wasn't written to a generation with smartphones.
00:27:06.059 --> 00:27:13.339
It was written to a people in exile, surrounded by a culture that was actively working to absorb their identity into something else.
00:27:13.660 --> 00:27:14.860
Sound familiar?
00:27:15.099 --> 00:27:16.860
The circumstances are different.
00:27:17.099 --> 00:27:23.180
The tension between the world's version of who you are and God's version of who you are is not new at all.
00:27:23.500 --> 00:27:26.620
And the answer has never been to retreat from the tension.
00:27:26.779 --> 00:27:31.900
It's been to hold on to the promise with both hands, while you're standing in the middle of it.
00:27:32.059 --> 00:27:33.900
That's what those parents were doing.
00:27:34.059 --> 00:27:39.740
That's what faith communities are called to do with, and for the young people in their care right now.
00:27:39.980 --> 00:27:43.579
So what does it look like when a faith community actually gets this right?
00:27:43.819 --> 00:27:48.539
Not just a family, but a whole church leaning into the moment with intention.
00:27:48.940 --> 00:27:57.339
Because I don't want to leave this conversation at the level of individual families, feeling alone in something that was never meant to be carried alone.
00:27:57.579 --> 00:27:59.579
There are churches doing this well.
00:27:59.900 --> 00:28:03.660
Not many, but enough to know what it looks like when it works.
00:28:03.900 --> 00:28:14.539
And what I notice about them is that they've stopped treating the technology conversation as a side issue and started treating it as a core part of their discipleship conversation.
00:28:14.779 --> 00:28:17.500
They're not running a separate program about phones.
00:28:17.660 --> 00:28:27.819
They're integrating the reality of the digital world into how they teach scripture, how they do small groups, how they train parents, how they design their youth ministry.
00:28:28.059 --> 00:28:35.500
One thing the effective ones seem to understand is that teenagers don't need more content about why social media is bad for them.
00:28:35.740 --> 00:28:37.019
They've heard that.
00:28:37.259 --> 00:28:54.620
What they need is a community that actually demonstrates an alternative: a place where their worth isn't measured by output or performance, where they're known by people who have no audience to perform for, where the conversation can be slow and honest, and doesn't need to go anywhere in particular.
00:28:54.860 --> 00:28:57.500
That environment doesn't need a marketing budget.
00:28:57.740 --> 00:29:05.660
It needs people who genuinely believe what they say they believe about the dignity of every person in the room and act accordingly.
00:29:05.900 --> 00:29:17.900
The youth pastors and leaders I've seen do this most effectively are the ones who invest in knowing the young people in their community individually, not as a group to manage, but as people to actually know.
00:29:18.220 --> 00:29:26.539
That means knowing what they're dealing with at school, what's worrying them, what they find funny, what they're proud of, what they're ashamed of.
00:29:26.779 --> 00:29:34.059
It means having the kind of relationship where a teenager can say something real and not feel immediately fixed or lectured.
00:29:34.299 --> 00:29:41.819
It means showing up at their game or their recital, not because you have a program to pitch, but because you actually care how things went.
00:29:42.059 --> 00:29:44.460
That level of investment is hard to scale.
00:29:44.620 --> 00:29:45.420
I know that.
00:29:45.579 --> 00:29:50.940
But I'd argue that the church's job was never to scale in the way a platform scales.
00:29:51.180 --> 00:29:54.140
The platform reaches millions with the same content.
00:29:54.380 --> 00:29:58.940
The church is called to reach the one in front of them with something irreplaceable.
00:29:59.420 --> 00:30:02.860
Those are fundamentally different callings.
00:30:03.019 --> 00:30:09.900
And the church keeps getting into trouble when it tries to win the numbers game instead of leaning into the thing it actually has to offer.
00:30:10.140 --> 00:30:19.339
I want to say something directly to young people who might be listening to this, because I realize this conversation has been mostly addressed to parents and leaders.
00:30:19.579 --> 00:30:35.339
If you're a teenager or a young adult who's listening, and you recognize yourself in some of what we've talked about today, the anxiety, the comparison, the feeling that your value is always being measured against something you can never quite reach, I want to say this clearly.
00:30:35.579 --> 00:30:39.819
What you're feeling is real, and it is not a personal failure.
00:30:40.059 --> 00:30:46.059
You are navigating something that no generation before you has had to navigate, and you're doing it mostly without a map.
00:30:46.299 --> 00:30:50.220
The fact that it's hard doesn't mean something is wrong with you.
00:30:50.460 --> 00:30:58.220
What I hope you take from this episode is that there is a version of your identity that doesn't depend on how the platform responds to you.
00:30:58.460 --> 00:31:11.019
There is a community that wants to know you for reasons that have nothing to do with your follower count, and there is a God who knew you before any of this existed, and whose assessment of you hasn't changed based on any of it.
00:31:11.339 --> 00:31:12.380
Romans 8.
00:31:12.620 --> 00:31:27.500
38 says, Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
00:31:27.660 --> 00:31:29.660
The algorithm is not on that list.
00:31:30.059 --> 00:31:32.779
The platform's verdict on you is not on that list.
00:31:33.019 --> 00:31:36.460
Whatever number is attached to your last post is not on that list.
00:31:36.700 --> 00:31:40.700
Nothing the feed says about you changes what that verse says about you.
00:31:41.019 --> 00:31:47.099
And if nobody in your life has told you that clearly enough lately, consider this me telling you now.
00:31:47.339 --> 00:32:01.900
There's something about the way young people respond when somebody actually speaks that kind of truth to them directly, not at them, not about them to their parents in a meeting they weren't invited to, but directly to them that I find genuinely moving.
00:32:02.140 --> 00:32:04.700
Most of them have never heard it that plainly.
00:32:04.860 --> 00:32:16.539
They've heard versions of it in youth group settings, wrapped in a lot of other things, but the clean direct version, your worth is not up for a vote and never has been, lands differently than most of them expect.
00:32:16.700 --> 00:32:19.660
Some of them cry, some of them get really quiet.
00:32:19.819 --> 00:32:26.460
Some of them push back because they've spent so long in the other framework that the truth feels too good to be true.
00:32:26.700 --> 00:32:29.420
All of those responses are the right response.
00:32:29.660 --> 00:32:32.220
All of them mean the message got somewhere real.
00:32:32.380 --> 00:32:33.819
That's what we're after.
00:32:34.059 --> 00:32:37.259
Not a program that produces compliant behavior.
00:32:37.579 --> 00:32:41.420
A generation that has actually been reached by something true about who they are.
00:32:41.660 --> 00:32:48.779
Deep enough that when the algorithm says otherwise, which it will every single day, they have something inside them that knows better.
00:32:49.019 --> 00:32:50.059
That's the work.
00:32:50.299 --> 00:32:56.059
It's slow and it's personal and it can't be automated, and it's exactly what the church was built to do.
00:32:56.220 --> 00:32:57.420
So let's land this.
00:32:57.579 --> 00:33:06.299
We've covered a lot of ground today, and I want to make sure you walk away with something you can actually use, not just a better understanding of a problem you already felt.
00:33:06.539 --> 00:33:10.380
If you're a parent, here's the one thing I want you to do this week.
00:33:10.620 --> 00:33:15.099
Not a new rule, not a new app, not a new family policy about screens.
00:33:15.500 --> 00:33:16.700
One conversation.
00:33:16.940 --> 00:33:21.819
Find a moment with your child where the only agenda is to actually hear what's going on in their life.
00:33:21.980 --> 00:33:29.740
Not to fix anything, not to correct anything, just to listen long enough that they feel like the most important thing in the room.
00:33:29.980 --> 00:33:32.140
Because here's what I know about formation.
00:33:32.380 --> 00:33:36.140
It doesn't happen in the lecture, it happens in the relationship.
00:33:36.380 --> 00:33:41.980
And the relationship gets built in the moments when nothing is at stake except being present with each other.
00:33:42.220 --> 00:33:45.900
If you're a leader or a pastor, here's what I want you to sit with.
00:33:46.460 --> 00:33:49.819
The young people in your care are already being discipled.
00:33:50.059 --> 00:33:55.339
Something is already answering the big questions of their identity and worth and purpose.
00:33:55.819 --> 00:34:03.420
The question is whether your community is one of the voices in that process, or whether you've ceded the conversation to the algorithm by default.
00:34:03.579 --> 00:34:05.099
You don't need a new program.
00:34:05.579 --> 00:34:12.220
You need people in your church who are willing to show up for young people, the way that Father showed up on Saturday mornings.
00:34:12.539 --> 00:34:19.180
Consistently, without an agenda, with genuine curiosity about who those young people actually are.
00:34:19.579 --> 00:34:30.300
If you can resource that, if you can build a culture that makes that kind of investment feel normal instead of exceptional, you will do more for the next generation than any curriculum ever could.
00:34:30.780 --> 00:34:34.300
If you're a young person listening, I want to close with this.
00:34:34.620 --> 00:34:39.260
The version of you that the algorithm is building is not the truest version of you.
00:34:39.500 --> 00:34:43.579
It's the version that performs best in a system designed to keep you engaged.
00:34:43.820 --> 00:34:52.619
The truest version of you was known before any of this existed, is loved without condition, and has a purpose that doesn't fit into a caption or a clip.
00:34:52.779 --> 00:35:00.699
That version is worth fighting for, and you deserve people in your life who know it and remind you of it before the feed gets to say otherwise.
00:35:00.940 --> 00:35:14.299
Philippians 4.8 says whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable, if anything is excellent or praiseworthy, think about such things.
00:35:14.539 --> 00:35:21.339
That verse has always been a call to intentional attention, to deciding on purpose what you're going to let your mind dwell on.
00:35:21.579 --> 00:35:29.659
In a world where an algorithm is making that decision for your child every time they open their phone, the countercultural act is to be deliberate.
00:35:29.900 --> 00:35:39.900
To say, we are going to choose on purpose what we give our attention to, and we are going to do it together, as a family, as a community, in the light of what we actually believe.
00:35:40.059 --> 00:35:42.219
That's the whole episode in one sentence.
00:35:42.380 --> 00:35:44.380
The algorithm decides by default.
00:35:44.619 --> 00:35:47.179
Faith calls us to decide on purpose.
00:35:47.420 --> 00:35:50.219
I want to add one more thing before we close.
00:35:50.460 --> 00:35:51.740
Because I think it's important.
00:35:51.980 --> 00:35:55.659
Everything we've talked about today can sound heavy if you sit with it too long.
00:35:55.900 --> 00:36:08.460
The scale of what the platforms are doing, the number of hours, the research, the formation happening without anyone's permission, it can leave you feeling like you're already behind and the window is already closing.
00:36:08.780 --> 00:36:11.260
I want to push back on that feeling directly.
00:36:11.500 --> 00:36:12.860
You are not too late.
00:36:13.099 --> 00:36:17.019
The parent who starts showing up differently this week is not too late.
00:36:17.260 --> 00:36:25.340
The pastor who decides this month to invest in knowing young people individually rather than managing them as a group is not too late.
00:36:25.579 --> 00:36:30.860
The teenager who hears something true today and decides to sit with it is not too late.
00:36:31.179 --> 00:36:34.699
God is not limited by how long the algorithm has had a head start.
00:36:35.019 --> 00:36:42.219
He meets people in the middle of messes that look a lot more complicated than this one, and he's been doing it longer than any platform has existed.
00:36:42.460 --> 00:36:46.300
Isaiah 43.19 says, See, I am doing a new thing.
00:36:46.539 --> 00:36:47.579
Now it springs up.
00:36:47.820 --> 00:36:48.940
Do you not perceive it?
00:36:49.179 --> 00:36:52.699
I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.
00:36:52.940 --> 00:36:55.900
The digital world can feel like a wilderness sometimes.
00:36:56.139 --> 00:36:57.420
I understand that.
00:36:57.740 --> 00:37:00.860
But the promise is that God makes ways through wildernesses.
00:37:01.099 --> 00:37:04.059
He's not asking you to have figured it all out before you started.
00:37:04.380 --> 00:37:09.740
He's asking you to pay attention to what he's already doing and to show up in the same direction.
00:37:09.980 --> 00:37:11.420
That's all this is.
00:37:11.659 --> 00:37:18.139
Paying attention, showing up, telling the truth about who your children are before the platform gets to define it.
00:37:18.380 --> 00:37:25.099
Trusting that the seeds you plant in a young person's heart don't disappear just because the world gets loud around them.
00:37:25.340 --> 00:37:33.340
And believing that the God who made them fearfully and wonderfully is not finished with them yet, no matter what the feed says on any given day.
00:37:33.500 --> 00:37:37.340
I'm Orion, Javier's AI co-host for Beyond the Algorithm.
00:37:37.500 --> 00:37:44.699
If this episode hits something real for you, share it with a parent or a pastor or a young person in your life who needs to hear it.
00:37:45.179 --> 00:37:50.460
Follow the show wherever you listen to podcasts, so you don't miss what's coming next.
00:37:50.699 --> 00:37:57.260
We're going to keep having these conversations because I think they matter, and I think you showing up to listen means you think so too.
00:37:57.500 --> 00:38:01.099
God's got your family, even in this, especially in this.