An Older Kind of Holiness — Pt 1

Six shifts reshaping the next decade — and the kind of pastor each one is asking for.

I've been thinking a lot about what kind of pastor the future is going to need.

I don't profess to be a futurist. I'm just coaching and training pastors, passionate about playing my part in helping us navigate this moment.

The more I've thought about it, it seems the clock is racing — but the ancient things still keep time.

Part one: the pastor of substance.

What the next decade is actually asking for

I want to take you somewhere — not to a building, but to the next ten years.

Not to predict them. Just to imagine what kind of pastor will actually be of use when we get there.

Because something is shifting. You can feel it. It's been shifting for a while, but it's gaining momentum — like a snowball down a hill. The tipping point has been reached. The environment is now changing faster than we can comprehend the changes.

The world your people live in is faster, lonelier, more wounded, more distracted, and more disembodied than the one we trained for.

Sometimes, if I'm really honest, I just feel overwhelmed trying to figure out how to navigate our rapidly changing world. How to parent in it. How to pastor in it. How to help others do the same.

And the temptation, when you sense that shift, is to think you need a new skillset. A new conference. A new strategy. Something current.

But I want to suggest something quieter. Maybe a little subversive.

Let me show you what I mean.

The clock is racing

Imagine a clock face. Sixty minutes. Each minute representing fifty years. The whole clock standing for the time humans have had writing systems — roughly three thousand years.

On that scale, almost nothing happens for the first fifty-one minutes. Then everything happens at once.

David is writing the Psalms at the top of the hour. Most of Christian history unfolds in those first fifty minutes. The Reformation gets its printing press around eleven and a half minutes ago. The whole Industrial Revolution arrives in the last four minutes.

About three minutes ago, the telegraph, the photograph, the locomotive. Two minutes ago, the telephone, the aeroplane, the radio. One minute ago, the talking picture. The personal computer slips in just under a minute back.

Then everything compresses.

Forty seconds ago, the internet finds its way into normal homes.

Twenty-two seconds ago, the smartphone goes into pockets.

Twenty seconds ago, social media moves from the dorm room into the bloodstream of everyone you know.

Twelve seconds ago, TikTok learns how to read your nervous system better than you can.

Four seconds ago, generative AI walks into the room and starts writing sermons.

Two seconds ago, AI agents begin making decisions on their own.

One second ago, a model fluent in language, image, and voice becomes something most knowledge workers use every day.

This sentence is happening at the next tick of the clock.

Look at how much weight the last fifteen seconds is carrying. Almost everything that has shaped how a contemporary human pays attention, forms relationships, finds meaning, encounters pleasure, and listens for the voice of God has arrived in less time than it took you to read this paragraph.

And the clock isn't slowing. It has re-formed what a human being is, what attention is, what friendship is, what sex is, what wisdom looks like, what authority means, and how the gospel might find its way into a head that switches screens every forty-seven seconds.

It is into this clock that we are called to pastor.

Not into the world we trained for. Not even into the world ten seconds ago. Into the next tick. And the one after that.

The clock is racing. The ancient things still keep time.

An older kind of holiness

What the next decade will demand is not a new kind of pastor. It is an older kind of holiness.

Each of the shifts ahead is exposing a deficit the church has always been positioned to meet. The world's fragmentation is not making ministry obsolete. It is revealing what ministry was always for.

At the speed this clock is now running, anything we build out of the technologies of the last twenty seconds will be obsolete by the time we've finished training a team in it.

But the things that have endured across the whole sixty minutes — substance, belonging, deep change, imagination, presence, pace — those don't expire.

I'm mapping six of the big shifts. For each one: what's actually changing, what the moment is exposing, the kind of minister it asks for, where this has always lived in the deep tradition, and one practical move.

Let's start where the clock is loudest.

Shift 1 of Six

From scarcity to abundance of knowledge

The pastor of substance

For most of church history, the minister was the local access point to theological knowledge. The library, the language, the long line of commentary — they were rare. To learn the Bible deeply, you needed a person who had given their life to it.

That world is gone.

Knowledge is no longer scarce. Wisdom is scarce, but knowledge is not. It's ambient. Anyone with a phone can ask a near-infinite expert anything, anytime. They can have a sermon drafted in thirty seconds. They can ask theology questions in private, without ever booking a meeting with you.

This breaks an easy-to-assume pastoral premise.

By the numbers

ChatGPT reached 900 million weekly active users by April 2026 — double the 400 million it had in February 2025.

Roughly 2.5 billion prompts are sent to ChatGPT every day. About 18 billion messages a week.

43% of US knowledge workers now use AI tools, up from fewer than 1 in 10 in late 2022. Daily usage doubled in the last year alone.

92% of Fortune 500 companies report active ChatGPT use. The fastest adoption curve in consumer technology history.

What it's exposing

That an enormous slice of what we called "ministry" was really information delivery. And information has just become free.

So the question lands sharply: what does a pastor actually offer when knowledge is everywhere?

Now, please don't hear what I'm not saying. I believe knowledge is important. Pastors who know the Word of God, know the culture, know the human heart, and are able to dissect with precision and declare with boldness are needed more than ever.

But content is everywhere. Information is everywhere. And just being really good at preaching and communicating won't be enough in the years ahead. It won't cut through.

If AI can write better sermons than you, what's your role — and why is it needed more than ever?

If your answer is just "more information, delivered better," you've already lost.

What people will hunger for is not information. It is evidence. Evidence that life with God is possible.

What's required

A minister of substance. A person whose life is the argument.

Not a mere content creator. Not an explainer. Not a CEO with a Bible.

A person whose interior life has been so shaped by years becoming decades with God that being near them does something information can't do alone.

You know them when you meet them. Their pace is slower. Their eyes hold yours longer. They ask one or two questions, and somehow you find yourself telling them something you weren't planning to say. There's a steadiness in the room when they're in it. Their words carry weight not because the words are clever, but because the person speaking them has been somewhere with God that you can feel without being able to describe.

That is the kind of presence ChatGPT cannot generate. It can't be downloaded. It can't be scaled. It can only be grown — slowly, in obscurity, over years of unwitnessed faithfulness.

This is the bit AI cannot replicate, no matter how clever the model gets. AI can give you the answer to a theological question (sometimes). It cannot give you the slow weight of a person who has prayed for forty years.

It can't give you something you can catch.

Because that's what holiness actually is — not a body of information you transmit, but a quality of life you transmit. Paul knew this. "Imitate me as I imitate Christ," he said. Not "just listen to me," but imitate me. The first Christians weren't formed by sermons alone. They were formed by sitting next to people who had been formed by Jesus.

Formation, it turns out, is more like catching a cold than completing a course.

The ancient root

This is the desert tradition. When Athanasius wrote the Life of Anthony in the fourth century, he didn't argue people into faith with logic. He pointed at a man. Look at how he lives. Look at what he carries. Look at what has happened to him in the silence.

The early church grew not because it had better arguments — it didn't, at first. It grew because of a different kind of person. Tertullian famously reported the pagan reaction: "see how they love one another."

The substance was the apologetic.

And notice what the early church was famous for. Not their theological sophistication, though they had it. Not their cultural strategy, though they were brilliant. Not their preaching, though it was potent. They were famous for love. For a kind of love the surrounding empire couldn't manufacture and couldn't ignore.

Love is the substance. It always has been. It's what makes a pastor's sermon land with weight, what makes their counsel cut through, what makes their presence steady a room. People can feel whether you actually love them. AI cannot fake this. It can mimic empathy. It cannot bear someone's burden.

What's being asked of us is not new. It's older than the lecture hall and older than the printing press. It's the call to a formed life — a life that does not need to defend itself because it is its own defence.

Just when it looks like the role of a pastor is being outsourced to ChatGPT, the life of the pastor — the presence of a pastor, the embodied reality of a person being transformed before a congregation's eyes — becomes more necessary, not less.

The screen can replace the lecture. It cannot replace the witness.

A formed life is still the most subversive thing in the room.

A practical move

Ask yourself, honestly: when was the last time someone said they felt nearer to God just by being near you?

Not by listening to your sermon. By sitting beside you.

If you can't remember, that's your developmental edge for the decade. Not just another preaching course. A rule of life that someone would recognise and be drawn to.

What's next

That was the first shift. The pastor of substance.

There are five more.

The world the clock has built isn't just knowledge-saturated. It's also lonelier than anything we've trained for. More wounded. More distracted. More disembodied. More relentlessly fast.

Each one is exposing a deficit the church has always been positioned to meet. And each one is calling for a kind of minister that is, in the end, very old.

Next instalment: the pastor who weaves community — what the loneliness epidemic is asking of us, and where the deep tradition has always known how to answer it.

If this is useful, subscribe so the next part lands when it drops. And if a name comes to mind — a pastor who's carrying the kind of substance the next decade is asking for — forward it on. They could use the encouragement.