A collaboration between Mark Goering and luke fredenberg .
It was day one of our Gen Z Bible internship, and we were spending our first hours in our prayer room. We ended the meeting calling each of the four new interns up to the mic to pray, something very normal in our world. One of the girl’s eyes got as big as the moon. I could see the panic written all over her face. “I’ve got to pray in front of people?”
I smiled and nodded. “You got this. Just a simple prayer.”
The others went before her, and then it was her turn. I handed her the mic. She stumbled over a clunky sentence, basically threw the mic back to me, turned, and ran out of the room straight to lock herself in the bathroom.
After her anxiety waned, we debriefed. “You did it,” I said. She rolled her eyes.
“I’m not kidding, that was the hardest moment of your internship. You went for it. You got up there and did it. That’s the win.”
About six months later this girl was strumming her guitar on stage, passionately pouring out her heart, leading our prayer room community in worship.
You don’t know what Jesus can do with your weak yes.
–From Luke’s own experience.
The average Christian in 2026 can access more types of content than the entire Church had access to in the first century: podcasts, commentaries, books, courses and on goes the list…
And we consume and consume. Stack that up over a few years and the number of hours of consumption gets ridiculous. Hundreds of hours. For a lot of people, thousands. Take a look at the infographic below and see where you consume the most:
Now lets look at the men Jesus picked. No podcasts, no conferences, no study Bibles, no app that pulls up the Greek when you tap a word. Most of them couldn’t have read a commentary if you’d handed them one. They had dusty roads, a teacher who kept saying confusing things, and a front-row seat to whatever happened next.
And they’re the ones who turned the world upside down. The ones whose work we’re standing on while we scroll through our seventh sermon of the week feeling somehow behind.
If information produced disciple-makers, we would already be drowning in them. We are not.
So what did they have that we usually don’t?
Scripture matters as does teaching and theology.
But information feels like progress even when nothing is moving. You can listen to a forty-minute message on evangelism, highlight a line, and text a friend about how good it was. Your brain files all of it under growth. Then you do that every week for a decade without starting a spiritual conversation with the guy who’s cut your hair for nine years.
We learn about the practices of Christ and get good at talking about them. Agreement begins to feel like obedience.
The problem: Nothing was practiced. Nothing was risked. But it sure felt like we were following Jesus. If information produced disciple-makers, we would already be up to our ears in them.
We are not.
Jesus began with two words: “Follow me.” Walk where I walk. Watch what I do.
The disciples watched him touch lepers, speak with people everyone avoided, calm storms, heal the sick, and proclaim the kingdom. Then he passed of the same “stuff” before they were ready.
In Mark 6 and Luke 9, Jesus sent the Twelve to preach, heal, and cast out demons. Later he sent seventy-two more. No two-year residency. No “make sure you’re ready” checkpoint. He sent them out and let them come back and tell him how it went.
And they failed.. they couldn’t cast out a demon and they misunderstood what he was doing. They argued about which of them was greatest. Jesus corrected them but sent them forward.
Jesus seemed far less worried about people failing than we are.
They watched. They tried. They came back. They talked about what happened. Then they tried again…that was the training.
You don’t need another ten hours of content on the thing. You need ten hours of practice at it.
But reps alone aren’t enough. Practice evangelism by yourself and you may just run into your same mental blocks and skill edges a bunch of times. You need someone with you who can say, “You talked for six minutes when you should’ve asked a question.”
Some of this can’t be downloaded. You can watch every video on praying with strangers and still lack the timing, nerve, and judgment of someone who has done it three hundred times.
So get close to someone already doing it. Watch them. Try it with them. Let them send you a little further than feels comfortable. Then talk about what happened.
That’s how you become ready.
Another story from Luke.
Her body stiffened. The fear was stifling. She was one of our teens out on her first time evangelizing, and she was at the pivotal moment of realization: “I’ve actually got to go talk to people.”
She spotted three glamorously dressed teen girls about her age. She didn’t know what she was doing, but at that moment she was determined to just go for it. She breathed in deeply, looked at the adult next to her and said, “I’ll be right back.”
She then found herself walking up to the girls, introducing herself, and simply offering to pray with them. They nodded.
After a quick, basic prayer, she took off a colored bracelet she had on, each color having a Bible verse etched into it. “I wanted to give this to you,” she said, handing the bracelet to one of the girls with a smile. She asked if she could share what the verses on the bracelet were. The girls nodded again, and our teen began sharing the Gospel.
She didn’t have years of experience or a polished plan. She just said yes and walked over.
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