Can God Start a Revival on TikTok?

Reclaiming Embodied Faith in a Disembodied Age

The other night, I was scrolling through Facebook when a question caught my eye: Do you think God can move digitally? Specifically, what would you say if I told you there’s a revival on TikTok? How far can something like that go? Where does it stop making sense to you?

The comments were filled with enthusiasm. People testified to their own spiritual awakenings through videos and livestreams. One person remembered how their greatest personal revival began in their living room while watching a Brownsville revival video. Another insisted that digital ministry is essential to fulfilling the Great Commission in today's world. Someone quoted Romans: "Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God." For many, the idea of a TikTok revival wasn’t strange or suspect. It was hopeful. Even beautiful.

About a year after I stopped pastoring, I had lunch with the new pastor of the church I had left. They were still in the throes of COVID restrictions, and the church had not yet reopened for in-person worship. He asked me what I thought was the biggest challenge facing the church, not just the local church, but the Church more broadly. I told him, "The biggest challenge the church faces post-pandemic is how to practice an embodied faith in a world that is increasingly disembodied."

The writing was on the wall. Online worship services during the pandemic sanctified digital space as sacred space. I saw then how the church was now contributing to an already emerging pattern of disembodiment in our society. What began as a lifeline during a crisis had inadvertently accelerated a shift away from physical presence. And I believe this disembodiment is only going to intensify with the rise of AI and the encroaching development of metaverses.

But this disembodiment runs contrary to the story we tell as Christians. Ours is a faith centered on incarnation. From the beginning, Scripture reveals a God who desires embodiment. In creation, God formed humanity in God's image from the dust and breathed life into that dust with divine breath. God walked in the garden with Adam and Eve in the cool of the day. This was not a distant, detached deity, but one who showed up in space and time; one who desired to commune with a body in its image.

And when humanity faltered, God came even nearer. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Jesus did not stream in from the clouds. He was born, lived, suffered, and died in a body. The Incarnation, the self-emptying of God in Christ, is not only the centerpiece of Christian theology, it is a pattern. A revelation that salvation is not abstract. It takes on form. It comes near.

The biblical story ends not with our souls escaping earth but with heaven coming down. The New Jerusalem descends. God's throne arrives. The final scene of Scripture is not disembodied bliss but embodied communion with God making his dwelling with humanity, wiping away tears, and restoring all things.

And until that day, Jesus commands us to practice embodiment. He does not say, 'Think of me.' He says, 'Take, eat. This is my body.' We are to eat his flesh and drink his blood, not as a mere metaphor but as memory and mystery. In perpetuity: We wash feet. We anoint with oil. We baptize into water. We lay hands in blessing and in healing. The Christian life is not a thought experiment. It is a bodily one.

That’s the part of the conversation I don’t want us to lose. Because Christianity is not a content stream. It’s not a message we consume. It is, at its core, an incarnational faith. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Jesus didn’t just preach; he ate with people, touched them, cried beside them, and walked dusty roads with them. Our most sacred practice is the Eucharist, bread broken, wine poured, bodies gathered. A ritual that reminds us, time after time, that salvation is not just something we hear about. It’s something we receive with our hands, take into our bodies, and embody in community. We are what we eat after all.

So, before we answer the question of whether or not people "getting saved" on TikTok signifies a revival, maybe we need to rethink what "being saved" actually means, and what role messaging and media might play in it. For much of modern evangelicalism, salvation has been reduced to responding to an altar call and praying the so called "sinners prayer." Both are designed for moments of decision and metrics of success. But these are relatively recent innovations in church history. The altar call, as we know it today, became popular in the 19th century during the revivalist movements, particularly through the influence of Charles Finney. Finney believed in inviting people forward as a way of marking a public decision for Christ, that he called the "anxious bench." This practice evolved into the modern altar call.

The sinner's prayer, likewise, has no firm grounding in Scripture or early Christian practice. It emerged more prominently in the 20th century as evangelists sought to distill conversion into a single moment of verbal assent. A typical version includes doctrinal affirmations such as: "I know that I am a sinner, "I believe that Jesus died on the cross for my sins and rose from the dead, and "I accept Jesus as my Lord and Savior." These statements mirror evangelical emphases on substitutionary atonement, personal guilt, and legal justification. But is that really what Jesus invited people into?

To me, being saved is not about mental assent. It is about being persuaded to follow, not just to believe something about Jesus, but to walk in his way. This kind of persuasion rarely happens in a single moment; it unfolds over time, in relationship, within community. This is why the Church must always think beyond moments of profession and create space for formation.

So can God start a revival on TikTok? Sure. But maybe the better question is: What kind of revival do we actually need? If by revival we mean people making spontaneous declarations of faith, then yes, the digital space is ripe with possibility, because it is a space rife with rhetoric and persuasion. One might appeal to Paul’s use of rhetoric among the philosophers of Mars Hill in Acts 17. But it’s worth remembering that while Paul made a compelling case in Athens, he won few converts and left no lasting church there. When he arrived in Corinth, Paul intentionally took a different approach— one grounded not in cleverness or philosophy, but in the raw, embodied message of Christ crucified. It seems he realized the futility of a faith borne of mental assent and returned the bloody and bodily message of Jesus’ death and resurrection. So if we’re talking about lives being transformed over time, about becoming more like Jesus, about carrying each other’s burdens and learning how to love our enemies, then digital connection alone won't be enough. We’re going to need flesh and blood.

I believe as the world grows more artificial and disembodied, and it will, the hunger for embodied love and real presence will only deepen. In a world dominated by algorithms and avatars, people will long for what is real. We are already seeing the effects of a culture shaped by disembodied interactions. Our digital lives allow for curated personas, performative intimacy, and algorithmically reinforced echo chambers. We scroll past suffering, skim past nuance, and confuse connection with proximity. All of it leaves us strangely exhausted and more alone than ever. It is not sustainable. It is not soulful.

What happens when we begin to outsource relationships, presence, and even worship to machines? When avatars replace neighbors? When digital intimacy becomes easier than real vulnerability? The Church cannot afford to be a mirror of this moment. We must become something different. We are something ancient and grounded and stubbornly present. We must be a community that doesn’t vanish when the screen goes dark. For eye contact. For shared meals. For someone to actually show up. And the Church has something to offer. Not merely as spectacle, but as sanctuary. Not just as influencers, but as embodied communities of grace.

Let the TikTok revivals come. Let hearts be stirred. Let curiosity awaken. But let it be a beginning, not a substitute. May those digital moments of awakening point people somewhere deeper, somewhere slower, somewhere real.

In a world that trades presence for performance and speed for depth, the church can resist. We can be the place where names are remembered, where grief is shared in silence, and where no one is reduced to data. We can offer an alternative to the algorithms as an embodied witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ.

The future of revival may not look like what we've been taught to expect. It may be less like a stadium full of raised hands and more like a small circle of friends carrying each other through the long journey of transformation. It may be less viral and more local. Less visible and more faithful.

That kind of revival may not trend. But it will last.