Despite the loneliness, mistrust, and anger coursing through American social life, young men have at least one institution they can still rely on: the male group chat.
I am 23 years old, and I am in seven of them: one with my closest friends, a porch night scheduling chat, a music chat, a workout chat, a family chat, a fantasy football chat, and one more—my small group chat, where the guys from my Wednesday-night Bible study send prayer requests, memes, check-ins, and the occasional theological question. Each one serves a different function, but together they constitute something like a social ecosystem, the scaffolding of my relational life.
I’m not unusual in this. The group chat is shaping more than we think. And to be sure, not all of it is pretty. When a college student slides into a gambling addiction, it often starts in a sports chat. When a lonely boy tumbles into the abyss of conspiracy theories, he may do it surrounded (virtually, at least) by other lonely boys. When a young man gets radicalized, it often happens in the slow drift of the chat thread.
But there’s another side of the group chat—one that headlines on digital isolation rarely capture. In my own life and the lives of many young men I know, the group chat has become a powerful force for binding us together. My small group chat, for example, has made me a better member of my small group, a more committed member of my church, and, most importantly, a more faithful follower of Christ.
It hasn’t always carried this kind of weight. For six years, my small group’s thread was little more than a logistics hub. We started it as college freshmen primarily to coordinate where we were meeting for Bible study each week. For a long time, the notifications were purely utilitarian—address pins, time changes, and the occasional “see you there” thumbs-up.
But as our friendships deepened, our digital space matured with us. In the last year, the frequency has shifted from a weekly check-in to an almost-daily dialogue. Thus, on a typical Tuesday, the notifications might start around noon with a link to a podcast episode someone found encouraging, followed by a flurry of thumbs-up emojis and reactions. By 5 p.m., the tone might shift as someone asks for prayer before a high-stakes job interview.
But the value of the chat runs deeper still. A few months ago, the chat was a lifeline for me. My mom was waiting on the results of an MRI scan for a tumor, and the silence was heavy. I didn’t feel like I needed to wait until Wednesday to ask for support—I just sent a quick text to the guys. Within minutes, my phone was buzzing with prayers and private check-ins that stayed steady until the results arrived with good news. Cue the “praise God” texts.
The digital thread captures these “middle spaces” of our lives—the majority of our lives—that a weekly meeting can’t reach. It allows us to be present for the Monday-morning anxieties and the Friday-afternoon wins, turning a structured program into a constant, lived-in brotherhood. The Wednesday-night program now feels more like a reunion, just picking up where we left off.
Throughout its history, Christ’s church has always brought men together, with Jesus teaching his disciples to care for and even to die for one another. This kind of self-sacrificial friendship remains radical in today’s world. Men’s ministries have long sought to foster friendships like that, and the traditions of early-morning breakfasts at diners and weekend retreats have borne good fruit in recent decades. Promise Keepers stadium rallies in the ’90s, too, drew hundreds of thousands of men to weep and pray together. These moments allowed men to show up at church in large numbers, confess things they’d never said out loud, and find brothers.
But for my generation, these mountaintop experiences aren’t enough. We live in a world of constant, fragmented noise, where the spiritual momentum of a weekend retreat often evaporates by the first Monday-morning commute. A Passion conference, a college retreat, or even a weekly Bible study can provide a powerful spark, but it rarely provides the daily heat necessary to survive a digital culture designed to isolate us. To reach young men today, to bind them together, the church needs more than these periodic pulses. It needs to enter the “middle spaces” of our lives. The church needs to enter the chat.
Growing communities like this is slower than hosting a one-time stadium rally or retreat, and it requires greater willingness to engage outside regularly scheduled meetings. It asks the pastor or layperson who leads it to model honesty, to stay in the room when it gets uncomfortable, and to check in midweek. Whether that happens over a thread of text messages, a shared workout, or a quick phone call on a commute, the goal is a faith that isn’t cordoned off to a Sunday morning.
Community growth also means creating spaces where men have permission to be honest about every part of life. In the anonymity of the internet—often behind the shield of a frog profile picture, or some other senseless meme—men feel free to voice their darkest anxieties, their political frustrations, or the conspiracy theories they’ve stumbled upon in the digital swamp. If the church doesn’t provide a place where men can speak those thoughts aloud without immediate condemnation, they will keep taking them to the corners of the web where they are never challenged. We need to be the kind of brothers who listen to unfiltered thoughts, stay in the room, and then point each other toward the truth.
Tightly knit communities are, of course, not new to the church’s imagination. Early Christians met in houses, often under threat, in intimate groups where everyone knew each other’s name (Acts 2:42–47). What made those early communities formative was precisely their smallness, their dailiness, and their shoulder-to-shoulder quality. The modern church must build communities that have the same texture: private, persistent, particular, and low on performance. Men are hungry for brothers who know them personally.
What the church can offer that no algorithm can is genuine presence, accountability, and a shared story bigger than any of its individual members. We need men who are on mission together, who know what they stand for, and who have chosen each other for the long work of discipleship.
That is what the early church was. That is what the group chat, at its best, is trying to be.
Luke Simon is the codirector of student ministries at The Crossing in Columbia, Missouri, and an MDiv student at Covenant Theological Seminary. He has written on Gen Z, technology, masculinity, and the church. You can follow him on X.
