Editor’s Note: TikTok is currently facing a reckoning in Congress over several concerns, including the security of Americans’ data. Whether or not the app is ultimately banned in the U.S., this is the story of how it has nevertheless been used in powerful ways for the spread of the gospel, particularly during the pandemic.
During the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, Barna asked pastors about the biggest challenges they were facing. Forty-seven percent of respondents said that ministry to kids and youth was the largest one. The normal rhythms of youth programs had been disrupted, and pastors were wrestling with how to keep young people connected while services were moving online.
At the same time, a largely unnoticed youth revival was taking shape in an unlikely place: a little app called TikTok that most people—if they knew of it at all—saw it only for its stream of short, funny videos. Though it officially launched from China to the global market in 2017, TikTok began to gather momentum as a platform after it bought and merged Musical.ly into its services. The app was unique in that anyone could post a short video that had a chance to go viral. In spring 2020, this app, which was slowly gaining popularity with Gen Z, suddenly became a go-to pressure release for masses of people during the lockdown.
At the time of Barna’s survey, TikTok reported close to 800 million monthly active users worldwide, and by 2021, it had surpassed Google as the most visited site on the internet (Cloudflare). Notably, almost 50% of its now over 1 billion monthly users are under 30 (Statista). TikTok’s explosion in popularity, especially among teenagers, has come with some important and well-documented concerns. The app has faced increasing scrutiny, including in Congress, about whether it’s doing enough to protect minors from exploitation and whether its origin in China presents ongoing security concerns. Many federal and state institutions and universities have banned the app because of concerns like these.
But along with the legitimate concerns about the app, there’s a powerful kingdom story emerging. In the past three years, TikTok has blossomed into one of the most powerful evangelistic tools of the digital age.
The Rise of Christian TikTok
Elijah Lamb (@elijah.lamb) posted his first videos on YouTube and other platforms when he was just 10 years old. Even from that early age, he had a strong desire to be a digital influencer. At the age of 16, he began creating comedy and satire videos on TikTok, and within three months he had amassed 200,000 followers. At that point, in the summer of 2019, he began to experiment with preaching videos.
“When I started preaching online, I had preached two total sermons in my life. I just didn’t know what my preaching voice was like,” Lamb says. “I hadn’t seen anybody preaching on the platform. I wasn’t being strategic about how those things would be received. All I knew was I had followers and had some kind of influence.”
At the time, there was not a visible Christian presence on the platform, so Lamb joined a Discord channel with 10–15 other Christians who had a following on TikTok so they could encourage one another and strategize.
Lamb and Grayson Bearden began experimenting with weekly livestream sermons, and were consistently getting around 1,200 people to tune in. Soon more and more creators, many of them inspired by Lamb, began to produce explicitly Christian content for TikTok. A growing, interconnected network of creators began to interact through massive Zoom meetings and group chats. Often those meetings would organically evolve into worship sessions.
“There was a sense of community that developed because we were all interacting with each other’s content, having fun and doing ministry online. A lot of us were believing for revival coming through social media,” Lamb says.
Over time, a growing number of them banded together to form Praise House, a shared account and forum for Christian TikTok content creators mirroring the secular Hype House. Many of them met in person for the first time at a Praise House gathering in August 2020, which was the first of several in-person meetings that attracted as many as 60–100 young creators at a time.
The Christian TikTok groundswell culminated in an all-digital (Gen) Z Conference in 2020, hosted by The HowToLife Movement. The conference featured prerecorded video testimonies from several TikTok creators, and attracted 1,000 young people who tuned in from 47 states and 40 countries. By the end of 2020, Christian TikTok had arrived in a big way as videos with hashtags like #Jesus, #God and #Christian began to garner billions of views.
Unexpected Fruit
When Brian Barcelona (@brianmbarcelona) was 18, he received a word from God that he was going to reach high schools. So in 2009, he went to his high school in Los Angeles and started preaching twice a week through the school’s Bible club, without much fruit. The next year he added another high school. When he started, only six people came, but within a month that number grew to 600. He relied on that model and continued preaching in a growing number of schools for the next decade-plus, seeing students of every stripe receive Christ.
Then the pandemic hit. In one day, all the schools shut down to in-person activities, and his ministry was shut down with them.
“I think what messes up most believers is when they have the word of the Lord, they feel God is saying something, and then the way in which he fulfills it is not how you thought,” Barcelona says. “That kind of moment presents an invitation to pivot, or it creates an invitation to massive discouragement. I’ve experienced both.”
After dealing for months of questioning why God had seemingly sidelined his fruitful ministry, the digital world suddenly caught his attention. One of the members of his team had a vision for an online event called Gen Z for Jesus, so they gave it a try and 25,000 students tuned in to the livestream. Soon after, Barcelona met two teenagers who trained him on TikTok. Now he has almost 430,000 followers.
“I thank God for that season of discouragement because discouragement, if stewarded well, has equal fruit it can bear,” says Barcelona, who went on to found One Voice Student Missions and is the author of The Jesus Club and Don’t Scroll.
His team has since launched an app and Bible clubs in 30 states and on six continents, reaching exponentially more people in the last two years than they had in the previous decade of preaching in high schools.
“Do I think that digital is to replace in-person? Never. But is it a means in which God can reach someone? Yes!” Barcelona says.
And he is not alone in celebrating the power of TikTok for outreach. York Moore (@york.moore), president and CEO for the Coalition for Christian Outreach, and co-founder of the EveryCampus Movement, has been an evangelist for around 30 years. At the encouragement of Barcelona, Moore began creating videos for TikTok in 2021 and was immediately blown away by how much the app expanded his reach.
“Social media has always been a part of my life, but I’ve never really used it for ministry purposes,” he says. “I talk to more people [through TikTok] every single week than I used to in an entire year combined. [It’s changed] the way I think about access and impact forever.”
After just over a year on TikTok, Moore had 400 million views of his content and had around 300,000 viewers indicate a decision for Christ. He estimates that about 60,000 of those were first-time decisions.
“It is literally an evangelist’s dream come true,” Moore says. “I can post and [my videos] preach [while I] sleep. I can call people to faith. I know that they’ve responded. I’m in the comments with them usually an hour to three hours a day. I go live frequently, and [disciple] people who are coming to faith through my ministry.”
Barcelona and Moore have also provided mentoring for many younger TikTokers through cultivating online and offline relationships, and in Moore’s case, participating in evangelist Nick Hall’s 2-year Pulse 100 program which draws many young people who want to learn how to use their platforms for the glory of God.
Signs of Revival
When David Latting (@davidlatting1) made his first TikTok videos, he says they were all about him. By the time he discovered Elijah Lamb’s preaching videos, Latting had already amassed 15,000 followers and a million views. Watching Lamb’s preaching, however, unearthed a faith in God that he’d gradually buried since middle school. He thought, If I can get the name of Jesus out … who’s doing it? No one’s doing it but this kid and his mirror. So he began to post videos telling his followers that God loves them, and it’s going to be OK.
“The scariest thing was, I was making Christian content, and I don’t even believe I was saved. I didn’t know [Jesus] like a bride knows her bridegroom,” he says.
One night as he was watching The Passion of the Christ, he felt the presence of God in a tangible way.
“I fell to my knees and couldn’t get up. I kept saying, ‘God, I give you my life,’” he says. “At that moment everything changed. My content went from elementary to real.”
That night launched a season when he received what he calls a “Holy Spirit Monster [Energy] drink.” He watched videos and sermons of theologians and pastors like John Piper, David Platt and Francis Chan; reached out to pastors Eli Laughlin and Chip Paul at his church for guidance; went for early morning walks; read the Bible and spent hours a day with God. He also posted 10–15 videos a night on TikTok, where he shared how, among other struggles, God was walking him through depression, anxiety and insecurity.
As he was discovering his voice on TikTok, he also looked to older leaders on the platform for mentoring, in particular, Jacob Coyne (@jacob.coyne), who took Latting and other younger TikTokers under his wing and was able to give guidance to them.
“I was this 17-year-old kid just making eight videos a night. You think I’m going to say everything correct? Heck no! I’ve said some silly stuff. But Jacob Coyne has [protected me and] openly, publicly defended me,” Latting says. “And now I go to his house and we speak together on stages.”
At the height of his posting on TikTok, Latting was able to reach 17 million people, and his videos had over one billion views. He gets direct messages from countless people every day whose lives have been changed. He calls the explosion of response to Christian TikTok a hidden revival or a “virus for the Devil,” because it’s happening online, unlike the very public revivals of the past—and it cannot be contained.
“The next revival will be a nameless and faceless revival. If you’re not awake, you won’t see it. I know hundreds of people, maybe thousands, who have given their lives to Jesus because of the internet,” Latting says. “It’s only been a couple years since [Christian] TikTok [took off], but I believe there’s going to be a wave of Christian leaders.”
Moore, who has the benefit of observing decades of evangelistic outreach, is equally bullish about the avenue TikTok has opened for the gospel. He says that we could be seeing the greatest evangelistic opportunity in American history.
“I think we’re going to see an acceleration of the gospel in digital spaces that’s going to be so unprecedented that it could dwarf the Jesus Movement in the 1970s. It could be the beginning of a third Great Awakening,” he says.
A Calling Revealed
Jacob Petersen (@jacobpetersen_) downloaded the TikTok app during the summer of his senior year of high school. He laughs now when he looks back on his “cringey” early posts that read like a quasi-dating profile (i.e., “If you want a Christian man who loves Jesus, loves lifting, then I’m your guy.”). By May 2020, he had 200,000 followers, but he felt compelled to delete the app and take a break to deepen his relationship with God and change his approach on the app. When he redownloaded TikTok, he began to post preaching videos. The first one got 2 million views. As he began creating Christian content, he entered the orbit of the burgeoning Christian TikTok creator community.
One of those creators was Julia Poe (@juliaapoee). When she first encountered TikTok, it had a reputation as being a silly app, so she saw it as a joke. After consuming content for a while, however, she started taking it more seriously and began posting her own videos and getting involved with the Praise House through David Latting.
“Within a very short time, I grew a following with community, and so many opportunities started to come my way,” Poe says. “I was like, OK, wait a minute, this might be how God wants me to do my ministry.”
One night, she was livestreaming on TikTok and read a comment from Jacob Petersen, who was following her, that they should get a group of people together for a Bible study. By April 2021, they decided to start dating.
As Petersen and Poe continued to post videos, and their livestream Bible studies grew to as many as 10,000 teens a night between the two of them, Petersen realized he was being called to ministry. So he dropped out of college a semester shy of going to medical school, and joined Poe on a three-month internship with Pulse, the youth evangelism ministry founded by Nick Hall. Today, in addition to their TikTok presence—with a combined following of almost 2.5 million—they speak at churches and conferences around the U.S.
Petersen and Poe’s reach underscores one of the obvious challenges of ministry on TikTok: the massive scale. There’s no way one person can respond to direct messages from, much less disciple, Petersen’s following of 2.1 million people—or as he so aptly describes it, 21 stadiums completely filled. So, together they put an emphasis on living their lives in front of their followers in a winsome way, while encouraging them to look to Jesus and a church community, not them, to make their faith their own.
“We’re sharing the gospel. We’re teaching them how we live our lives. And that has brought so many people to start reading their Bible again, start going to church again, to have a conversation with their friends [about Jesus],” Poe says. “We are discipling them on a level, but on the deep level they’re going to need, they’re going to need to find that through a community.”
Growing Up Together
Petersen and Poe got married this month, and a majority of the friends in their wedding party were people they met through TikTok. Poe estimates that she shares around 300 mutual friends with any given Christian TikToker. Deep connections have been forged as they learned the ins and outs of evangelism through social media and weathered the ups and downs that come with having such a high level of influence on a very public platform.
For example, as Latting’s following grew to around 1.3 million, he faced blowback from viewers of his videos who took exception to his boldness to speak biblical truth on controversial topics and his impassioned proclamations that Jesus is the only way. His detractors have banded together and lobbied several times to have his account removed. His creator friends have been a lifeline as he’s navigated the vitriol he’s received. Many of them have also experienced the pain of internet hatred—often, unfortunately, from fellow Christians.
“All of my best friends have now been made through the internet. We all started at ground zero together,” Latting says. “We learned together, and we failed together. We protected one another. It’s a bunch of young, zealous kids, but God stewarded it, and he allows us to grow.”
As Christian TikTok has come of age, so have its content creators. Most have gone on to some form of vocational ministry and say they wouldn’t have discovered their gifts and callings apart from posting on TikTok and interacting with one another.
“Pretty much everybody who started on TikTok never planned to be in ministry. God used it to reveal gifts that have been given [to each of us],” Petersen says. “It’s given people the boldness to talk about Jesus. They see people doing it online and think, Maybe I could talk about Jesus, too.”