Churches weigh phone-free worship as pastors and researchers warn screens fracture Sunday attention

When a pastor asks the congregation to open Scripture, most people now reach for their phones. And once those screens light up, according to Russell Moore, editor in chief of Christianity Today, one thing leads to another — Bible apps give way to pings, notifications, and the slow erosion of whatever stillness the service had built.

I have an hour where I come in and worship ... and I'm distracted by — I'll get pings on my phone. I'm getting distracted by all of that.— Russell Moore, editor in chief, Christianity Today

That observation sits at the center of a new piece in Christianity Today titled 'A Manifesto for Phone-Free Church' by Matthew D. Love. The argument is straightforward: smartphones, even when used with good intentions, fracture the attentive listening that Love considers the foundational posture of Christian worship. The piece calls on church leaders to model voluntary, device-free Sundays — without bouncers at the door or mandates from the pulpit.

Love frames attention itself as the central resource at stake. He describes the entire arc of a worship service — songs, prayers, Communion — as preparation for hearing a word from the Lord, a preparation that evaporates the moment a screen lights up or a pocket vibrates. In his view, the stillness a service is designed to cultivate disappears the moment a phone is within reach: 'With phones at hand,' he writes, 'much of the stillness that the service has been designed to foster is forfeited.'

The piece anticipates the most common defense: that phones carry Bible apps, Greek parsing tools, and cross-reference libraries. Love does not dismiss these tools outright, but questions whether the disposition they encourage — chasing down references, fact-checking the preacher mid-sermon — is compatible with worship. He draws a distinction between Bible study and worship, arguing that Sunday mornings call for 'listening, waiting, and receiving' rather than active research. He invokes the Bereans of Acts 17 not as models of in-service skepticism but as 'vulnerable believers, eager to accept' — faith seeking understanding, not understanders seeking to believe.

I think the important question for Sunday mornings is 'Do these devices and the study tools they offer help me listen?' In my experience, the answer is that they distract me as much as (or more than) they help me.— Matthew D. Love, author

The concern is not new, but it is gaining institutional weight. In a podcast, Moore put the question directly to Jonathan Haidt — author of 'The Anxious Generation' and the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University. Moore floated the idea of designated phone-free services — modeled on 'scent-free services' some evangelical churches already offer for allergy sufferers — as a voluntary opt-in rather than a congregation-wide rule.

That's a great idea, because there are a couple of things going on here that are interesting psychologically. One is that many of us have desires for how we want to be in the long run ... but then when faced with temptation, we cave.— Jonathan Haidt, Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership, New York University

Haidt, who describes himself as a self-avowed Jewish atheist, told Religion Unplugged that clergy hold unusual leverage here. He predicted that if a pastor simply asked the congregation how many felt their phones were distracting them in ways they were not comfortable with, 'almost all hands are going to go up.' The follow-up — asking whether they would like to be truly present during worship — would produce the same result. The gap between what people want and what they do, he argued, is exactly where communal commitment can help.

We want to connect with each other and to God, but our phones keep calling us away.— Jonathan Haidt, Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership, New York University

The view from the pews adds a layer of candor. Thom S. Rainer, president and CEO of Church Answers and author of more than 25 books including 'I Am a Church Member,' spent over 30 years in the pulpit before stepping back eight years ago to experience Sunday mornings as a regular congregant. What he found unsettled him. He watched members click on notifications mid-service, and by his own admission found himself reading over one member's shoulder as the man checked college football rankings. In Outreach Magazine, Rainer confessed: 'I am ashamed to say I looked longer than I should.'

I guess theaters have higher standards than churches in that regard.— Thom S. Rainer, president and CEO, Church Answers

Rainer lists seven reasons he believes church leaders should encourage members to turn off devices, ranging from the distraction phones cause both to their users and to those sitting nearby, to research showing that handwritten notes improve retention compared to typing, to the argument that smartphone use in worship communicates misplaced priorities even when the user is genuinely following along. He also points to Haidt's findings linking smartphone and social media use to climbing rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, and suicide among Gen Z, adding that pulling out his own phone during services would amount to giving 'tacit approval to the habitual use of smartphones.'

Rainer is candid about the limits of what leaders can do. Mandating that members silence their phones during worship is, he acknowledges, beyond what churches can realistically impose: 'I know we can't mandate that members turn off phones during worship services,' he writes. He adds that the habit has taken such deep root in many congregations — some of which actively encouraged it — that walking it back will not be easy: 'I also know that many churches have permitted or even encouraged it so long that reversing it will be difficult.' His prescription is persuasion, not enforcement.

Jake Meador, editor-in-chief of Mere Orthodoxy, approaches the question as a thought experiment rather than a settled argument, acknowledging that his own congregation still streams services online. But he takes the practical objections seriously and works through them. Families with children in nurseries, he notes, do not need phones to be reached — his childhood church used numbered display screens on the back wall and small numbered buttons given to parents at drop-off. For churches that use text-based Q&A after services, he suggests reverting to pew cards collected in offering bags. His broader point is that the pre-digital solutions were not inferior; they were simply replaced.

Meador draws a firm line at coercion. Stationing people at church entrances to take phones away is not something he endorses: 'I don't support any kind of plan where churches have ecclesial bouncers at the door confiscating phones,' he writes, noting that many visitors 'live on their phones' and that unnecessary barriers to entry are the wrong trade-off right now. The goal, in his framing, is to make the case and let congregations decide — not to police the sanctuary.

The Christianity Today manifesto builds on earlier discussions of screen-free church approaches, and arrives as calls grow in the wider culture for legislation restricting children's smartphone use at school. According to Religion Unplugged's reporting, the U.S. House of Representatives was preparing to take up the Kids Online Safety Act and the Child and Teens' Online Privacy Protection Act during its lame-duck session.

Haidt told Religion Unplugged that religious communities occupy a distinctive position in this debate. Young people's development, he argued, depends on guidance from the adults around them: 'Adolescent development needs to be guided by elders in their community,' he said. A phone-centered childhood crowds out that kind of relationship, he continued: 'Once you get a phone-based childhood, now there's very little room for mentors of any kind — offline.' The void, he said, gets filled in a particular way: 'So what they get, in essence, are mentors online who are chosen by an algorithm for their extremities.' Whether churches act on that opening — or continue to accommodate the devices that compete with their own purpose — is the question Love's manifesto leaves on the table.

Why it matters — As smartphones become the default Bible and notebook in the pew, a growing coalition of pastors and researchers is asking whether the same devices accelerating a youth mental-health crisis are also quietly hollowing out the communal attention that makes worship distinct from any other hour of the week.

Reported by christianitytoday.com, mereorthodoxy.com, religionunplugged.com, outreachmagazine.com