How do we reorient attention toward God’s active presence in everyday life?

Attention isn’t neutral. It involves selection and deselection. The attention economy is real, and a Christian who doesn’t think carefully about attention has already conceded the field. Reorientation requires practices that retrain attention against the grain of the contemporary environment.

Attention is one of the most contested goods of our time. It is being fought for by everyone with something to sell, promote, or spread. The attention economy isn’t metaphorical. It is the actual structure within which most of us now live. Platforms capture attention and convert it into revenue. Politicians, advertisers, and influencers compete for whatever is left. A Christian who doesn’t think carefully about attention has already conceded the field.

Attention isn’t neutral. It involves selection and deselection simultaneously. When we attend to something, we are also declining to attend to everything else. That isn’t a limitation of our attention. It is a feature of it. Attention draws a foreground and a background. The question is always what is foregrounded and what is pushed to the periphery.

The digital environment makes this difficult. Notifications, feeds, and the constant availability of novelty conspire to keep our attention fragmented and externalized. Even when we intend to attend to God, the habits of attention that the digital environment has trained in us push against sustained focus. This isn’t primarily a moral failure. It is a formational reality. Our attention has been trained to operate in ways that make attending to God difficult.

Reorientation begins with recognizing the problem. It then proceeds through practices that retrain attention. Some of these practices are quite old: fixed times of prayer, Sabbath keeping, regular corporate worship, daily Scripture reading, silence, contemplation. None is novel. All of them operate against the grain of the contemporary attention economy. Part of their value is precisely that. They insist that certain things are worthy of sustained attention and that other things aren’t.

A few specific practices are worth naming. The first is establishing times when devices aren’t available. Not because the devices are evil, but because they are designed to capture attention continuously. Setting them aside for defined periods creates the conditions under which attention can be directed elsewhere. The second is developing the habit of pausing before responding, especially in moments of emotional reactivity. The digital environment trains rapid response. Discipleship trains considered response. The gap between stimulus and response is where attention can be redirected toward what is actually happening in light of God’s reality.

Worship is indispensable. Corporate worship weekly retrains attention together. It foregrounds God in the company of others whose attention is being similarly retrained. The communal dimension matters. A person whose attention is retrained alone faces the full weight of the attention economy by themselves. A person whose attention is retrained in worship faces it with others, and the others steady the attention when any one member’s falters.

Reorienting attention is slow, difficult, and countercultural. It is also possible. The practices that make it possible aren’t secret. They have been available to the church for centuries. What is new is the intensity of the pressure against them. Recovering these practices in the present moment is one of the most important formational tasks facing contemporary Christians.

Key Takeaways: Reorienting Attention

• The Theological Stakes: If God is the most relevant actor in any situation, misattending isn’t neutral. It treats something else as more relevant than it is.

• Practices That Retrain: Fixed prayer, Sabbath, daily Scripture, silence, and corporate worship all operate against the grain of the attention economy.

• The “So What”: The practices needed to reorient attention have been available for centuries. What is new is the intensity of the pressure against them.

James Spencer, PhD, is a theologian, author, and host of the Thinking Christian podcast, where he writes and speaks on Christian formation, political theology, and technology. He holds a PhD in Theological Studies from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and completed the Institute for Educational Management at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He serves as President of the D.L. Moody Center in Northfield, Massachusetts, as adjunct faculty in Wheaton College’s MA in Leadership program, and as an Associate Research Fellow at the Kirby Laing Centre for Public Theology. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times, Christianity.com, and Sojourners; he has been quoted in The Telegraph; and he is a regular guest on Stand in the Gap Today with the American Pastors Network. His forthcoming book is Digital Discernment (InterVarsity Press, Fall 2026). Learn more at jamesgspencer.com.