My Students Are Reading John Mark Comer, and Now I Know Why

The popular pastor’s latest works inhabit a fruitful tension between inheriting church tradition and rebuilding it for today’s world.

I’ll begin with a confession: I was once very skeptical of John Mark Comer.

From afar, he seemed like one more polished celebrity pastor turned speaker turned writer, with slick content designed to evoke the Rob Bell aesthetic of yore—and for that reason, to annoy people like me. By “people like me,” most charitably, I mean bookish believers and teachers concerned with orthodoxy. Less charitably, I mean snobs with too many degrees who look down on books sold in airport terminals (and by “down,” I mean “with envy”).

Here’s how I learned the error of my ways: I noticed Comer’s books in the hands of my students. I assumed someone had assigned him; after all, many college students don’t read for any other reason. But no, they were reading him by choice. They were reading him on technology, on spiritual warfare, on sex—on everything. They started asking my opinion of him. I decided I needed to do due diligence if I was going to have an informed answer.

And even with my defenses up, he won me over.

In reverse order, I listened to his books on audio. Yes, they have a striking visual aesthetic and literary style. Yes, he is writing for young professionals in the pews. Yes, he’s a “secular city” evangelical pastor through and through. Pop cultural references abound, as do bipartisan third ways, all governed by a sensitive attunement to the allergies and appetites of Gen Z agnostics starved by society and hungry for the gospel. And?

And nothing. I was wrong. Comer is doing the Lord’s work. My students appear not only to be reading him but to be reading no one else. Once it was Lewis and Chesterton, then Schaeffer and Stott and Packer, and then ...

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from Christianity Today Magazine
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