Disciple

"You are not going to be a disciple spending 1 hour a week with Jesus"
- Andrew Wormack

Imagine, if you will, a small, padded room. It has air conditioning, polite music, and comfortable chairs arranged in neat rows. Once a week, for exactly sixty minutes, the occupants gather. They listen. They nod. They may even say “Amen.” Then a clock ticks, the doors open, and everyone returns to their regularly scheduled lives.

You have just entered the Twilight Zone of modern discipleship.

Submitted for your approval: a culture that believes mastery can be achieved through occasional attendance. A people who confuse proximity with transformation. A faith reduced to a calendar appointment.

Andrew Wommack’s point, stripped of religious language, is brutally simple. There is a difference between showing up and being shaped. Between attendance and apprenticeship. Between sitting in the room and becoming like the Master.

If discipleship means learning to live like someone, then time matters. A lot. And here is where the math gets uncomfortable.

One hour a week is 0.6 percent of your total time. Not even a full percent. In any other area of life, we would laugh at this arrangement.

Imagine telling a surgeon, “I practice cutting once a week for an hour.” Or telling a pilot, “I fly occasionally, when my schedule allows.” One hour a week is not training. It is dabbling. It is cosplay with better lighting.

In the real world, one hour a week is a hobby. Forty hours a week is a vocation. No one becomes fluent in French by visiting Paris once a month. No one builds intimacy by scheduling affection between commercials. You cannot know someone’s heart by speaking to them for sixty minutes out of ten thousand.

Yet somehow, we expect spiritual mastery to work differently.

The ancient language of discipleship uses a word that does not mean “attend.” It means “abide.” Live there. Remain. Stay connected. It implies a constant state, not a weekly visit. Abiding is not an appointment. It is an atmosphere.

According to recent trends, the average Nigerian spends six hours and thirty-eight minutes online every single day. Not occasionally. Not accidentally. Every day.

Over three of those hours are spent on social media. Nigeria ranks among the most engaged digital populations on Earth. In 2025 alone, Nigerians consumed over 13 million terabytes of data. Videos. Messages. Memes. Influencers whispering wisdom at midnight. Algorithms preaching sermons without ever asking for an offering.

This is not neutral time. This is formation.

A typical day looks something like this. Eight or nine hours sleeping and taking care of personal needs. Six to eight hours working or commuting. Two to three hours handling chores and family responsibilities. And then there it is, quietly dominant. Six and a half hours immersed in digital space.

The overlap is constant. Phones in traffic. Podcasts at work. Social feeds during meals. The screen never sleeps, even when you should.

Now pause the scene and consider the irony.

A man who claims one master spends three hours a day listening to another. A woman who insists her values are eternal gives most of her attention to content designed to change her mind every thirty seconds.

If someone spends three hours a day on social media, that is twenty-one hours a week. Compare that to one hour of intentional discipleship. The ratio is not subtle. It is twenty-one to one.

Which means, functionally, that the algorithms are doing the discipling.

They teach you what to desire, what to fear, who to admire, who to despise, and what success looks like. They repeat the lesson daily. They quiz you constantly. They reward compliance with dopamine and punish resistance with boredom.

And they never miss a day.

So the question is not whether people are being discipled. The question is by whom.

We like to imagine that the one-hour gathering somehow outweighs the other 167 hours of the week. That a brief talk can overpower a steady stream of images, narratives, and emotional cues. That formation happens by osmosis. That attendance equals transformation.

This belief exists in the same category as thinking you can get fit by walking past a gym.

True discipleship, the kind that actually changes a person, looks far less tidy. It spills into ordinary moments. It interrupts habits. It rearranges time. It demands attention when attention is already fully booked.

It is not dramatic. It does not fit neatly between errands.

Which is why it is so often replaced with something easier.

The modern arrangement allows us to feel faithful without being formed. To belong without abiding. To admire the Master without learning how He walks.

You may leave this post with your assumptions intact. Or you may ask yourself an uncomfortable question: ‘What am I giving my time to?’