John Mark Comer can be a hard man to find. He’s one of the most famous pastors in America right now, an author whose books have together sold more than 1 million copies, but he’s not the most reachable guy. He has a professional website but no contact page.

He rarely travels. And as I reported this story, I began to learn his habits: Sending him a text early in the day was a wash, for instance, because he doesn’t check his phone until after morning prayer time. Once, when I reached out by email, I got an out-of-office response that he had set before Christmas explaining that he was observing “rhythms of rest” and asking that I try him again after his return in mid-January.

Incoming messages sent in the meantime would be deleted.I had first seen Comer in October, at a service for Church of the City New York, held inside a historic chapel in Lower Manhattan. Lo-fi beats played over the speakers as hundreds of people, mostly in their 20s and 30s, milled around and looked for seats in the crammed pews. When Comer took the stage, dressed in a matching ochre shirt-jacket and pants, a silver stud in his left ear, the crowd cheered and whooped.He pulled up a slide.

It was not the usual Bible story or psalm, but an excerpt from Anne Helen Petersen’s 2019 BuzzFeed essay “How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation.” Burnout is “not a temporary affliction,” it read. “It’s the millennial condition.” The Gen Z one, too, Comer added. “It’s like we just churn out tired, exhausted souls like a widget factory,” he said.

“I don’t know if you feel this at all yet in your body or in your bones. If you don’t, it’s because you’re still young and you haven’t been in the city very long. But you will.

Trust me, you will.”Then he clicked over to a passage from the Gospel of Matthew:Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.“Most of us, as modern Americans,” Comer said, with a hand over his heart, “we read that line and there’s just this, like, deep, soul-level, Yes, I ache for that.” The guy in front of me took a picture of the slide with his phone.

I noticed that his screen was set to gray scale. So was the screen of the person sitting next to me.[Read: The tension that defines modern life]Signs of Comer’s influence had been popping up in my life all year. One friend had started observing a 24-hour, phone-free Sabbath.

My roommates began fasting several times a month. Then, in quick succession, three different people recommended that I read The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, Comer’s 2019 best seller.In that book, Comer advances the theory that the great enemy of spiritual life is hurry. By this he means not simply busyness: Hurry is a gnawing sense that there is always more to do; a life spent hurtling oneself through each day; a schedule that makes little room for God.

Technology has only exacerbated the problem. Comer calls the modern world “a virtual conspiracy against the interior life,” and urges readers to reclaim their focus from the algorithm and shift it toward God.The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, he told me, is “a book about discipleship to Jesus masquerading as a self-help book.” Many of its suggestions are similar to what you might find in articles about digital detoxes. To break a cellphone addiction, he offers detailed advice on how to “turn your smartphone into a dumbphone”: delete social media and web browsers, turn off notifications, and set your screen to gray scale, to curb the appeal of the remaining candy-colored apps.

His prose, too, is rendered in a pithy, how-to style that one of his critics has dubbed “The Ruthless Elimination of Paragraphs.”Because of this approach, Comer can seem more like a wellness personality, such as Andrew Huberman, than a pastor. Like Huberman, Comer offers a concrete regimen that’s attractive to people who feel unmoored in contemporary society. Comer’s skeptics, when remarking on his rapid ascent, point to these similarities and wonder if what he’s offering is simply baptized wellness, a pop spirituality tailored to the tastes and frustrations of affluent young people.

But sitting among his followers, I wondered: Could Comer’s practices actually bring them closer to God? I met Comer the next day at a coffee shop in the East Village. Our cashier, who looked about 24, recognized Comer and was visibly starstruck.

“Your books are so amazing,” he said. “I pass them around to all my friends.” Our lattes, he insisted, were on the house. Comer told me that the same thing had happened yesterday in SoHo, then he shrugged.

“Coffee shops are like bars for Christians.”Comer is Protestant, nondenominational, and roughly in the evangelical sphere, but his work is mostly about how technology—what he calls “the machine”—is spiritually deforming people. “Any version of discipleship to Jesus that doesn’t ser