On Silicon Valley Revival & Maturity

By Denise Lee Yohn & Paul Taylor

Something is stirring in the San Francisco Bay Area.

A recent surge in media coverage—from The New York Times to The Atlantic to The San Francisco Standard—describes a fresh and unexpected curiosity about Jesus among tech workers, founders, and investors. Faith-based gatherings are happening in corporate offices. Prominent leaders are speaking openly about their religious commitments. Public spaces are filling up with worship.

Throughout church history, we’ve seen that movements of God have often begun with similar flashpoints—moments of widespread visibility, cultural disruption, or public repentance. Think of the first Great Awakening, incited by the fiery preaching of Jonathan Edwards; the Azusa Street revival, birthed by one prayer meeting that eventually became three services a day for over three years; or the youthful energy of the Jesus Movement, which eventually swept through California.

In our efforts with a faith-and-work ministry here in the Bay Area, we’ve been exploring what faithful followers of Christ can do to turn this momentum into maturity. How can leaders in this region respond with both excitement and discernment to what’s being reported? The stakes are high. Because the innovations and companies here often shape how the rest of the country and world lives and thinks, this moment might signify a new, more expansive work of God than we can imagine.

Discipleship in this context must be both theologically grounded and vocationally engaged—not just for personal faithfulness but as a way of stewarding the outsize cultural influence of this region.

In Silicon Valley, we find a unique and contradictory combination of post-Christian disillusionment and pre-Christian openness, hostility toward religion and curiosity about Christ, and fascination with the new alongside a longing for something lasting. Many of us are transplants, drawn to this place of promise where a single idea can change the world. Nothing seems impossible with so much energy and innovation in the air—but at the same time, everyone is weary and running on fumes.

The concept of exilic discipleship, first coined by faith-and-work leader David Kim, offers a helpful framework for addressing these particular cultural realities. Kim describes exilic discipleship as prioritizing “a posture of listening, discernment, and loving engagement with the surrounding community informed by the biblical paradigm of exile.” Others have written about the biblical concept of exile as a helpful framework for Christians in a world that doesn’t share our values.

To understand what exilic discipleship looks like, it’s helpful to study the stories of some of the believers we’ve encountered through our ministry.

One of our board members rose through the ranks in senior product roles at major tech companies, including Meta, Yahoo, Amazon, Roku, and Intel.

While building digital experiences to drive streaming engagement, she grappled with challenges familiar to many Christians in Silicon Valley. At one point, her role required her to optimize for increased viewer screen time, a key product metric. At the same time, as a mother of two young children, she was actively limiting their screen time at home. How does one stay faithful when professional success seems to conflict with personal convictions?

Living as an exile means embracing this constant state of tension. Your internal identity comes into regular conflict with the external demands of your environment. As the old hymn proclaims, “This world is not my home.” And yet Christians are constantly tempted to acculturate by allowing their identity to be shaped by external factors.

The biblical character of Daniel provides an archetypal example of exilic living. Somehow, he managed to succeed in his professional role of making an evil king successful while maintaining a deep sense of personal integrity. We often say, “If Daniel could work for Nebuchadnezzar, you can work for anyone.”

This kind of exilic discipleship requires a humble recognition that there are no easy answers, no simple ethical formulas to fall back on. One believer we know has been censured by human resources for inviting coworkers to a Bible study at her home. After a lengthy process that nearly cost the Christian her job, she continued with the study but stopped inviting coworkers to attend. Another felt terrified to discuss spirituality with his coworker, then discovered over a casual lunch conversation that the coworker and her spouse had been asking ChatGPT to summarize books of the Bible in the evenings.

Rather than leading with either outrage or withdrawal, we seek to help Bay Area Christians cultivate humility, resilience, and a posture of creativity. We want to be engaged but not assimilated, confident but not arrogant, prophetic yet patient.

The goal is not merely survival in a secular workplace but faithful influence—Christians who are equipped to shape company cultures, influence product decisions, and cast a redemptive vision for work and innovation.

The Bay Area reveres a particular kind of Silicon Valley street smarts. We celebrate founders who disrupt systems, hackers whose instincts see options no one considered before, and investors who risk big and win even bigger. Respect is earned through fast-paced failure and success.

And yet while this region is filled with people who can build, scale, and optimize, the bigger challenge is knowing what is worth creating in the first place. How can our work lead to the flourishing of communities? What would it look like to build not just what’s possible but what’s good and true?

We often imagine discipleship as taking place primarily in churches and small groups. But in the Bay Area, skepticism toward institutional religion runs deep: 41 percent of people consider themselves religious while 65 percent consider themselves spiritual. Even though people are hesitant to show up in churches, spiritual curiosity is emerging in unexpected places—in particular, the workplace, with its pressing questions about artificial intelligence, privacy, dignity, and personhood and its demands on employees’ identity, purpose, and worth.

Through discipleship that meets people where they are—in labs, incubators, and boardrooms—workers discover not only the credibility of Christianity but also its relevance to vocation. But this doesn’t happen automatically. It requires, once again, exilic discipleship, a kind of personal spiritual formation that gets expressed in real-life decisions about ethics and leadership.

We hope and pray that this reported momentum is only the beginning in the Bay Area. But we also know that the spark of excitement around Christ that has been lit here can only be kept flickering by the slow, relational, often-invisible work of discipleship—the kind that transforms not just what people believe but how they live, lead, and love. When this happens, exilic disciples will bring the presence of Christ into every workplace.

Maybe that’s the real story unfolding in the Bay Area: not just that people are becoming curious about Christ but that exilic discipleship is already happening—quietly, faithfully, and redemptively.

Of course, the big question isn’t what’s happening now. It’s what might come next.

What if the Bay Area, renowned for its innovative spirit, also became recognized as a place where we Christians learn to navigate the unique tensions of work in the modern age? What if, in addition to exporting apps and algorithms, we also distributed redemptive leadership, theological depth, and vocational integrity?

We believe that’s the story God is writing. And he’s just getting started.

This piece was originally published in Christianity Today. Read the original article here.

Denise Lee Yohn is a keynote speaker and author on brand leadership. Paul Taylor is a longtime pastor serving as the director of Unify for Transforming the Bay with Christ. Together, they cofounded the Bay Area Center for Faith, Work & Tech.