Judah Smith: What New and Old Believers Can Learn From Each Other

At the beginning, faith feels like a floodlight. Everything is new: Worship hits harder, Scripture feels more personal — in the best and worst way — and even prayer feels like a direct line. Then time passes. Life gets a little louder, and while you still believe, the urgency starts to dulls.

The bigger problem is what we do next. A lot of church culture treats this like a character issue: new believers are “too intense,” longtime believers are “lukewarm.” Both labels are lazy and unhelpful. New believers can burn themselves out. Longtime believers can slide into maintenance mode. The real question is simpler: What keeps faith alive when novelty fades?

Part of the answer is right in front of us: New believers and longtime believers need each other. Not as a cute intergenerational program, but as a survival strategy.

“You can learn probably more from people that just met Jesus than people who’ve been walking with him for 30 years,” pastor Judah Smith says.  

That line can sound insulting if you’ve done this for decades — it can also be true.

New believers don’t have spiritual scar tissue yet. They haven’t learned how to dress disappointment up as discernment. They haven’t mastered the art of staying emotionally distant from God so they don’t get hurt again. Their faith is loud, messy, sometimes naive, but above all fairly sincere.

Longtime believers need that energy — not because anyone should be in a perpetual state of “hype mode,” but because cynicism is one of the most socially acceptable sins in church.

Smith knows that tension well. He recalled meeting Bryce Crawford, a younger believer who uses his growing social media platform to talk with others about his faith, whether that’s with strangers on the street or a one-on-one podcast conversation.

“Bryce is so passionate about telling everyone on the streets of LA that Jesus loves them and he wants to hug everyone one by one,” Smith recalled.

Crawford’s conviction stopped Smith in his tracks.

“I’m on the golf course — and Bryce is on the streets,” Smith admitted. 

It’s funny because it’s specific, but it’s also revealing. When you’ve been around church long enough, you can accidentally trade mission for routine. You show up weekly to check off that you served once a month and you say all the right things. But the edge is gone. You’re not necessarily doing anything wrong; you’re just not doing anything that costs you much.

New believers expose that, sometimes without meaning to. Often, they can remind them what the Gospel sounds like when it hasn’t been domesticated.

They also remind longtime believers that God still changes people quickly. Plenty of Christians stop expecting transformation, or rather, they become familiar with mundane faith they forget about the miraculous. You’ve seen too many altar calls that didn’t stick, too many leaders implode, too many prayers that took years.

Then someone gets saved and acts like it, and it’s almost jarring to witness.

If longtime believers can receive that zeal without immediately critiquing it, new believers can act like spiritual smelling salts: A reminder that faith isn’t a religion, it’s a relationship, and relationships don’t stay healthy on autopilot.

Still, this isn’t a one-way transfer where new believers bring passion and longtime believers bring caution. Longtime believers carry something new believers will need sooner than they think: a faith that survives boredom, grief, unanswered prayer and ordinary disappointment.

Because eventually the honeymoon era ends. A new believer learns that temptation typically doesn’t disappear with a handful of prayers. People, even well-meaning Christians, can still disappoint you. And you can have a real encounter with God and still wake up the next morning with the same circumstances designed to send you into a spiral.

“It’s impossible for me to be okay every day,” Smith said. “That’s not even real.” 

That sentence is a gift to anyone who thinks faith means emotional consistency. It also pushes back on a subtle performance culture new believers can absorb fast: If you really love Jesus, you’ll always feel close to Him. If you’re struggling, something must be wrong with you.

Longtime believers who have stayed through dry seasons can offer a better definition of maturity. Not, “I always feel on fire.” More like, “I keep showing up, even when I don’t.”

They can teach new believers how to build habits for the high and low seasons. They can also model what healthy spiritual relationships look like. Smith talked about how relationships need “a back and forth,” a real “reciprocation,” not a setup where one person always pours out and the other always takes in. He described rethinking a leadership posture where he didn’t share his heart because he was “the leader.” 

That matters because new believers don’t just need teachers. They need people who are honest.

If an older Christian’s version of faith is always perfect, new believers will assume that’s the goal. Then, when their own life gets messy, they’ll either fake it or disappear. Longtime believers can prevent that simply by telling the truth about what faith looks like after the spark becomes a long burn.

The fastest way for both groups to get twisted is the same: turning faith into a scoreboard.

New believers can do it because they’re excited and want to be all in. Longtime believers can do it because they know the system and how to look mature inside it. Either way, performance becomes the engine.

“It’s grace that grows the church,” Smith explained.  

Grace is what lets new believers grow without burning out trying to prove they’re serious. It’s also what keeps longtime believers from hardening into cynicism when they can’t control outcomes. Grace is what turns “keep up appearances” into “keep returning.”

So what do new and old believers actually learn from one another?

Both groups, if they’re wise, stop treating the other as a stereotype. The new believer isn’t a puppy to manage. The longtime believer isn’t a fossil to ignore. They’re both carrying something the other needs.

The goal isn’t to keep first-week energy forever. That’s not realistic. The goal is to keep returning, keep receiving grace and keep giving it away. New believers can remind you why you started. Longtime believers can show you how to last.