Are We Witnessing the Beginnings of a Revival among Young Adults?
On Gen Z Church Attendance, Charlie Kirk's Murder, and the Need for Cultural Apologetics
Generation Z Goes to Church
This morning, I have a new column for WORLD Opinions titled “A Revival Pattern in America.” The article talks about the recent uptick in church attendance among Generation Z and younger millennials. I wrote,
Recently, the Barna Group released a new study as part of their ongoing State of the Church initiative with Gloo, a faith-based technology company. The headline is encouraging: “Young Adults Lead a Resurgence in Church Attendance.” According to the data, while U.S. church attendance remains flat overall, Christians who are part of Generation Z and younger millennials are attending church more frequently than before. Young believers are also attending church much more often than Christians in older generations.
While I can’t exactly say I was expecting these findings, I also can’t say that I’m surprised. As I note in the column, there was a lot of anecdotal evidence that the Lord was stirring the hearts of the younger generation.
Around the time the COVID-19 pandemic was ending, my colleagues and I started noticing a spiritual hunger among young people. While many churches were struggling to return to their pre-pandemic levels of attendance, youth groups and college ministries seemed to be growing. There appeared to be an uptick in the number of teenagers and twentysomethings who were eager to participate in mission trips or who were wrestling with a call to the ministry. Many campus ministries were thriving. Stories of campus revivals were common, most notably the Asbury Revival in the spring of 2023.
The main thrust of the column is that this sort of thing has happened before. Historically, there has been a recurring pattern of religious revival among teenagers and young adults since the rise of the modern evangelical movement in the early 1700s. This is a topic that has always fascinated me as a church historian, and it has been an ongoing source of encouragement to me as a professor and pastor. I would invite you to read the whole thing.
Responding to Charlie Kirk’s Murder
Notably, I submitted this column to my WORLD editor several hours before Charlie Kirk’s murder last week. As many others have observed, Kirk had a significant following among Gen Z. Many of those conservative young people are Christians. Kirk himself was a Christian, and those who know him speak openly about how his faith had become a more important part of his life in recent years. His social media certainly indicates that Kirk was interested in apologetics and motivated, at least in part, by evangelistic urgency to reach the spiritually lost. It remains to be seen how his death will intersect with the trend of young people showing increased interest in the church. I pray it is one of the means that the Holy Spirit uses to bring a significant spiritual awakening to Gen Z—and others—across our land.
I talked more about Kirk and his legacy among the young with my friends Benjamin Quinn and Dan Darling in a special edition of the Christ and Culture Podcast. I hope you’ll also listed to that. The podcast is hosted by the Center for Faith and Culture at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. I have a recurring, mostly monthly gig on the podcast where we join Benjamin, Dan, and Kristen Kellen to discuss recent headlines from the perspective of a biblical worldview and with an eye toward equipping pastors and other ministry leaders.
One more thing about Kirk: I’ve been disappointed in how some conservatives, and especially Christians, have responded to his death by taking a vengeful approach. Andrew Walker offers some helpful words on this theme in a recent column, arguing for both the importance of cultivating consistently Christian ethics and the resiliency of the US Constitution.
In a polarized culture, it is so very easy to default to an “us versus them” posture toward our political opponents. The temptation is for a posture of cultural warfare to become our only, or at least our primary, frame of reference when we think about faithful cultural engagement. Worse, we can adopt overtly un-Christian vices in our personal lives as we attempt to champion Christian virtues in the public square. To be clear, I believe there is a culture war, and I further believe that radical progressives are the aggressors. But our engagement with the culture should be much more holistic than debating the great moral issues of our day. And even when we do engage in such debates, that should never be an occasion to neglect the fruit of the Spirit. When we enter into contentious discussions, or advocate for our views in the public square, we must remember that our cultural engagement must never be dismissed from our personal pursuit of holiness or our public proclamation of the gospel.
The Importance of Cultural Apologetics
I’ve been encouraged by the conversation about cultural apologetics that has been taking place in recent years. In his excellent book, Cultural Apologetics: Renewing the Christian Voice, Conscience, and Imagination in a Disenchanted World (Zondervan Academic, 2019), Paul Gould defines cultural apologetics as the “work of establishing the Christian voice, conscience, and imagination within a culture so that Christianity is seen as true and satisfying” (p. 21). Many of the classes I teach at North Greenville University, as well as my work with the EQUIP Institute at Taylors First Baptist Church, touch on this topic.
Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to review an important new book on cultural apologetics for The Gospel Coalition website. The Gospel after Christendom: An Introduction to Cultural Apologetics, edited by Collin Hansen, Skyler Flowers, and Ivan Mesa, brings together fellows of The Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics to offer an accessible introduction to the topic. I thoroughly enjoyed reading The Gospel after Christendom and would commend it to pastors and other ministry leaders. If you want a brief introduction to cultural apologetics, I’d recommend this essay from Collin Hansen. TGC also adapted Collin’s introduction to The Gospel after Christendom and published it on their website.
Cultural apologetics offers us a point of intersection between those earlier studies of Gen Z’s secularist assumptions and interest in neo-paganism, as well as the more recent trend of increased church attendance. Young people have been “discipled” by a social imaginary that increasingly doesn’t take belief in God for granted, sees science (both real and perceived) as more authoritative than religion or philosophy, is fascinated by non-traditional and even openly deviant spiritualities, elevates individual identity over received traditions, is obsessed with sexual expression, and is enamored with technological advancement. We cannot take it for granted that Christianity—or, more generally, Judeo-Christian values and assumptions—are part of the “air they breathe” in the same way was for many of their parents (my generation!) and especially their grandparents.
The Holy Spirit is already cutting through all this fog, and there is now clear evidence of growing interest in the gospel among Gen Z. Cultural apologetics reminds us of the importance of helping young people (and all people!) to see things more clearly. Christianity offers a better story than the rival stories that animate so much of postmodern Western Culture. Christianity offers Truth in a world that has embraced the post-truth status quo. Christianity offers answers to life’s ultimate questions—the sorts of basic worldview issues people never stopped caring about, even as the plate tectonics shifted into an increasingly post-Christian context.
Cultural apologetics is really just a new name for what some believers have always done: seek to make Christianity plausible to unbelievers by challenging the false assumptions of their contemporary world and creating space to share the gospel that alone is the power to save. The difference is that the current conversation about cultural apologetics is calibrated contextually to some of the particular challenges we face in a world where we can no longer assume that most of those around us are positively disposed toward religion, let alone Christianity.
I’m all in on trying to equip university students to engage in cultural apologetics for the sake of kingdom advance. I’m also committed to helping their parents’ and grandparents’ respective generations better understand how to navigate the “strange new world” that Gen Z simply takes for granted. Join me in praying that the encouraging trend of younger folks going to church is but the opening stage in a significant spiritual awakening that changes millions of lives across our nation and, ultimately, to the uttermost parts of the earth.