M I N I S T RY | YO U T H
Reaching Gen Z What today’s young people most want from church leaders By JOSH PACKARD
O
n your way to becoming a mature Christian and a leader in the church, chances are somebody — likely multiple somebodies — cared enough to invest in you relationally. Ministers today are concerned about how to engage the members of Generation Z (born around 1997 or later) in matters of faith. With many young people leaving the church, it is easy to assume they are simply uninterested in spirituality. You know they represent the future. You know God has called you to take the gospel to them and disciple them in the faith. But perhaps you don’t always know the best way to go about it. How do you attract them? How do you keep them? How do you introduce them to Jesus? As it turns out, the solution may be less complicated than you realize.
Leading Through Uncertainty I serve as executive director of Springtide Research Institute, which recently released The State of Religion and Young People 2021. This report sheds light on what churches can do to reach this generation. Our goal was to describe the current state of the
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relationship between young people and religion, not prescribe what that relationship should be. However, a closer look at what young people are saying suggests some possible avenues for church leaders seeking to evangelize and disciple them. Even as some members of Generation Z eschew church attendance, most are asking existential questions, searching for meaning, and exploring religious ideas. They claim to experience spirituality in a variety of ways, such as watching movies, reading books, praying, and meditating. In our survey of U.S. teens and adults aged 13–25, 71% identified as religious, and 78% described themselves as spiritual. Yet many who identify as religious don’t attend church — or any other kind of religious service, for that matter. This disconnect is multifaceted, but it is impossible to understand fully without first acknowledging that Generation Z is struggling with a significant degree of uncertainty — a key point in our report. In fact, 1 in 3 respondents told us they were going through a challenging event. Amid a global pandemic and myriad disruptions to daily life, they were making big decisions about the future, experiencing mental or physical illness, dealing with the death or sickness of a loved one, or navigating
