Next Gen Goes to Church

It’s been called a “quiet revival,” or the “revival generation.”¹ Perhaps we now have numerical evidence to back up that experience. It appears Next Gen is showing up for church.

More than that, they are now showing up more than their older counterparts. It appears Millennial and Gen Z adults are now the most frequent church attenders, outpacing members of the Elder and Boomer generations.

Recent research, executed by Barna, tracked the frequency of church attendance by generation, and these two Next Gen groups come out on top.

What is Church Frequency?

By using church frequency, Barna measured how often their respondents participated a weekend worship service. As opposed to a “how many” number, Barna tracked “how often” people came to church. This metric gauges regularity of participation, which serves as a decent proxy for both interest in faith and loyalty or devotion to participating in Christian worship. In other words, it is not the worst way to speculate about one’s seriousness in their faith or the importance of church community.

According to the research, “church going” frequency is presently rising. However, that only tells half the story. To be more precise, frequency is mostly flat or in slight decline among other generational cohorts. But despite plateaued involvement from other groups, the increase among Millennials and Gen Z in church frequency has been so significant over the last five years, that it caused the average for everyone to go up.

Church Going Average: 1.6 Weekends a Month

Now, let’s be honest, 1.6 weekends a month seems pretty underwhelming as an average for all adults regardless of generation. Of the people that we call “regular church attenders”, they come less than 2 times a month.

Though it appears low, remember this is also an average. That means you are lumping in the people who are there every time someone unlocks the church doors with the folk that barely make it every six months. According to Barna’s data, they poled all adults in their database who attended church in the last 6 months. This metric created their respondent pool. That is a low barrier of entry, but with good reason. They goal was to catch people who self-identified as regular church attenders and see what that actually means to them. This produced a respondent pool of thousands, so it is plenty for a decent survey.

After marking out the respondent pool, they determined their frequency. If you lump all those people who only came once in six months together with the Sunday School teachers there every Sunday, you get 1.6 a month.

I still don’t like it, but that’s often the state of things. We are fooling ourselves to think otherwise. And, if you are a local church pastor, I believe this likely confirms something you already know. Even those who claim to be regular church attenders have a thinner definition of regular than we’d like.

Next Generation Cohorts are Bucking the Trend

While average attendance among church goers is lower than ideal, the upcoming generations are reversing the trend if this survey is to be believed. At least two significant findings in the data bear real-world significance on how we think about local church ministry in the United States.

First, the research demonstrates what may be explosive growth in church attendance among both Millennials and Gen Z. Those cohorts are significantly higher than the average at 1.8 and 1.9 weekends each month respectively. What is more, their frequency was much lower a few years ago. In 2020, both next generational cohorts sat around one weekend a month. In other words, they have both almost doubled in frequency in the last five years.

Both Millennials and Gen Z adults currently have the highest rates of attendance ever recorded for their cohorts, if I’m reading the report correctly. That is a marked gain and something worth noting.

Second, if this trend holds in the future, it represents a reversal in who is most loyal to church attendance. For decades, older generations proved the most loyal to attend church. Over the past 25 years, the Elder and Boomer generations slowly declined in frequency. This fact alone changes much about how we conceive of local church ministry.

Of course, the biblical givens of healthy church ministry are the same regardless of which generations show up. There are timeless, Scripturally determined practices for all eras and places: the gathering of the church for corporate worship, the proper practice of the ordinances, the right preaching of the word, biblically qualified leadership, and living out the “one anothers” of Scripture as a community of faith. Yet, the methods and manners in which we accomplish these things shift depending on the context and, in this case, perhaps the generational demographic that is most loyal.

If nothing else, this bucks the stereotype that younger generations are simply disinterested in matters of faith and (since this is measuring church attendance) institutional religion.

Is this an opportunity for ministry?

So, what do we make of this? In their report, Barna is rather optimistic about the ministry potential presented by this trend. Of course, Barna published the data. David Kinnaman, Barna’s CEO claimed, “The significant drop-off among older generations shows that the fabric of congregational life is changing. It’s more frayed and less gray than it was a decade ago. The influx of new generations represents a massive opportunity for congregational leaders, but this renewed interest must be stewarded well.”²

Furthermore, they claim capitalizing on this next generation interest and participation means embracing a lot of their preferences to do so. Barna suggests we acqueisce, at some level, to the present rate of attendance and claims church leaders need to assume “regular attendars” who are not all that regular and adjust to meet them in digital spaces. They suggest employing church apps, chat opportunities, and likely livestream services to accommodate this and stay connected when they are away from the corporate gathering.

Personally, I’m ambivalent to that initial suggestion. It is certainly true that we lead the church that is not the one that ought to be. If we are going to engage these new attenders, it will requires us to initially meet them where they are in some sense. However, I am committed to the idea that we must call them to more if the Scriptures do so. I’m not so quick to overlook the command of Scripture that we do not foresake the gathering for the assembly.

Meet them where we can? Sure. But call them to a fuller understanding of loyalty and commitment to the family of God through even more regular participation in the coporate gathering of the saints. I believe so.

If you want to hear more about this, Scott Hildreth and I recently discussed these findings on an episode of The Sent Life, our podcast through the Center for Great Commission Studies. Here’s the episode: [Why the Next Generation Is Returning to Church])(https://www.thecgcs.org/resources/podcast/why-the-next-generation-is-returning-to-church/).