David Kinnaman is CEO of Barna Group, a leading research and communications company, and is the author of the bestselling books Faith For Exiles, Good Faith, You Lost Me and unChristian. Kinnaman is also a main session speaker for the upcoming 2025 Amplify Conference, October 21–22 at Wheaton College.
In the following interview with Outreach, Kinnaman discusses some encouraging trends coming out of the latest research Barna has conducted on the State of the Church and the need for church leaders to leverage this cultural moment of openness to faith.
Barna continues to track the State of the Church on an annual basis. What are some of those trends that have kind of surprised you in this year’s research?
[One trend is] the rise in the percentage of Americans who say they’ve made a commitment to Jesus that is still important in their life. It currently stands at 66%. And it was at a low point just four years ago in 2021 and 2022 at 54%. So it’s been steadily rising the last number of years. We don’t have good evidence yet as to why that is.
I believe [this] is important for a number of reasons. First of all, we should qualify it to say that it doesn’t necessarily translate into disciples—Christianity in America is always a mile wide but an inch deep—but as just one metric of spiritual change and spiritual trajectory, it is huge news that there has been a 12-point increase from 54% to 66%. And that is important in that it tells us that the spiritual trajectory of a nation isn’t a done deal. There is renewal, there is the possibility of reenchanting people with the person and work of Jesus. And there are multiple surprises underneath that.
One, that younger generations are actually more likely to be fueling that growth and commitment to Jesus—millennials and Gen Z. Number two, men, not women, are fueling that growth. [Men are] more likely to have increased their commitment to Jesus over the last six years. And number three, there are people who, in a separate survey question, did not describe themselves as Christian, and yet they say they’re followers of Jesus, which suggests that [this] Jesus moment is bubbling outside the usual suspects.
It really tells us some important things about the nature of the changing world around us.
So talk a little bit about that distinction between people who say they have faith in Jesus or have made a commitment to Jesus but may not call themselves a Christian.
Something that people are often surprised by when they hear about research is that there’s not a lot of coherence. You have atheists who pray or you have Christians who say they don’t believe in God. So you’re constantly struck by the paradox of belief. I think that’s just actually true of humans that were a patchwork of things we’ve absorbed from our lives and our parents and the things we think are important and the things we’ve never really thought about.
It’s a fascinating reality that in our modern post-enlightenment but rational world, we think that everyone has got it all kind of dialed in and that they should be able to answer all these questions that [we] could hear. But people are a sort of interesting admixture of beliefs, and I think that’s OK. That’s part of the way we’re created. But it’s also partly our mission as the church to help give people a cohesive and coherent and livable and flourishing vision of life, of being human under the authority of Scripture and in light of Jesus’ work on the cross.
So it’s as simple as comparing two questions. Number one, do you consider yourself to be a Christian? And number two, have you ever made a commitment to Jesus that’s still important in your life? Those are two separate questions.
People aren’t tracking with the coherence of all those things in their head. And the fact that, you know, it’s currently 27% of those who say they’re not a Christian have said they’ve made a commitment to Jesus that’s still important in their life. So it’s a super interesting finding. And that’s always been the case. There’s been a percentage of those who say they’ve made a commitment to Jesus, but the last few years it’s reached new highs, and it suggests that whatever signs of renewal we’re seeing currently, it’s sort of bubbling outside the traditional boundaries of just recycled Christians.
We in the church were wringing our hands for several years about people leaving out the back door of the church and what’s going on: There’s a hole in the bottom of the bathtub and it’s draining people out of the church. And it seems like that Nones [people with no religious affiliation] trend is kind of flattening. Do you think some of those same trends are driving each other?
I do, and this is what I would like to talk about at Amplify: how do we steward a new Jesus moment, so that in three years time, in 10 years time, we don’t just have a lot of silt at the bottom of the tub, and instead we’re able to see the church retain and mobilize and deploy people on mission with Jesus, since it is the most exciting story and mission in the world.
Certainly, post-COVID-19, there is a stripping back of some of the pretenses of modern life. Obviously, younger generations have been deeply immersed in the, “you do you,” and “you find your own path,” and the of false promise of secularism. My own daughter has been working as a first-year nurse in oncology, and she was telling me how much Ash Wednesday meant to her this year. She’s like, “I don’t know how some of my fellow nurses can do this without some sort of belief in their life.”
Things like The Chosen—a pitch perfect strategy—a streaming show on the person and work of Jesus, and very much in the world of Gen Z and asynchronous television viewing and the manner in which that’s being made. And obviously Jonathan Roumie is really capturing a certain kind of ethos of Jesus that while we should clarify is not Jesus, it is at least giving us a picture of a more human or more modern or more global Jesus.
And then He Gets Us, and some of the campus movements [like the] grassroots renewal that seems to be bubbling over at Asbury … I’ve been floating, because it represents something that we pray for. We’re in this for these moments of a turnaround. The inevitability, the inexorable decline of Christianity, is not a done deal. It’s not as though there’s been a complete turnaround and everyone’s a Christian, but there’s a real moment of spiritual openness that is translating now into this resurgence of interest in Jesus. It’s a big deal.
Thinking about how segmented and curated and mediated our culture has become, it makes sense that people will be like, Yeah, I’m a fan of Jesus, but maybe I don’t like the church so much. And we all have our own feeds. It seems like we’re segmenting and mediating ourselves more and more. So how does the church serve as a bridge to the commitment to Jesus when our culture is so segmented?
Yeah, I think that is the question for church leaders to grapple with. Then, how people can experience Jesus inside the walls of the church and be sent out on a mission with him is critical, because it’s clear that the local churches are playing a part in this. It’s also clear that because they’re younger generations and because there are certain very new believers that people will not always know where the church fits in the plot.
So again, I think [this is] a moment for us as church leaders to do some soul searching about where will people see and experience and find Jesus in our churches and in our congregations, recognizing how important it will be for us to look at the blank slate of this generation—not assuming that everyone knows what it is we’re talking about when it comes to the stories or the traditions or the legacy—and making it plain.
[The] reason people are a patchwork of beliefs is because I think some of our learning models are incomplete in the modern world. So, we’ve got to be very intentional about building the church as an essential learning community.
Another [thing] I’d be remiss if I didn’t bring up [is] AI and the way that that’s kind of shaping culture in very dramatic ways. How do you think that’s going to shape the way that people look at faith going forward?
The story of the last decade has been social media and an interconnected world, and faith interrupted by COVID-19, and now the rebuilding of a lot of different institutions, and work from home and hybrid work, and worship from home.
I think AI clearly is going to be the defining technological story [for the coming decade]. Obviously, there’s a lot of different permutations of that, but this idea of a personal digital sherpa on all things, and the necessity for the church to think about its role as a center for learning and what counts for knowledge. These feel like [heady] things, but they’re at the very heart of what it means to be an embodied community to help people navigate the decisions that they make.
I believe AI, as much as anything we’ve created, will be a threat to our conception and experience of the Holy Spirit, because it’s our ever-present help in time of questions. Google and other tools have been a sort of proxy for that, but that is the power of AI. It really does seem to mimic the kind of insights and personalization and being known … it’s a meta leap forward in the way humans have created tools to come alongside them.
I think we really have to step up our theology of the Holy Spirit. We have to teach people how to be in the world, but not out of the world, and to be able to be comfortable using AI, but also recognizing its limitations. To be thinking about how to be on mission with Jesus in the digital spaces, and how important that is for our kids and grandkids, the Gen Z and Gen Alpha among us.
We’re seeing in the research we’re doing that more congregants are willing to acknowledge that AI and technology can be a very meaningful part of church experience. Obviously, they tend to [prefer] certain things that are very relationally oriented like counseling or spiritual guidance to be more human driven.
What gives you hope about the church in the coming decade and our outreach efforts, the ways that we can reach our culture?
A lot of things. I’m so grateful that George Barna, who started [Barna], chose a path of being honest about the research findings, even at times at great cost to him. [He] took a lot of heat for stuff he released. And then I inherited some of that mantle and I’ve [been] taking my fair share of criticism for being maybe unduly critical. The best [way] we can say [it] is we’re just trying to be faithful. And now we have some signs of life within the church in unexpected ways.
In times of upheaval people are trying to find their equilibrium, and that gives us unprecedented opportunities. I think there’s just a really cool moment for the church to think again about the kinds of models, the wine skins, to imagine the kind of words we use to describe the reference points for faith, and then to engage the next generation of leaders. You and I aren’t gonna be here forever, and we get a chance to see the church carried along in its mission by a new generation of leaders, and a new way of conceiving and expressing what it means to follow Jesus. What an incredible opportunity that represents.
To hear more from leaders like David Kinnaman who are helping churches mobilize everyday Christians to reach their communities with the gospel, register your team now for this year’s Amplify Conference. You don’t want to miss it.