Gen Z Church Revival: David Kinnaman on Barna’s Findings
In the past couple years, the American church has experienced a resurgence as a larger percentage of people are making new commitments to Jesus. That trend has primarily been driven by younger generations who are longing for deeper spiritual guidance as they deal with deep existential questions around AI, wars, financial uncertainty, and relational breakdowns. Despite the challenges and uncertainties of our time, David Kinnaman is excited for the future of the church and the growing opportunities for the gospel to go forward in our cultural moment.
Kinnaman is the CEO of Barna Group, a leading research and communications company serving churches, nonprofits, and businesses. He is the bestselling author of Faith for Exiles, Good Faith, You Lost Me, and UnChristian. At the upcoming Amplify Conference, October 20–21 at Wheaton College, in partnership with Outreach magazine, he will be sharing some of Barna’s new findings about the resurgence of Christian faith in Gens Z and Alpha that undergird his upcoming book, Jesus Is Back: A New Generation’s Search for a Real, Beautiful, and Lasting Faith (Baker, March 2027).
In the following conversation, Kinnaman discusses the continuing trend of young people returning to church and how church leaders can be prepared to receive them, how times of uncertainty like the one we find ourselves in today can drive spiritual renewal, and how the church can equip the next generation to reach their spiritually hungry peers.
Last time we talked, you had some research coming out [about young people returning to church]. And a lot of people were asking, “Is there a revival happening?” Now that we’ve had a little bit of distance from last year’s talk of revival, what is the new year showing you about that trend of young people coming back to church?
I think so far it seems to be continuing. There are many different signs that we’re in a period of spiritual openness: people’s expectations that revival might be imminent, this sense that it’s actually younger generations that seem to be experiencing more supernatural things—miracles, answers to prayer, a sense that Jesus is close. I think as society has moved in the last year with the war in Iran and with economic disruptions and AI [there’s] a sense in which young people are sort of wondering, maybe less even spiritual questions, but more existential questions, vocational questions, financial questions, some of those things are coming front and center. Usually what happens, and our friends at the Billy Graham Center would attest to this, when there are a lot of headwinds—economic, war, vocational—those tend to be pretty ripe periods for spiritual renewal.
When society is sort of up and to the right, it tends to be a time when people feel pretty good with the status quo. And when things tend to take a turn as they have the last couple of years with gas prices [and] some of the questions like, “Will the war in Iran resolve?” We’re sitting at this really pregnant moment, a very ripe period. As Jesus says, the fields are ripe unto harvest (John 4:35).
I believe more than ever that young people are responding to the gospel. They’re also open spiritually to everything from WitchTok on TikTok [to] crystals and astrology—a lot of syncretism. But it seems to me like there is this sort of continuing deep stirring. And again, none of us root for bad economic conditions or uncertainty in our lives. But as a Christian, as someone who hopes to see God do new things in our time, I think it is actually creating the conditions for even more renewal, even more openness. We’ll see how that comes to fruition.
The testimony we’re hearing from pastors [is they] are experiencing an influx of young people. They’re actually surprisingly open to some of the liturgical options or some deeper study. They’re gravitating toward Christian teaching on radio stations, and [there’s] this real [drive to] make apologetics relevant again. We’re entering a golden era of thinking through the ministry of the gospel for Gen Z and Gen Alpha, to reimagine what God might be up to and how we can actually give them the encouragement and the push and the support to build the church that will be faithful for the future.
What do you think are some of the keys to church leaders being prepared for that influx? It’s a little bit different than in past decades, though there are echoes [of] the ’60s. How can church leaders be prepared to meet the moment?
Well, I think you’ve mentioned one thing, which is to be historically thinking [about] what has happened during other periods of renewal—the ’60s being one of them, the Jesus Movement was an outflow of that. What can we learn from the past so that we can make the most of our present?
Number two, most important, is to lean into what the Spirit is doing [with a] heavy emphasis on prayer, [and a] heavy emphasis on spiritual discernment to give people eyes to see and ears to hear. For those of us who are of a more established generation, Gen X and boomers, to make sure that we’re not trying to just fit the movement of the next generation into the models, the wineskins that we have. God’s always doing something new. So let’s make sure we really platform these younger generations.
Another thing is just to make sure we’re not creating light forms of discipleship. I think this generation is asking more of the church than sometimes we’re willing to do. If we’re being honest, most congregations are like event management services. We have this great opportunity. The good news is you see young people who are like, “Hey, I think I’m kind of curious. Let’s actually check this out.” I think a real disservice [would] be [if] in three years, five years, 10 years we haven’t really radically rethought the amount of teaching and pedagogy and content and formation that their hungry souls are after, and that we’ve just made another generation of Christian consumers rather than gospel participants.
What do you think is the opportunity and the particular struggles that this next generation is facing that maybe we haven’t seen before?
Well, I would borrow from some of our friends at the Harvard Program for Human Flourishing to talk about the different areas of life that are the domains of flourishing: relationships, finance, vocation, character, virtue, happiness and life satisfaction. You can check out some of the work that they’ve done. We’ve been partnered with them for a while. And I think we could track all that back to Jesus. The imperative that he has come for us to have life and life to the full (John 10:10).
I think this generation is looking for an abundant, flourishing life. The pressures they’re facing are in no uncertain terms centered around their fear of the future. We find that young Christians are actually more fearful about the future than our young non-Christians. How do we help this generation embrace that God’s not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind, from 2 Timothy 1? I think there’s fear about each of those areas of flourishing. There is fear about what the lack of flourishing will look like: fear about the future, fear about war, fear about unemployment, fear about [whether] our generation [will] have a future, fear about whether I’ll be lonely or will anyone love me.
The way we’ve been describing Generation Alpha is that they’re anxious optimists. They really do believe that society will figure out a better way forward, but they’re very anxious around some of these existential questions. And why would they not be? We’ve got these tech companies with godlike powers who are creating a sense of tension, anxiety, fear. Most of the news media trafficks in the latest challenges and fears. And well they should. [It’s] their job to talk about what’s not working.
But I believe that the church is a place where we actually come together to see what is working, to center our lives on the hope of the resurrection and to give people a sense that their lives are going to matter in deeper ways than they could possibly imagine.
I have this incredible hope that the church can rise to the occasion. We’re already doing this. We’re already helping people understand what it means to be human, to flourish spiritually because we’re in deep need of a Savior, for our souls to be redeemed in his sacrifice. I think this is going to be a great moment for the church to stand up and witness to the goodness of following Jesus not just for the afterlife but also for the life to come. As Paul says, the promise of salvation isn’t just for the life to come, but also for the life that is.
From an evangelism standpoint, how can church leaders equip the next generation to reach their peers?
There’s probably no particular way, but there is a whole mindset. First, we have to encourage everyday Christians that this is a moment for the gospel. There are millions of people who’ve made a commitment to Jesus in the last year who need to be discipled. So we need to find really good ways of encouraging a disciple-making church. Even by their own account, a lot of pastors tell us they struggle with this. In a 2026 survey we interviewed 507 senior pastors and only 4% said their church is very effective at reaching unchurched people. Only 4%. Fourteen percent—about three times as many but still a small percentage—say they’re very effective at discipleship and spiritual formation. I think that should tell us, first of all, pastors need to be active and engage in conversing with people who are not Christians. You need to have regular contact and regular meaningful conversation. You have to be a practitioner of evangelism, not just an encourager, not just a commentator on it.
We need to equip people to be active participants in gospel mission, not just consumers of our content. I believe [in] some of these old, old things of evangelism training and Alpha and programs that just make it easier for us to equip our congregations to have a ministry mindset, to be outreach-oriented, to be able to tell our testimonies. We need to equip people to be able to tell their stories of how Jesus transformed their lives so that people could be encouraged that we overcame by the blood of the Lamb and the word of our testimony (Rev. 12:11). We have to become an evangelistically ready church. Places like Amplify are hard at work and doing just that, and we need to continue to rise to the occasion and raise the temperature of our evangelism today.
Join David Kinnaman and many other dynamic Christian leaders at this year’s Amplify Conference, October 20–21 at Wheaton College, and learn to lead with gospel clarity, live authentically, and multiply faithfully in the real challenges of ministry today.
