The recent retraction of a British Bible Society report on a supposed “quiet revival” among young adults felt like a gut punch. While some had long been skeptical of the data, others had understandably been thrilled over the report’s claim that church attendance among 18- to 24-year-olds in England and Wales had quadrupled between 2018 and 2024, from 4 percent to 16 percent. Before the retraction, those findings traveled everywhere: to Parliament, to conferences, to headlines on both sides of the Atlantic. A narrative took hold: Young people were returning to church.
When the data firm YouGov admitted the numbers were flawed, and the report was pulled, the ensuing disappointment was palpable. The revival in the UK was not real. Just as the hopeful narrative had spread, so did a resurgence of the familiar discouraging story of endless institutional decline.
For the church in the United States, we want to offer a more complicated account, neither the thrill of the quiet revival nor the dismay of its debunking.
Many US observers had enthusiastically picked up the British study as a lens for looking at trends popping up closer to home. Now we have to ask if our own signs of revival are a mirage as well. We have been watching campus revivals, reports of white Gen Z men showing new interest in church, and a generation that seems more spiritually curious than the one before it. Should we be concerned about how we have been interpreting the data here in the US?
The short answer is no. The signs we continue to see are quite real and remarkably consistent. They’re just consistent with a different story: Young people remain deeply wary of large institutions, but they are undeniably interested in faith and spirituality. The front door of the church has moved.
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Sociologist Nancy Ammerman put it best in Sacred Stories, Spiritual Tribes. “In a time of significant change,” she writes, “we cannot assume we will find religion in the predictable places or in the predictable forms. And if we do not find as much of it in those predictable places as we did before, we cannot assume that it is disappearing.”
That sentence frames the argument of this piece better than any statistic could—but consider what major surveys reveal when you separate belief from belonging.
If you look only at institutions, the story is undeniably grim. Gallup’s 2025 tracking data puts clear confidence in organized religion at just 36 percent. For young adults, formal religious affiliation continues to slide inmajor polls. This led Pew to conclude recently that traditional survey instruments show no clear evidence of a youth revival in America.
But when you look at spiritual hunger instead of church attendance, the picture changes dramatically. Pew’s massive Religious Landscape Study found that while less than half of young adults identify as Christian, a full 71 percent believe there is something spiritual beyond the natural world. On measures of institutional belonging, the generational gap is large. On these measures of spiritual openness, it’s significantly smaller.
Our own research at Future of Faith confirms this exact tension. We found that a staggering 73 percent of young people become more open to spiritual conversations when someone simply listens to them, yet only 16 percent are willing to trust large organizations. What is shifting is not belief itself but the relationship between belief and the church as an institution.
This is the defining sociological reality of our moment. For previous generations, the institution itself provided credibility. A church building or a pastoral title was often enough to get people through the doors. That era is over. Young people today will not walk into a building simply because it exists.
But this does not mean Generations Z and Alpha are necessarily secular or closed to the gospel. Young people still actively seek meaning, guidance, and truth, but they only accept it from adults and communities who have first demonstrated genuine care for them. Trust must be built interpersonally before it can be transferred institutionally. That is, young people must feel they belong before they can believe.
As researchers and practitioners who work daily alongside congregations, youth workers, and community leaders at the forefront of this field, we can tell you firsthand that the story on the ground is not that of the retracted report or its aftermath. What we see every day is evidence of renewed spiritual interest and churches that are rising to meet it.
Our own studies suggest that when caring adults give young people the chance to be genuinely heard, the results are striking. Eight in ten respondents in our Sacred Listening research said being listened to shaped their faith more than any other single factor. Teenagers were far more likely to tell us that being heard was important (67%) than to say sermons (33%) were important to their spiritual growth. And seven in ten said they become more open to spiritual conversations after someone has listened to them.
The hunger is there. What young people are not always willing to do is show up to an institution they believe is more interested in their attendance than their questions.
Accordingly, some of the most vital congregations we’ve encountered are communities that have planted themselves in particular neighborhoods, learned to pay attention to what’s already there, and built their common life around shared practices and reliable relationships with younger congregants. Churches like Tapestry LA Church, Open Door Presbyterian Church in Virginia, and Lifegate in Denver have hundreds of members in Gen Z and younger generations—composing more than half their congregations—not only present but actively engaged. They approach cultivation of institutional trust practically (e.g., Tapestry LA offers ride reimbursements to students), formationally (e.g., Open Door Presbyterian Church structures its volunteer base to reflect a multigenerational household instead of siloing congregants by age), and creatively (e.g., Tapestry LA supports a Gen Z–led Asian American worship band that produces its own music and draws young people into the community).
We live in a world where institutional trust is earned, not assumed, and young people are exacting judges of the difference. The congregations attracting young people have different styles but share a common posture: They lead with curiosity rather than pronouncements, welcome difficult questions, and measure depth of discipleship over head count.
This is profoundly good news for the local church. The congregation is not obsolete. It remains the essential vessel for Christian formation and discipleship. What has changed from decades past are the entry point and the assumptions pastors and other Christians sometimes make about how others see our institutions.
The door of the church has moved, but we can still pray, as Paul asked the Colossians, “that God may open a door for our message, so that we may proclaim the mystery of Christ,” being “wise in the way [we] act toward outsiders,” and “mak[ing] the most of every opportunity” (Col. 4:3, 5). The revival we thought was happening isn’t, but perhaps another revival is already here.
Josh Packard is a sociologist, cofounder of Future of Faith, and author of Faithful Futures: Sacred Tools for Engaging Younger Generations.
Raymond Chang is president of the Asian American Christian Collaborative and an executive with the TENx10 Collaboration at Fuller Seminary. He is a coauthor of Future-Focused Church.
The post The Revival That Wasn’t—and the One That May Be appeared first on Christianity Today.