White Young People and The Quiet Revival

Unpacking the Bible Society report

And let us not neglect our meeting together, as some people do, but encourage one another, especially now that the day of his return is drawing near. - Hebrews 10:25 NLT

The recent report from The Bible Society, The Quiet Revival: Gen Z leads rise in church attendance, reminds us of something true for the last two thousand years. That church attendance, turning up, is the singular most important measure of church growth or decline.

Attendance is still the single most meaningful indicator of the practice of the Christian faith, and of one’s relationship with Jesus

Until recently, non-attendance has been the fastest-growing activity of Christians in the Western world. The last thirty years have seen a great stepping away from the church in the UK, where church attendance declined from 5.2 million people to just under 2.5 million (in a population of 67 million people).

Mind you, measuring attendance has become harder these days. The way people connect to church, and how they connect, is changing, and is making things far more challenging to measure. We now have to track the churched, unchurched, unattached, intermittents, homebodies, blenders, conventionals, nones and dones, to name a few. Underneath all the varying statistics, the complexity, and the changing landscape are realities few deny. The church in the Western world had declined in terms of membership, participation and attendance.

Attendance is still the single most meaningful indicator of the practice of the Christian faith and one’s relationship with Jesus.¹ If you are going to measure one thing to measure the decline or growth of Christianity in belief and practice, attendance is the one to track.²

However, we may have reached peak decline in the UK. A few years ago a Times newspaper article charted a slight increase in Sunday attendance just after COVID. It seemed that the number of those attending regularly continued to decline, while those who hardly ever attended had gone a few times more. But now we have The Bible Society, Quiet Revival report and the first major signs of church growth in attendance.

At any rate, there is much excitement because people attending more means something, even if we don’t yet fully know what that something is. Even the secular press in the UK knows it is important. We instinctively and empirically know that attendance gains and losses indicate something about the well-being of Christianity and the church. In particular, I want to pick up on the significant growth in white people attending church, and why that is a welcome change and explain why.

A lost generation of white young people

Something pernicious has happened with white British Christians over the last few decades, which the Bible Society report might show a counter movement taking place.

Parents often console themselves with the idea that their children can return to church later in life and rediscover faith. All the statistics tell us something very different. Secularism has infected Christian parents’ imaginations with its insistence on removing religion from everyday life and relegating it to the private. In the secular, Christianity is something private to come to later in adult life, when and if someone wants to. But this is a lie, leading to a lifelong impact. In the UK, people from both ethnic and religious backgrounds who are non-practising as teenagers and young adults often return to the faith of their family of origin.

However, for Christian white British people, almost no young people return to the faith of their parents. The data shows that if you are a white middle-class family who stops participating in attending church, your children will likely never return to, or practice, the Christian faith. Why is that?

Children of Christian parents who only attend church in a crisis, from an on-demand needs basis, end up modelling something for their children. Their children do indeed adopt the faith of their parents. It is one where the church is optional, and something for emergencies. Where Christianity is self-help for getting something else in life. Children copy the faith of their parents. Moreover, there is no continuing ethnic connection for the church with white Brits, unlike other religions where their ethnic identity is supported. White middle-class religious and cultural identity has become one where the church is for emergencies only, and Christmas. Significant surveys and studies bear this out, revealing the anaemic and therapeutic self-help faith that young people are inheriting from their parents.

But something different seems to be happening with white young people.

Young White People: What has changed?

So, having said all that, why are people attending church more, particularly young white people? The Bible Society report summarises things as:

We found that the Church is in a period of rapid growth, driven by young adults and inparticular young men. Along with this, the Church demonstrates greater ethnic diversity than ever before. Both within and outside the Church, young adults are more spiritually engaged than any other living generation, with Bible reading and belief in God on the rise. But we also see that active engagement with a church has a significant impact on the lives of attenders, with a high increase in mental and general life wellbeing – again particularly among young adults, a generation in the midst of a mental health crisis. It is also changing communities, with churchgoers more likely to feel a connection to their local area and get involved in social engagement activities. Challenges remain for the Church and civic society in responding to this Quiet Revival, but its reality can no longer be denied.

And then…

However, it is also clear that the growth in churchgoing is not solely attributable to the rise in attenders from minority ethnic groups – we are also seeing a rise in White attendance. Among 18–34-year-old men in this group, for example, 18% are now attending church monthly, compared to 3% in 2018, and it is a similar story (albeit not so dramatic) among young White women. We are therefore seeing an absolute growth in churchgoing among young adults – including substantial growth from the White population – but also greater diversity among younger churchgoers than among older group.

We need more time to see if this trend continues and more data on what is happening, but I suspect two things are happening among young white people.

First, those from Christian families seem tired of their parents' therapeutic, on-demand faith. Carlton Johnstone noted this trend in New Zealand in 2014. Younger generations, who had grown up in Christian homes, were rejecting their parents' individualistic isolationist faith and had begun to explore ‘Embedded Faith’, the rediscovery of collective acts of worship to counter individualism and foster belonging and community.

Emily, a twenty-eight-year-old single woman, said:

Church is important because I don’t want to be a Christian by myself, I don’t want to be an island. Because I feel like I need other people; I learn and grow when I’m connected to other people. Yeah, I do life better actually when I’m . . . when there are people I can talk to, when there are people who hold me accountable; when there are people that I can help as well. I might have gone through something that I can help someone with. Or I might have a skill or ability or something that can contribute to either the life of the church, or a cell group, or individual. Something like that. And that is a new learning thing for me as well, because I have always been very independent and quite happy being independent. But in terms of my faith I need other people.

Carlton explained that the young people he interviewed who were returning to church and attending more were doing so as examples of “constituted selves,” with “a sense of identity which only makes sense in the context of community.” Theologically, those young people were discovering what Walter Brugerman calls the ‘covenanted self’, understood “as a radical alternative to the consumer autonomy that has become so prevalent in our society and has invaded the life of the church in debilitating ways”.

Second, Millennials and Gen Z more broadly are looking for hope and something other than what the lifestyles of their parents have not provided. Sarah Copping has made an astute observation of the main forces upon Millennials and Gen Z, and how:

One third of Millennials were raised with either separated, divorced, or single parents, and for Gen Z, it is now almost half.

As a result, attachment disorders - which used to be fringe - are now so pervasive we quietly renamed them attachment ‘styles’. We learn about them through online quizzes as though they are personality types, rather than in the therapist’s office because we think it is normal…

…It’s weird that I have to say this, but a parental divorce is deeply distressing to a child. Yet we’re told that if we openly admit to our distress, then we are the bad guys. We’re too judgmental. How dare we have feelings. Or needs.

Imagine doing this to a third of an entire generation, and then being surprised that they’re not flourishing as adults?

In many ways, Millennials and Gen Z feel like we were the guinea pigs in a social experiment that ultimately failed. How can we look forward to a future when so many of us don’t even know how to trust a partner?

We are not looking for handouts; we’re looking for hope.

The on-demand dispensing of religious goods and services for consumer Christians might have lost its appeal. Christianity as a support for a way of life is not working. Perhaps young white people are ready to discover Christianity as a way of life in and of itself.

Ignatian Intersections: Disenchantment and Re-enchantment

There is undoubtedly a re-enchantment of faith taking place. Secularism, materialism, rationalism, and consumerism have dominated much of the church and the faith of those who consume it. The result is an emptiness, deism and God of the gaps, who is there to get stuff in the material world. In his seminal work "A Secular Age", Charles Taylor describes disenchantment as the process by which the modern world has moved away from a framework where the spiritual and supernatural were integral parts of human experience to a more secular, rational, and scientific understanding of reality. The result is a ‘buffered self’ where identity is about being isolated, autonomous agents. Then, there is a loss of meaning, with no sacred stories, rituals, symbols, or spiritual forces. And that, combined with privileging the immanent for material life and experiences, results in a loss of transcendental reality. A human being cannot thrive in this, as we are discovering.

Taylor signposts the human drive for re-enchantment—a desire to reconnect with spiritual and meaningful aspects of existence. This is seen in various cultural, artistic, and religious movements that resist purely secular explanations. It should not surprise us to read in the Bible Society report about the kinds of churches young people are moving towards - more liturgical. Those churches that are more sacramental and engage in the symbolic to explore the transcendent are seeing significant growth.

For many years, there has been a growing interest and hospitality in recovering dimensions of spiritual formation, worship, prayer, and traditions. This re-enchantment accounts partly for the growing interest in Ignatian spirituality, which seeks to reintegrate a sense of mystery, purpose, and depth into everyday life. Also, Ignatian Spirituality lends itself to our person-centred affective world (I wrote about that previously here).

Call To Action: The beauty of attendance

Attendance, then, can be a doorway of the ordinary into something extraordinary; akin to the wardrobe in a dusty attic that opens into Narnia. There is an adventure waiting on the other side of this ordinary, by which we can be thrilled and transformed. But it requires a different orientation. Some places of worship have rooms that require you to bow, in order to enter, lowering your head and bending over to gain access. There is something similar and key to attendance. Like Alice in Wonderland, we must become smaller to enter the doorway into the beautiful garden. Our diminution is a yielding of the self, and submission of needs and self-interests, to experience the beauty on the other side. Otherwise, we blunder around as self-obsessed giants, unable to see what is before us and trampling the beauty all around. Once inside, something exquisite and beyond the ordinary is available, a world parallel to the one rushing around us with all its distractions and frustrations. As I recall the texture and map from my attendance of nearly forty years, this is the garden and beauty I have seen.

Attendance for me is a series of catching eyes, smiling, many quick touches on the arm, counterpointed with embraces, hugs, kisses, and snatches of conversations that mine the depths of life. It is incredible how, over coffee, a simple “how are you?” can open a door into the beauty of someone's inner landscape, and the textures of their life before God. Attendance for me, from my entrance and the walk to the hall for worship, is an opportunity to run my hand over the tapestry of the lives of others. Where the threads and colours I touch are the stories and images of cancer, job stress, failed marriages, anxiety and depression, concerns for children’s university applications, care for ageing parents and disappointments with self, and with life. Woven through all this are stories of God’s love and care. It is as if I can see His Spirit holding all this together, as he weaves us into His life. The threshold of a doorway for attendance has indeed become the doorway into Narnia. I would not trade any activity for the captivating and arresting beauty of these moments, these experiences Sunday by Sunday.

And then, there is worship; words to bring into contact with the imaginations and commitments I have for life. If I go beyond deciding whether I like the words and music, or if I am enjoying the production which is taking place, I find a way to measure my life and actions against the things I am singing. And when I do that, I realise how far I have come and how much more I have to discover. And at the end, when we pray for each other, the most stunning and arresting thing occurs. I see the conscious opening-up of shared lives before God. It is like time and space dilate, and the eschaton, the Kingdom of God, breaks into reality. In place of lies about isolation, lack, anxiety and despair, truths about acceptance, identity, presence, relationship, and hope rush in. Tears are cried, fears allayed, hopes kindled, peace descends. There is also the risk of praying for others, overcoming my fears and inadequacies that I am not enough or do not know enough to pray. In the praying, my self-protection is put to death again.

Some Sunday mornings, I am deeply sad over things happening in my life, what is happening to my family, and where I am being overextended. I want to hide and withdraw. I want you to know that the allure not to attend often grips me greatly. Yet, on these challenging Sundays, I rediscover the doorway of the ordinary into something beyond my troubling circumstances. I find, upon leaving, that I am filled with something other than my consternations. God has shown up, and I have stopped worrying about myself for just a little while. My fears and self-obsessions have abated, sometimes wonderfully, sometimes just a fleeting amount, such that my burdens feel slightly lighter.

The plenitude of God has interrupted my life and touched my fears and feelings of lack. From time to time during my attendance, I have had others come to me with words, pictures, and encouragements—precious things that become the warp and weft of my life and unconscious textures to my identity in Jesus. Those moments are made possible by the volume and regularity of my attendance. If we step into it and attend, the Kingdom of God is indeed at hand.

(Parts of this article were built upon a previous article about attendance and heavily edited.)

1. George Barna, the well-known church statistician, has the numbers to prove this.

2. The church history/theology professor John Stackhouse puts it more bluntly: just go to Church. John Stackhouse can provide evidence that the decline in church attendance directly correlates with a broader decline in Christian belief and practice.