Young Adults Lead a Resurgence in Church Attendance

Seems like this is widespread.

Church

Sep 2, 2025

New Barna Data: Young Adults Lead a Resurgence in Church Attendance

https://www.barna.com/research/young-adults-lead-resurgence-in-church-attendance/

At a Glance

• A historic reversal: For the first time in decades, younger adults—Gen Z and Millennials—are now the most regular churchgoers, outpacing older generations, who once formed the backbone of church attendance.
  
• Why it matters: This shift signals a new opportunity for ministry. Younger adults are showing spiritual curiosity and a desire for belonging—but even as they attend more often than older adults, they still attend less than half the time, so every touchpoint matters.
• The leadership challenge: Weekly rhythms can no longer be assumed. Church leaders will need to reimagine discipleship pathways, relational connections and volunteer engagement in ways that resonate with a younger majority.

New research from Barna Group, as part of their ongoing State of the Church initiative with Gloo, reveals a surprising shift: Millennials and Gen Z are driving a resurgence in church attendance. As reports emerge of spiritual interest, rising faith activity, signs of revival—including Barna’s analysis of the recent rise in commitments to Jesus—churchgoing frequency is another improving trend among Millennials and Gen Z in the U.S. While overall church attendance trends have been flat in recent years, the return to church among the next generation stands out as a powerful sign of rising openness to faith.

The headline: Millennials and Gen Z Christians are attending church more frequently than before and much more often than are older generations. The typical Gen Z churchgoer now attends 1.9 weekends per month, while Millennial churchgoers average 1.8 times—a steady upward shift since the lows seen during the pandemic. 

These are easily the highest rates of church attendance among young Christians since they first hit Barna’s tracking.

Daniel Copeland, Barna’s vice president of research, said, “We were able to analyze our data in a fresh way to show what many pastors feel—that even really regular churchgoers do not attend that often. Among all churched adults, we found that they attend, on average, 1.6 times per month, or roughly two out of every five weekends. This new analysis of the tracking data helps us better understand the frustrations pastors feel when they are trying to build momentum for their congregations, such as series-based preaching and mobilizing volunteers.”

“Even so, the fact that young people are showing up more frequently than before is not a typical trend,” Copeland explained. “It’s typically older adults who are the most loyal churchgoers. This data represents good news for church leaders and adds to the picture that spiritual renewal is shaping Gen Z and Millennials today.” 

The Churchgoing Spike

Where is this renewal coming from? For decades, older adults—Boomers and Elders—were the most reliable churchgoers. Today, the pattern has shifted. Gen Z and Millennials, often labeled as disinterested in faith, show the highest levels of regular attendance.

The following chart depicts the degree to which frequent churchgoing has steadily risen among Millennial and Gen Z. In 2020, the average was close to one weekend per month. Now, those rates are up nearly one extra weekend a month, nearly double the rates of just five years ago.

(Note that the rates of Gen Z churchgoing in 2017 and 2018 are higher due to the fact that Gen Zers at that time were just becoming old enough to be counted in Barna’s adult sampling. In other words, those years only represent 18-, 19- and 20-year-olds, and their data would be more likely to mirror their parents’ religious activities.)

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A Generational Reversal

The rebound of churchgoing among younger adults contrasts with older generations, whose participation is flat (as shown in the next chart). Over the last 25 years, Elders and Boomers are well below the frequency of attendance they practiced in the past; Gen X churchgoing has landed at about the same rate as it was in 2000.

Looking back, Elder churchgoers came about 2.3 times per month in 2000 and Boomers were consistently attending about half of all weekends (2.0 times per month). Those participation rates have steadily declined over the past 25 years. Gen X attendance has held steady but has not grown. In contrast, younger generations have moved from an average of just over one weekend per month in 2020 to nearly two in 2025.

Also noteworthy is that all three older generations of churchgoers are about as likely to attend church as in the years immediately before the pandemic. 

Turning Churchgoers Into Disciples

“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,” notes David Kinnaman, CEO of Barna Group. “The influx of new generations represents a massive opportunity for congregational leaders, but this renewed interest must be stewarded well.”

“Our research clearly shows that churchgoing alone does not in itself create devoted disciples. Even with the increasing participation of younger generations, there is still the challenge of shaping hearts and minds to live out their faith beyond church participation,” adds Kinnaman.

What This Means for Church Leaders

For pastors and ministry leaders, the uptick in next gen church attendance presents both opportunity and challenge:

• Opportunity: Younger adults are coming back. Churches that offer relational connection, spiritual mentoring and authentic belonging can nurture this renewed interest into depth of faith.
• Challenge: Attendance, while improving, is still far from weekly. Discipleship strategies must account for a rhythm where people are present at church less than half the time. Digital tools can help bridge this gap. Church apps for texting and small groups, as well as online resources for spiritual growth can help augment the in-person Sunday experience. 

Looking Ahead

If these trends continue, the spiritual explorations of the next generation could redefine the makeup and momentum of Christianity and of congregations in the coming decade. The data points to a future where the vitality of the Church may hinge on how well leaders engage the spiritual curiosity and commitments of younger adults.

About the Research

Barna Group’s tracking data is based on online and telephone interviews within nationwide random samples of 132,030 adults conducted over a twenty-five-year period ending in July 2025. These studies are conducted utilizing quota sampling for representation of all U.S. adults by age, gender, race / ethnicity, region, education and income. Minimal statistical weighting has been used when necessary to maximize statistical representativeness. Included in this data is 5,580 online interviews that were collected between January and July of 2025. These interviews were also conducted utilizing quota sampling for age, gender, race / ethnicity, region, education and income, and minimal statistical weighting has been used to maximize statistical representation.

The Bible and Conceptions of individual rights

 In God's Image: How Western Civilization Was Shaped by a Revolutionary Idea

‘In God’s Image’ Review: Sharing a Sacred Form

Conceptions of individual rights that have guided modern civilization are rooted in an idea with biblical origins.

By 

Ana Siljak

Oct. 24, 2025

https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/in-gods-image-review-sharing-a-sacred-form-3016d4a7?mod=arts-culture_feat1_recent-reviews_pos4

The Lebanese philosopher Charles Malik and the French jurist René Cassin had little in common. When they met, in 1947, Malik was a devout Orthodox Christian, Lebanon’s first ambassador to the U.S. and a spokesman for Lebanese and Palestinian Arabs in the Middle East. Cassin, who had lost many relatives in the Holocaust, was a prominent Zionist. Nevertheless, they became unexpected but staunch allies on the Human Rights Commission that drafted the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, ratified in 1948.

In the face of ideological challenges and pragmatic objections, both men insisted that the dignity of each individual person was sacred and inviolable, and that individual rights must prevail against states and ideologies. For Cassin, human dignity was a bulwark against another Holocaust. For Malik, whose defense of rights would become legendary, it was also a matter of faith, based on the words found in the book of Genesis: Each individual had rights, he argued, by virtue of being created by God “in his own image.”

The history of human rights and human dignity is a site of heated controversy. Some historians find its origins in the secular individualism of the 18th-century Enlightenment, or in the earlier political thought of John Locke or Thomas Hobbes. A few historians have excavated rights in the Middle Ages. Others assert that rights were “invented” in the 20th century and used to justify Cold War interventionism. 

Tomer Persico’s “In God’s Image: How Western Civilization Was Shaped by a Revolutionary Idea” takes a bold new position. Mr. Persico, a research scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, does not mention Malik by name but essentially agrees with him: The inviolable rights and dignity of the individual are grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition and trace back to the earliest pages of the Bible. God creates man in his likeness and image: Mr. Persico follows the reception of this short phrase through the centuries, revealing how it unfolds into a full-fledged defense of individual human worth. He makes a further, more radical claim: “the idea that all human beings were created in God’s image was seminal to the creation of the modern West.” What the West considers its most cherished secular ideals—human dignity, personal autonomy, conscience and individual rights—all find their origins in the Bible.

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Mr. Persico’s account is sweeping, encompassing a vast amount of compelling evidence. He begins with the Israelites, whose belief in humanity as God’s image sharply distinguished their faith from those of their Near Eastern neighbors. The Jewish prohibition against the worship of material idols, for example, stemmed from their respect for the human person as a the true “idol” or image of God. Jewish purity rituals likewise revered the sacred nature of the human body. For the ancient Egyptians and Assyrians, kings were created in God’s image, but for the Israelites, this honor was bestowed on every individual. In ancient Israel, the unique history of the West began.

Christianity deepened and broadened this Old Testament legacy. In the New Testament, the apostle Paul transformed Jewish tradition by moving God’s image from the physical body to the spiritual soul. External ritual gave way to interior experience, and this inward turn, Mr. Persico tells us, effected “one of the most momentous revolutions” in the history of the West. In Christianity, the individual believer was untethered from a wider religious community and became the locus of meaning and authority. From there, it was a short step to the “individual universal subject,” who could claim independent legal and political status. The earliest Christian arguments against slavery in the fourth and fifth centuries, from theologians such as St. Augustine and St. Gregory of Nyssa, stemmed from the Christian assertion that no one could buy or sell a creature that shared God’s likeness.

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From St. Paul onward, the development of individual rights and dignity remained a Christian project. Mr. Persico sides with scholars who find the rudiments of natural rights in the medieval period. As early as the 12th and 13th centuries, philosophers such as St. Thomas Aquinas identified reason as the home of God’s image in every person. Reason granted each individual the potential to understand the natural order and discern good from evil. Later Spanish theologians, such as Francisco de Vitoria and Bartolomé de las Casas, used innate reason to defend the inviolable humanity of Native Americans. 

In Mr. Persico’s account, the Protestant Reformation completed the project that Genesis began, entrenching individual autonomy and selfhood in Western culture. Here the author covers more familiar scholarly ground. Martin Luther’s personal spiritual struggles brought St. Paul’s inwardness to its fullest expression; after Luther, Mr. Persico writes, “God no longer resided in the heavens, but in the human heart.” Conscience became the Christian’s guide to religious truth, replacing church and tradition, and birthing a radical individual autonomy that could challenge governments and rulers. In this manner, Protestantism begat modern liberalism and individualism. Mr. Persico declares Locke “one of liberalism’s founding fathers” for weaving all of these strands together—“the image of God, natural law, reason and rights”—in his political philosophy. The originally Christian defense of the individual autonomous subject became a liberal cultural and political worldview.

Mr. Persico’s narrative is persuasively linear. This may leave the reader unprepared for the book’s final, provocative twist. It is an ingenious argument: The value and freedom of individuals are gradually asserted against God himself. It is not science and technical progress that nurtures modern atheism but rather the very “image of God” tradition revolting against God. Atheism is thus a normative rather than a scientific position: An all-powerful God eventually becomes the obstacle to individual flourishing, where human value “comes not from realizing the image of God inside us” but from denying God’s very existence. Mr. Persico might have added the well-known words of the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin: “If God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.” The “image of God” tradition contains the seeds of its own destruction.

Mr. Persico’s erudite account is at times reductive. “In God’s Image” often brushes past fierce debates about the value of the human person. The fourth-century Christian attacks on slavery were later met with vociferous defenses of the practice, and the persistence of slavery into modern times requires accounting. Las Casas’ arguments about Native Americans softened the hearts of very few Christian conquistadors. Mr. Persico mentions that Martin Luther hated Jews and persecuted heretics, and he acknowledges that Locke excluded Catholics and atheists from toleration. But his story would be enriched by lingering on these contradictions, demonstrating how the “image of God” was an uneven standard intermittently applied. The line from Genesis to modern human dignity and rights is neither straight nor unbroken.

Most importantly, however, the history of “God’s image” cannot stop short in secularism. By 1947, Malik and Cassin were not the only 20th-century philosophers and theologians who, in the wake of historical catastrophes, sought to rebuild selfhood, dignity and rights on religious foundations. The 20th-century story of the battle for human rights and dignity, which culminated in the U.N. declaration, should have a place in Mr. Persico’s narrative. He ends his book with a call to rethink the “image of God” tradition, but the recovery of this tradition has already begun.

Mr. Persico has produced a provocative account of a vital subject, uncovering the religious roots of the West’s enduring commitment to individual dignity and value. The question that looms, however, is whether that commitment—sustained by the belief in humanity’s reflection of God—can survive in a godless world.

Ms. Siljak is a professor of humanities at the Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida.