Jessica Koulianos has watched enough church trends come and go to know the difference between momentum and hunger.
She grew up in ministry watching her father, televangelist Benny Hinn, travel the globe. Then, after renewing her relationship with God as an adult, she helped build Jesus Image with her husband, Michael Koulianos, and now serves inside a church community where a large share of the room is young and serious about faith. For a generation often analyzed as anxious or spiritually unmoored, Koulianos sees something more hopeful happening.
Young people, she said, aren’t wandering back into church because Christianity suddenly became culturally interesting again. They’re showing up because they’re tired of shallow answers.
“What I’m seeing is they want something tangible, they want something real,” Koulianos said. “It’s really encouraging to me.”
At Jesus Image, Koulianos sees it across generations, from ministry students to older adults to her own children. She’s careful not to flatten an entire generation into one glowing spiritual success story. Gen Z still has struggles. They still live with the same pressures that come with being young in a broken world. But the hunger she’s seeing feels unusually focused.
She doesn’t remember her own generation chasing God with this level of seriousness.
“They don’t want hype,” Koulianos said. “They don’t want something fake. They don’t want counterfeit. They want Jesus.”
Much of modern church culture has been built around making faith feel accessible and relevant. Sometimes that helps. Sometimes it produces a room full of people who know the language of Christianity but never develop the inner life to sustain it.
Koulianos believes Gen Z can tell the difference. A generation raised inside the algorithm has developed a strong radar for performance. They know when they’re being sold something. They know when authenticity has been focus-grouped. When it comes to faith, she said, many of them are asking for something rooted enough to survive real life.
“They want to hear the real Bible,” Koulianos said. “They don’t want to hear TED Talks. They don’t want to hear about your experience. If your experience points them to Jesus, great. But they want the word of the Lord.”
For Koulianos, that hunger only matters if it becomes formation. Interest in Jesus is beautiful, but spiritual curiosity has to become spiritual maturity. Otherwise, it stays a moment, and moments are notoriously bad foundations.
Her definition of maturity is simple enough to sound almost too obvious: A mature Christian looks like Jesus.
“You know you’re walking in maturity when you look more like Him and less like yourself,” Koulianos said.
That kind of growth, she said, can’t be reduced to religious optics. Church attendance matters. Scripture matters too. But no spiritual practice is meant to become a performance scorecard. The point is intimacy with Jesus.
Koulianos knows how easily Christians can confuse routine for relationship. Growing up in church gave her language and proximity to faith, but she said she had to learn what it meant to know Jesus for herself. Religious familiarity can make a person look spiritually fluent while their actual connection with God remains thin.
The way out, she said, begins with making time.
“I know it sounds so basic, but spending time with Him,” Koulianos said. “You have to actually make the time for Him.”
For Koulianos, that meant putting a timer on her phone, shutting the door, opening Scripture and staying there even when she felt distracted. At first, it felt forced. Then it became familiar. Eventually, it became the kind of daily rhythm she could feel herself missing.
This is where her view of formation gets refreshingly practical. She isn’t describing some mystical elite tier of Christianity reserved for people who naturally wake up at 5 a.m. glowing with discipline. She describes herself as easily distracted and not naturally regimented. The habit had to be built.
“You can’t just add the Lord on your day,” Koulianos said. “You can’t be like, I gotta do a million things and we can even do this when we’re in full-time ministry. Like I gotta do all the things for God and be busy … but I haven’t given Him any attention and you wonder why you don’t feel good inside.”
There’s the line many Christians probably don’t want to sit with too long. It’s possible to be busy around God without being close to God. Ministry can do it. Church involvement can do it. So can a steady diet of Christian content that creates the illusion of depth without requiring the quiet, unseen work of formation.
Koulianos compares intimacy with Jesus to marriage. She doesn’t wake up every morning wondering how to keep her husband from abandoning her. A healthy relationship isn’t sustained by panic. It’s sustained by love and presence. She believes the Christian life works the same way.
“You don’t have to produce works and try to muster up things to feel accepted by Him or by others,” Koulianos said. “You need to walk in real sonship.”
This is also why she keeps returning to Scripture. For Koulianos, going deeper spiritually means moving beyond borrowed faith and secondhand inspiration. Testimonies matter, she said, but they’re not the whole diet.
She remembers a season when she kept sharing her story with Jesus School students until her husband gently told her they had already heard it. It was time to study Scripture more deeply.
“And again, not that your testimony is not beautiful,” Koulianos said. “You should always share what the Lord has done. But if the Lord’s going to trust you with His work, you actually have to get deeper.”
Depth matters because life is not gentle. A faith built on aesthetics, personalities or someone else’s spiritual fire will eventually be tested. Leaders fail. Churches disappoint. Pain interrupts the clean story people thought they were living. When that happens, Koulianos said, shallow foundations don’t hold.
“If a foundation is built on anything other than Jesus, none of us will have longevity,” Koulianos said.
That is where her hope for Gen Z becomes more than demographic optimism. She’s hopeful because she believes they’re asking better questions about what faith is actually built on. Celebrity-driven Christianity has lost some of its shine. Hype has an expiration date. Scripture does not.
Koulianos believes this generation may help pull the Church back toward the basics, which sounds quaint until you realize how much of modern Christian life has been spent trying to improve on them.
“I really do feel this,” Koulianos said. “They are going to bring us back to the simplicity of the cross, the simplicity of loving Jesus, the simplicity of being a faithful follower.”
Her vision for the future of the Church is direct: She wants to see the Church look more like Jesus. For Koulianos, every answer eventually comes back there because every other answer is too small.
The story of Gen Z and faith is still unfolding. It would be naive to pretend every young person is suddenly racing toward spiritual depth. But it would be just as naive to ignore the hunger showing up in churches and ministry schools where young Christians are asking for something sturdier than vibes.
Koulianos sees a generation tired of spiritual fog machines looking for the real thing. If she’s right, the most interesting thing happening in the Church right now may be a return.
“The foundation of our life is Jesus,” Koulianos said. “We didn’t say yes to Christianity to be a Christian. We said yes to Christianity because we want Jesus.”
