Something happened at Jaywalker’s Conference in 2023 that Jennie Allen keeps coming back to. She gave an altar call with her eyes closed, praying out loud, and when she opened them, hundreds of young people were already at the front — on their knees, voices repeating her prayer back to her. She hadn’t even seen them come forward.
“It was so sincere. It was so simple. It was so pure,” Allen says. “They just want God.”
It’s a striking image in a moment when the headlines about Gen Z and the Church tend to run in the opposite direction. Statistically, the picture is complicated: roughly one-third of Gen Z identifies as religiously unaffiliated, and the exodus from organized religion that began with Millennials has accelerated. It’s enough to make a lot of church leaders nervous.
But spend time with people who are actually in the room with this generation — not observing them from a distance, but working alongside them, teaching them, being led by them — and a different story starts to emerge. Not a story of a generation abandoning faith, but one of a generation quietly reshaping it. Here are four ways Gen Z is already changing the Church for the better.
1. They’re arriving at faith hungrier than any generation in recent memory.
There’s a reason Jennie Allen keeps comparing Gen Z to the young people her parents described from the Jesus Movement of the 1970s. That generation, she notes, turned to God out of the wreckage of sex, drugs and the disillusionment of war. They got everything the world promised and found it hollow. Sound familiar?
“It is a mercy of God to get everything that the world says will make you happy and to realize it doesn’t,” Allen says. “Because then you want God in a different way.”
Gen Z has lived this in real time. They’ve grown up with the entire world in their pockets — social media, pornography, curated highlight reels, infinite scroll — and for many of them, it delivered exactly what it promised and left them empty anyway. The disillusionment that took previous generations years to accumulate, Gen Z absorbed in childhood. And that, Allen argues, is precisely what makes them ready.
“They have tasted it all and they realize that it’s hopeless,” she says. “And they want something to mean more than the world they’re being offered.”
The evidence shows up in moments like Jaywalker’s. It showed up at Asbury. It shows up at youth events where, according to Allen, public confessions of sin have become almost commonplace. “In every situation,” she says, “it is in response to the gospel — that Jesus died for their sins, my sins, and is their hope.” When the gospel is actually preached to this generation, they respond. Desperately, openly and without embarrassment.
2. They’re pulling the Church back toward real community.
For all the concern about Gen Z’s relationship with technology, Jo Saxton — executive director of a leadership institute at Bethel University and founder of the Aza Collective — sees something different up close. At a recent baptism on campus, she watched a group of students surround their friend in the water and just go for it. No posturing. No cool detachment. No filter.
“There was no reserve,” she says. “They’re just like, let’s go. We’re in it.”
Jennie Allen sees the same instinct in how Gen Z is orienting their lives more broadly. Young people are leaving cities for small towns. They’re gravitating toward small churches. They’re hungry for something that feels, as Allen puts it, “like dinner and looking at eyeballs across the table — community that doesn’t have a filter on it.”
This matters because the Church has spent years trying to compete with the digital world rather than offering an alternative to it. Gen Z, ironically, may be the generation that finally pushes it back toward the irreplaceable thing it has always had to offer: actual people, in actual rooms, doing life together. Allen is careful to say they haven’t fully arrived there yet. But she argues the craving itself is the point — and the Church’s job is to recognize and meet it.
It’s also worth noting that Gen Z is statistically the loneliest generation in American history. A 2018 Cigna study found that 69 percent of Gen Z feel lonely some of the time, and 68 percent feel like nobody knows them well. That’s not a crisis the Church can scroll past. It’s an invitation.
3. They’re forcing the Church to earn trust instead of assuming it.
This one is harder to hear, but it may be the most important. According to Springtide Research Institute, Gen Z gives the Church a 4.9 out of 10 on trust. Nine out of 10 Americans say the American Church is too judgmental. Nearly as many call it hypocritical. For a generation that has watched institution after institution fail to live up to its own stated values, the Church doesn’t get a pass just because it’s the Church.
For previous generations, the Church carried an assumed cultural authority — a sense that even if you had doubts, the building on the corner was still the de facto place to take them. Gen Z doesn’t operate that way. They will simply refuse to align with institutions that don’t share their values, and no amount of branding or programming will change that.
Here’s the gift hidden inside that: Gen Z’s skepticism is honest. And honest skepticism, when the Church is willing to receive it rather than dismiss it, is exactly the kind of pressure that produces accountability. Allen describes sitting with her daughter through a season of serious doubt in middle school — “Mom, I don’t think it’s true. I don’t believe in God” — and choosing to stay present in it rather than panic.
“I said, ‘I want to be here with you. I think this is good. I think it’s good for you to wrestle with this,'” Allen says.
That posture — meeting doubt with presence rather than defensiveness — is what Gen Z is asking of the Church. Not agreement on every question, but honesty. Not polish, but integrity. The Church that’s willing to be held to that standard will be stronger for it. The one that isn’t will keep watching young people walk out the door.
4. They’re making the Church look more like the world it’s trying to reach.
Gen Z is the most racially, culturally and theologically diverse generation in American history. Because of this, they take diversity and inclusion not as progressive talking points but as baseline assumptions. They grew up connected online to people of different races, backgrounds, sexual orientations and religious beliefs. They expect to see that reflected in the spaces they inhabit.
That expectation is already reshaping the Church in concrete ways. Saxton, who has spent years investing in women leaders across industries and generations, notes that Gen Z doesn’t arrive in church spaces still arguing about whether women belong at the table.
“Gen Z is coming in with the expectation that men and women lead together,” she says. “That’s just normal to them.”
The same is true of racial diversity. In spaces where older generations are still treating representation as an aspiration, Gen Z is treating it as an assumption — and quietly moving on from communities that haven’t caught up. Their presence doesn’t just challenge the Church to diversify for optics. It challenges the Church to reflect the actual breadth of God’s people, which is what the New Testament describes it as being in the first place.
Taken together, these aren’t the traits of a generation abandoning the Church. They’re the traits of a generation that could rescue it — if the Church is willing to be shaped by the people it keeps saying it’s trying to reach.
“The real secret for the Church,” as one observer put it, “will be learning that their mission is not simply to shape Gen Z, but also to be shaped by them.”
At Jaywalker’s Conference, Jennie Allen opened her eyes and found hundreds of young people already on their knees. She hadn’t asked them to move that fast. She hadn’t seen them coming.
Maybe that’s the point.
