By Chestly Allen Lunday
During a panel discussion at the recent Evangelical Press Association convention in the Nashville area, two journalists unexpectedly debated whether Gen Z is returning to church. Billy Hallowell of CBN cited Barna statistics saying it is. Bob Smietana of Religion News Service pushed back on the methodology. The audience left with more questions than answers.
Both journalists were probably right. They were simply measuring different things. And neither asked the question that actually matters for the church.
The debate about whether Gen Z is returning to church is the wrong debate. The question church leaders should be sitting with is more complex and more urgent: What are the members of Gen Z reaching for when they reach toward us, and what will they find when they arrive?
Walking Into the Future Backward
Marshall McLuhan, a linguist and professor whom many in Silicon Valley named a digital prophet, observed that when a new medium creates total environmental disruption, people don’t move confidently forward. They reach backward. They retrieve older forms, older rituals, older communities — not because they’ve been intellectually persuaded, but because they need something that doesn’t move while everything does. “We look at the present through a rear-view mirror,” McLuhan wrote. “We march backwards into the future.”
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“What are the members of Gen Z reaching for when they reach toward us, and what will they find when they arrive?”
That is what is happening right now. The same disruption that has destabilized every institution Gen Z was handed — media, government, education, commerce — has created a hunger for stability, for embodied community, for something that feels permanent. The aesthetic of tradition. The weight of liturgy. The warmth of gathered people who seem to know who they are.
This is retrieval. Sometimes it’s conversion.
The institutional temptation is to read this “return to faith” as affirmation — to conclude that the forms finally worked, that the preaching finally landed, that patience has been rewarded. This reading is understandable. It is also a misreading that will cost us the moment entirely if we act on it.
A Better Understanding Of “Digital”
Before we go further, I need to stop and say something clearly, because the word “digital” is doing far more work in this conversation than most church leaders realize.
When I say digital, I do not mean social media. I do not mean live-streaming your Sunday service. I do not mean a better church app. The printing press didn’t give people a new way to copy text. It aggregated knowledge into mass-replicable, easily distributable forms — and that single shift was the prerequisite for everything that followed. The Enlightenment required a literate public with shared access to ideas. Democracy required an informed citizenry. The scientific method required findings that could be published, replicated, and built upon. The Industrial Revolution required technical knowledge that could travel faster than a human teacher. Every one of those civilizational transformations was downstream of one technological reality: Knowledge could be copied and distributed at scale.
And here is what that did to institutions — including the church. The printing press era produced and then required centralized institutions to aggregate, validate, and distribute that knowledge. Universities. Publishing houses. Denominations. Governments. Corporations. The institution became the gatekeeper of what counted as legitimate knowledge, legitimate authority, legitimate community. The church was shaped by that logic for 400 years — the sermon as broadcast, the creed as authorized text, the denomination as the body that certifies whose theology counts.
The digital revolution is doing the inverse. It is not aggregating knowledge into centralized, replicable forms. It is disaggregating it — distributing authority, decentralizing governance, disintermediating every institution that based its power on controlling access to aggregated knowledge. The institutions the printing press built — including the institutional church — are experiencing exactly what you would expect when their founding sociological assumption is reversed.
That is the scale of what we are inside right now. Not a new communication channel; this is the end of one civilizational era and the beginning of another.
The generation we are talking about has grown up in the early stages of a transformation moving toward the full embodiment of digital technology in everyday physical life. Not screens you look at. Technology you wear. Augmented reality that layers digital information over the physical world you inhabit. Artificial intelligence embedded in every decision environment. Machines you relate with and speak to. Economic systems built on blockchain that bypass centralized institutional gatekeepers entirely. Governance structures — decentralized autonomous organizations — that distribute authority through code and consensus rather than through hierarchy and appointment. Ray Kurzweil and others have described the endpoint of this trajectory as the singularity: the moment when the boundary between digital and physical existence effectively dissolves.
We are not there yet. But the generation we are discussing was born into the world where these pieces began assembling, and they very well could see it. They do not experience digital technology as a tool they pick up and put down. They experience it the way a fish experiences water — as the environment itself, invisible precisely because it is total.
I am 39 years old. I am a bridge. I can see both shores. And what I want to communicate to Free Methodist leaders reading this article is not a technology briefing. It is an honest account of the distance between those shores. The world this generation inhabits — the world their children will inhabit — is not a digitized version of the world that produced our current ecclesiological forms. It is a different world. And different worlds produce different worldviews (not theological, but anthropological).
This is not rebellion. It is Reformation.
What the Data Actually Says About the Gen Z Debate
In December 2022, we fielded a national faith study with 1,276 Americans ages 13–55, conducted by the Center for Generational Kinetics. In August 2023, we followed with a study of 1,000 people who self-identified as open or interested in Christian community. The data doesn’t tell a simple story about return. It tells a precise story about a generation navigating this paradigm shift.
Among the general population, 68.6% of Americans identify as spiritual. Only 55.8% identify as religious. That 12.8-point gap between spiritual and institutional religious identity is the Hallowell-Smietana debate in a single number. Barna is measuring spiritual interest. Smietana is correctly observing that institutional metrics don’t confirm a return. Both are right. Neither is telling the whole story.
For older Gen Z — 19 to 26-year-olds making genuinely independent faith decisions — spiritual identification holds near 67% while religious identification drops to 57%. The gap widens precisely as young people individuate. They are not becoming less interested in God. They are becoming more discerning about institutions.
Perhaps the most significant number in our research: 27.8% of faith-interested young Americans are believers who are not active in a local church. They believe. They are open. They are not in the room. They are not lost. They are waiting to find a community whose floor doesn’t feel like every other institutional floor they’ve watched give way. Or, possibly, more likely, waiting for resonance to models and forms that they recognize as native to their way of moving in the world.
Adding to this conundrum, this generation has extraordinarily sensitive institutional fraud detection. They know the difference between a community whose stability comes from their conviction to inherited forms nobody has examined lately, versus those who whose virtues come from intimacy with Jesus, and the fruit is an openness to the Spirit to do something unlike what God has done in our past. And they will feel it faster than any generation before them.
The Floor We Are Standing On
Here is the thing we are not saying loudly enough: Denominations are not on the stable institutional ground on which they are presenting themselves to younger generations.
The institutional forms of mainline and evangelical Protestantism — including the Free Methodist Church — are undergoing the same structural pressure as every institution built for the pre-digital, centralized, printing press era. The connectionalism Wesley designed was a stroke of genius for an agricultural society where information moved by horse and conviction traveled with the itinerant preacher. The forms his heirs preserved were appropriate for the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Neither maps cleanly onto a world of decentralized networks, distributed authority, and embodied digital existence.
If Wesley were alive today, I believe he would use his connectional virtues to build a model more congruent to this moment. He would let the moment and mission dictate the method — not the other way around.
B.T. Roberts saw an earlier version of this dynamic clearly in 1860. He watched the Methodist Episcopal Church preserve every form of Wesleyan polity while losing the conviction that gave those forms their power. He named it. He built something new. The question this generation asks of us is the same question Roberts asked of his denomination: Does the form still serve the principles, or has the form become the point?
If young people arrive seeking ground and discover that our floor is disintegrating too — that the stability we projected was aesthetic rather than structural — they will not simply leave. They will leave with a specific disillusionment. Not “church wasn’t for me,” but “church was dishonest about what it was.” In a world where experience is immediately sharable across networks, that disillusionment does not stay private.
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“Does the form still serve the principles, or has the form become the point?”
The HP Opportunity
Clayton Christensen’s account of HP’s printer business offers the most useful frame I know for what faithful institutional response looks like. When inkjet technology emerged as a disruptive innovation, HP’s dominant laser printer division would have killed it if they’d managed it from within the same structure. The laser division’s metrics, incentives, and processes were all optimized for sustaining the existing business. A disruptive innovation that threatened to cannibalize it would never survive that logic.
HP’s solution was to put the inkjet division in a completely separate building, in a different city, with its own mandate — and to give it explicit permission to disrupt the laser business if faithfulness to the mission required it. The result was that HP dominated both markets.
The existing connectional structure of the Free Methodist Church is the laser division. It is not evil. It served the world it was built for and still serves people well within that world. But its internal logic — conference polity, episcopal oversight, itinerant appointments, attendance metrics — may not produce the forms needed for a digitally embodied, decentralized generation. Every institutional incentive points toward preservation of the existing form.
What is needed is the FM equivalent of the Vancouver inkjet division: protected communities with explicit permission to build new wineskins. Hub-and-node architecture. Digital-physical hybrid formation pathways. Leadership recognized by demonstrated relational capital and spiritual fruit rather than positional appointment alone. Metrics that measure depth of formation rather than breadth of attendance. Governance structures that are participatory and transparent rather than hierarchical and insulated.
Not replacement. Coexistence. The laser division keeps running while the inkjet division figures out the future. And here is the honest thing: We do not yet know exactly what the inkjet division looks like. Because nobody does. The wineskin for a digitally embodied, decentralized age is still being discovered. What we know is that it will require experimentation, iteration, and the humility to learn from failure without treating failure as institutional threat … oh, and this is the big one, a permission for our people to switch to the inkjet printer without envy or penalty.
It’s Time to Ask the Better Question
The Nashville debate may pressure church leaders to ask: How do we get Gen Z? This is the wrong question, and acting on it without structural reform will accelerate the fracture rather than prevent it. You cannot bring a generation of institutional refugees into a disintegrating institutional structure and expect them not to notice. And you cannot respond to a world-historical paradigm shift — the reversal of 400 years of printing press logic — with a simple social media strategy.
The right question is more serious and generative: What does faithfulness look like for the generation beyond Gen Z? Not what form of church will attract 24-year-olds today — but what structure of community will carry the gospel faithfully into the world that comes after this disruption? What does Wesleyan connexion look like when the connexion is networked and if the itineracy is digital? What does sanctifying community look like if formation happens in hybrid physical-digital space? What does authority look like when influence flows through trust and demonstrated conduct rather than institutional gatekeeping?
These questions cannot be answered by current institutional leaders alone. They are products of the existing form. Their instincts, their competencies, their measures of success are all calibrated to the wineskin that worked for them. This is not a critique. It is simply true. The most faithful thing a current leader can do is ask the right question, create protected space for it to be answered, and then invite people not yet in the room to help build what comes next.
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“What does faithfulness look like for the generation beyond Gen Z?”
This is Wesley’s method. He did not manage the class meeting from the top. He identified people in whom the Spirit was already at work, gave them authorization, and trusted the connexion to hold them accountable. He asked the question and invited others to build the answer.
Roberts did the same. He named the drift, articulated the principle, and gathered people willing to build something that served the mission rather than the institution.
The moment asks it of us again. Gen Z is reaching toward the church not because we finally persuaded them, but because the world is shifting under their feet, and they are looking for ground. The question is not how to capture that moment for institutional benefit. The question is whether we are willing to do the work — structural, theological, imaginative — to be what they actually need.
And whether we are honest enough to admit that we cannot do that work alone. That we must invite others — people who swim in the water we are only beginning to see — to help us build it.
Not a floor that looks stable.
A foundation that is.
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Chestly Allen Lunday is a researcher, strategist, and ministerial candidate in the Pacific Coast Japanese Conference of the Free Methodist Church. He is the author of “The Million Member Church” and the “Designing the Future of Faith” national research studies, which you can access at millionmemberchurch.com/research.
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