Practitioners Reflect: What the Data Means for Youth Ministry Today
The conversation about young people and religion has shifted. For decades, the dominant story was one of decline, driven by the absence of teens and young adults in pews, the rise of the religious “Nones,” and the erosion of trust in religious institutions. These days, different headlines are surfacing, highlighting thriving religious communities, a growing interest in traditional forms of worship, and the religious enthusiasm of a subset of young people today. A new narrative has thus begun to take hold, one about a religious resurgence among America’s youngest generations.
These conflicting narratives raise questions: Is religion still declining in the United States or is there a religious revival? Do emerging modes of religious identity, belief, and practice call for new understandings of religion altogether? And what do these trends mean for youth ministry today?
We asked practitioners—theologians, religious leaders, teachers, and youth mentors—to reflect on our latest data, a national survey of nearly 3,000 young people and 51 in-depth interviews:
- The Four Dimensions of Young People’s Spiritual and Religious Lives
- Parents, Peers, & Personal Belief: A Framework for Young People’s Religious Involvement
Here are five themes that surfaced from these contributors’ reflections on young people and religion.
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The “decline” vs. “resurgence” narratives are incomplete on their own.
Across their reflections, practitioners share their experiences with young people, noting how the spiritual lives of teens and young adults are often more nuanced than either narrative suggests. Some young people, for example, identify as religious but say they only attend religious services to satisfy their parents’ wishes. Others have never set foot in a place of worship but express an undoubting belief in a higher power. Some are drawn to long-standing religious traditions; others to a mix of contemporary religious and secular ideas. Some are joining a religious tradition for the first time, and others are leaving it. Thus, how we understand and measure religious identity, belief, behavior, and community can shape the picture that emerges of religion in the United States. A single measure or a single narrative may not fully capture how young people’s religious and spiritual lives—diverse, rich, and complex as they are—can blur boundaries and challenge existing understandings of organized religion.
Ministry leaders . . . have experienced these trends, noticing an uptick in young people coming back to church, expressing how hopeful it makes them feel. Yet, many young people are not practicing or engaging in their religious traditions in the same ways as generations before them, or as generations before them might expect people to.
Belief, identity, practice, and community don’t always move together.
There is, it would seem, a significant gap between stated religious identity on the one hand and active involvement in a religious community on the other. Practitioners of different religious traditions will respond to this data according to the lights of their own tradition. From my own Catholic perspective, the data presents a challenge centering on the question: What does it mean to be a person of faith? Or, more specifically: Who is a Christian?
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Individual stories matter.
Survey data can helpfully point us to broad patterns in the religious landscape of our society. These data help us see how our individual experiences, like those in classrooms or youth ministry groups, connect to a larger, shared social reality. They can also offer insight into how different experiences or identities—such as one’s age, religious upbringing, school context, and so on—relate to or influence each other. This can be helpful when designing programming or ministry approaches that will resonate with teens and young adults. On the other hand, young people are not passive recipients of the world around them, and we are not mentoring variables but real human persons. They are creative, active, and unique. The reflections from our practitioner partners remind us that statistics can help us identify patterns while conversations with young people allow us to understand, explain, and complicate those patterns. These writers highlight the need for practitioners to continually balance a bird’s eye view of social reality with the things that make the young person in front of us unlike any other young person in the world.
Sometimes statistics are not going to help you listen to a young person speak about how the Church hurt them or how they saw something that resembled the Virgin Mary on their first pilgrimage outside of their home country.
Statistics, polls, and other quantitative data can be great resources to show important trends in generations, and in society in general. Yet statistics cannot tell you what is on the hearts, minds, and souls of the young people in your communities.
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Relationships are the ends and means.
Social scientists have traced growing levels of social isolation in our society since the mid-20th century. Technological advances like the telephone, internet, and social media mean that we can extend our community beyond the limits of geography. They also mean, however, that fewer individuals connect with and support each other in person. It is in this context that good relationships—which young people characterize as nonjudgmental, open, kind, and reciprocal—within our local communities become particularly impactful. In fact, good relationships with trusted adults are often the cornerstone of belonging for young people. It is by being noticed, named, known, and needed that young people begin to feel like they play an important role, not just in their classroom or youth group, but in the world itself. The practitioners who reflected on Springtide’s data see clearly the importance of relationships in their own contexts. In fact, many view relationship as the goal of youth ministry, since it is the means by which the sacred makes itself seen, felt, and known.
Each of our relationships—[between humanity and our Creator, humanity and creation, and the relationships among human beings]—were created interrelated and any isolation of one from the other is problematic and can lead to damaging results.
Belonging becomes credible through concrete signs—being known and named, being welcomed into relationships, being given a place and a voice, being missed when absent. Worship is central, but communion is cultivated.
Human encounter is never merely social. In the presence of another person, something is at stake—an opening where God can meet us. Youth ministers know this. You can “run” an event without anyone being known. You can have a room full of teenagers and still have no community. And you can have a small group—six students, a leader, and a bag of chips—and find yourself in holy territory because someone finally tells the truth and is not punished for it.
Belonging does not simply mean providing a safe and welcoming space . . . it asks for something more. Each child should feel not just as though they fit in, but as though they are indispensable. They are the bits of color that make up the entire mosaic that is a faith community. In short: The youth need to believe that their setting would not be the same if they were not there. That is the essence of true belonging.
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Having true fun is important.
We repeatedly hear from teens and young adults that they desire and choose groups or activities that are “fun.” When asked to define what “fun” is, we see a wide variety of answers. Some young people describe fun as the opportunity to work together to accomplish a shared goal. For others, fun happens when they get to learn new skills on their own. Bowling is fun for some, and not fun for others. These different definitions of fun raise several questions: Is fun merely subjective? And is it even a goal worth pursuing? Our contributors weigh in, reflecting on the characteristics of fun and its implications for youth ministry. In these reflections, fun appears as more than a passing feeling—it is a deep and enduring sense of fulfillment that comes from finding meaning and purpose in one’s life. Helping young people have true fun thus becomes about helping young people discover, embrace, and joyfully live out their identity in community with others.
A cursory reading of this report might lead to the conclusion that faith communities should become more “fun” to attract and retain young people. But decades of youth ministry programs based on the assumption that faith communities can compete with secular forms of entertainment and succeed in luring young people to their buildings to “win” them for God have proven shallow and misguided. . . . As a disposition and virtue, joy is best cultivated within religious communities. True fun is joy . . . a community that gathers to rejoice and give thanks, a community that receives the gifts not only of the Creator, but from the young people that are looking for meaningful ways to contribute.
We must acknowledge that some young people will take faith seriously and/or experience the faith journey as “fun,” and others won’t do either while they’re in our care. Deep down, we know that chasing one or the other is pointless. We can’t control for fun or serious, and if we try, we inevitably fall short . . . We can teach young people about faith, we can provide opportunities for practice, and we can accompany them as they wrestle with traditions, stories, and ideas. We can listen closely, we can guide, and we can hold space for their process. As a youth worker, this sure sounds fun to me.
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Social media and AI are double-edged swords that aren’t going away.
Digital technologies like social media and artificial intelligence enable us to connect, educate, and learn. Indeed, many young people tell us that they use these platforms to gain a greater understanding of their faith tradition and deepen their religious identity and practice. We know that this technology can also lead to misinformation, social isolation, and distraction from the present. Some of our contributors argue that the reality of social media and AI calls for creativity around how to meet young people where they are—that is, online. At the same time, these contributors note how practitioners might help young people use social media and AI thoughtfully and responsibly, see the limitations of these technologies, and cultivate meaningful connections in person.
In an era where [teens] feel pressure about what to post on social media—and perhaps more importantly, what not to post—because of what others may think, young people need youth group to be a criticism-free refuge.
Our society offers myriad opportunities to connect, but the devices that connect us also generate modern byproducts of disconnection, isolation, and distraction. Youth long to be heard and seen in a world drowning in noise, movement, and graphics.
Where are [young people] going to learn about religion and spirituality? The most likely place is the internet. As AI search engines and social media have democratized information, young people have easy access to more experts and sources than ever before. But this democratization of information can also lead to misinformation, as well as a shallow or incomplete understanding of the complexity and depth of religious belief . . . The church needs to be willing to open itself to better understand and resource the strong belief that young people already carry, by creating bridges between the wisdom of historic religious traditions and spaces of new knowledge formation.
So, is there a religious revival in the US? Our contributors’ reflections on Springtide’s data suggest that the answer to this question depends on who you ask, how you ask, and what you define as “religious.” Perhaps it is the case that religion in the US has changed, taking on diverse analog and digital expressions that unbundle and blur the neat religious categories of the past. What remains as true as ever today is that young people seek meaning and support in their lives. They respond favorably to practices and rituals that help them find that meaning. And they feel and become most themselves in communities built on open, authentic, and caring relationships. Whether they will return to seeking those things within the boundaries of traditional organized religion remains to be seen.
The takeaways above are just a few of the many rich insights featured in our practitioner partners’ reflections on Springtide data. They offer a look into the complex realities of young people’s religious and spiritual lives today, providing data-informed recommendations for how to bring data-based insights to life in your own work. You can find their full reflections here.
