You’ve tried everything.
The youth programs. The small groups. The mission trips designed to spark something. You’ve adjusted the music, updated the graphics, invited speakers who understand “their generation.” You’ve read the books on reaching Millennials, Gen Z and now Gen Alpha. You’ve prayed. You’ve prayed so much.
And still… they fade.
Not dramatically, usually. No protest signs or press releases. Silence, and then absence. The chair at family dinner where they used to debate theology now holds someone scrolling through their phone, half-present. The student who once asked the sharpest questions in youth group stops showing up entirely. Your own child, the one you raised in the faith, starts saying things like “I’m spiritual, but I’m not really into organized religion anymore.”
If you’re a parent, pastor, mentor, or small group leader watching this happen, you already know the statistics don’t capture the ache. Six in ten young Christians walk away by age 29. But the numbers don’t tell you what it’s like to watch it happen in real time to someone you love.
And if you’re reading this after years of pouring yourself out trying to keep young people connected to faith, I want you to know I’m not here to add to your guilt. You’re probably already carrying enough of that. The fact that you’re still reading, still caring, still asking “what can I do differently?” tells me something about your heart. This isn’t about what you’ve done wrong. It’s about what we might build together going forward.
The Question That Keeps Us Stuck
I’ve noticed something about most of the conversations I hear around this exodus: they’re organized around a single question.
How do we get them back?
It’s a reasonable question. It comes from a genuine place of love and concern. But I’m starting to wonder if it’s the wrong question entirely.
Think about what that question assumes. It positions the church as a static destination and the young person as a lost item to be located and returned. It frames the problem as retrieval. It subtly suggests that if we could find the right strategy, the right program, the right argument, we could bring them home.
But what if they’re not lost in the way we think they are?
The reality tells a more complicated story. Young people aren’t primarily leaving because they’ve rejected Jesus. They’re leaving because the institutional experience no longer feels connected to their real lives, their real questions, or the real God they’re hungry to encounter. Over a third of young Christians say they feel unable to ask their hardest questions in church. Not because those questions aren’t welcome on paper, but because something in the culture signals that doubt is dangerous rather than developmental.
(And if you’re feeling defensive right now, please, stay with me. I’m not here to blame you. I’m here because I think there might be a better question.)
The Reframe
What if instead of asking “How do we get them back?” we started asking:
What kind of community would be worth returning to?
That’s a different question entirely. It shifts the burden from the departing young person to the community itself. It invites introspection rather than strategy. It asks us to examine what we’re inviting them into.
This isn’t about making the church “cooler” or more “relevant.” Those words make me cringe, honestly. Young people can smell inauthenticity from miles away. They’re not looking for better production values or hipper music. They’re looking for something far more basic and far more demanding: integrity.
People leave churches not primarily because of theological disagreements, but because of felt experience. Perceived hypocrisy. A sense that what’s preached doesn’t match how people live. Environments where questions feel unsafe. The gap between the Jesus they read about in Scripture and the culture they experience on Sunday morning.
Think about the difference between a store and a home. You visit a store when you need something. You evaluate whether they have what you’re looking for. If the experience is bad, you leave a negative review and never come back. But home?
Home is where people know your name, where you can show up messy, where you belong even when you’re not performing. Too many young people experienced church as a storefront… a place to consume religious services, evaluate the product, and move on when it stopped meeting their needs. What they’re hungry for is a home. And you can’t build a home with better marketing.
They’re not rejecting a complex theological system they understand. Many of them don’t know enough about historic Christianity to reject it. They’re reacting to an institutional experience that felt controlling, shallow, or disconnected from the God they want to find.
The Ones Who Haven’t Closed the Door
This might surprise you: about 30% of young people who leave aren’t rejecting Jesus at all.
They’re classified as “Exiles.” And understanding who they are changes everything about how you approach this.
What makes Exiles different? They’re not the ones posting manifestos on social media about why they’re done with Jesus. They’re not the ones who’ve rebuilt their entire worldview around a different spirituality. They’re the ones who quietly stopped showing up but still feel a pang when worship music comes on in the grocery store. They still pray sometimes, in the privacy of their own heads, even though they’d never admit it. They believe in God… they’re not sure they believe in us.
And this is what matters: they’re watching. They’re watching to see if anyone notices they’re gone. They’re watching to see if the church can be something different than what pushed them away. They haven’t closed the door. They’ve stepped back to see if anyone will come looking.
They want to follow Christ. They’re hungry for authentic faith. They feel like the church, as they’ve experienced it, doesn’t connect with their real life anymore. They’re not against Jesus. They’re not sure they’re into… us.
(That stings a little, doesn’t it? It stings me too.)
What “Worth Returning To” Looks Like
The early church in Acts gives us a picture.
“All the believers devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching, and to fellowship, and to sharing in meals, and to prayer… And each day the Lord added to their fellowship those who were being saved” (Acts 2:42, 47, NLT).
Notice what’s not there. No mention of programs. No strategic initiatives. No “how do we reach the next generation” task forces.
What is there is presence. Daily. Embodied. Shared meals, shared teaching, shared prayer. They were the church every day, not a place people attended on weekends.
I’m not romanticizing the early church (they had their problems). But I am wondering what it would look like if we stopped trying to retrieve young people and started building communities characterized by that kind of relational depth.
Because this is what consistently proves true about young people who stay connected to faith: almost universally, they can name at least one adult who invested in them personally. Not a program. A person. Someone who knew their name, asked real questions, listened to their doubts without flinching, and walked alongside them through the mess of becoming an adult.
That’s not scalable. It’s not efficient. It can’t be systematized or tracked with attendance metrics.
But it’s what works.
I know what you’re thinking. “That’s great for small churches, but I’m looking at a congregation of hundreds (or a youth group of dozens) and exactly three volunteers who show up.” Fair. I’m not asking you to personally mentor every young person in your orbit. But I am asking you to consider: what if even five young people in your context had one adult who knew them? What if you trained and empowered even a handful of ordinary, imperfect members to be that presence for someone? You don’t need to scale presence. You need to distribute it.
When the Doctrinal Objection Comes Up
Now, I can hear the objection forming: “But some of them left because they wanted to live however they wanted without accountability. Some of them left because they rejected biblical authority.”
And yes, that’s sometimes true. I’m not suggesting we water down truth to make it more palatable.
But even in those cases, I’d gently ask: did the relational foundation exist that would have made those hard conversations possible? Or did the doctrine come across as rules without relationship? There’s a difference between someone leaving because they wrestled with truth in community and found they couldn’t accept it, and someone leaving because they never felt safe enough to wrestle in the first place.
The young people drifting into “spiritual but not religious” territory aren’t building their own belief systems out of rebellion. Most of them are doing it because external spiritual authority felt unsafe, controlling, or hypocritical. When you’ve been hurt by people claiming to represent God, of course you’d rather trust yourself. That’s not rebellion. That’s survival.
But even though the motivation is understandable, the outcome creates its own crisis. Being your own ultimate authority sounds liberating until you realize you’re alone in territory you don’t fully understand, trusting intuition that could be wisdom or could be anxiety you’ve mistaken for divine guidance.
That’s where they are. And they need someone who can meet them there, not with immediate correction, but with patient presence that earns the right to speak truth.
What Reconciliation Looked Like for Me
When I finally joined a church after over a decade of wandering through my own version of “spirituality without institution,” I was terrified.
I need to be clear about where I’d been. I wasn’t raised outside of Christianity… I was raised in it. But somewhere along the way, I started blending Christian language with practices that weren’t exactly by the book. I talked about prayer and manifestation in the same breath. I encouraged people (including myself) to trust intuition as divine guidance while quietly setting aside the parts of Scripture that felt inconvenient. All of it wrapped in enough Jesus language that it felt like spiritual growth, not drift.
The Holy Spirit had other plans. And His conviction was persistent, not shaming, relentless in the best way. A growing discomfort I couldn’t ignore. Questions I didn’t want to answer. A widening gap between what I was building and what I claimed to believe.
So when I finally walked back into a church, I expected judgment. I expected interrogation about where I’d been and what I’d done. I expected to have to prove I was serious before anyone would take me seriously.
What I found was different.
A vicar who listened to my story, affirmed my journey, and encouraged me to do what I’m doing now, this, what you’re reading. A rector who connected with my husband and me like he wanted to know us. Because he did. A spiritual director who helped me see myself the way Jesus does instead of the way my shame insisted I should be seen. And that broke me in ways that I really can articulate.
For the first time in a long time, I wasn’t alone. Not in the theoretical sense (God is with you, which is true but can feel abstract when you’re drowning). With people. In flesh and blood community. Being known.
That’s what made me want to stay. Not the theology, though the theology matters. Not the programs. The people who made space for me without demanding I have it all figured out first.
When Doubt Belongs Inside, Not Outside
There’s this moment in John’s gospel where Thomas doubts the resurrection. He’s not politely skeptical. He’s emphatic: “I won’t believe it unless I see the nail wounds in his hands, put my fingers into them, and place my hand into the wound in his side” (John 20:25, NLT).
And Jesus doesn’t scold him. Doesn’t lecture him about the importance of faith. He shows up, extends his hands, and says, “Put your finger here… Don’t be faithless any longer. Believe!” (John 20:27, NLT).
That’s formation through relationship. That’s making space for doubt within the community, not outside it. Thomas didn’t have to go figure out his doubt alone before he was allowed back in. Jesus met him exactly where he was, inside the room, with the other disciples, in the mess of his unbelief.
What would it look like if our churches operated that way? If doubt was something we helped people navigate rather than something we signaled was dangerous?
What This Means for You
I’m not going to give you a five-step program. You’ve probably tried enough of those.
But I will ask you to sit with some uncomfortable questions:
If a young person showed up at your church or your dinner table tomorrow, full of doubt and half-formed spiritual questions and anger at how religion has hurt them, would they feel safe? Not safe to be agreed with. Safe to be honest. Safe to wrestle without being labeled “difficult” or “rebellious.”
When was the last time you asked a young person what they believe, and then listened without preparing your rebuttal? Not to correct them. To understand what they’re thinking.
Is your community a place where the messy middle of faith is welcome? Or do you (perhaps unintentionally) signal that everyone should have it together?
One Thing You Could Do This Week
For those of you feeling the weight of “but what do I do?”, something concrete.
Think of one young person who’s drifted. Someone who used to be in youth group. Your neighbor’s kid who stopped going to church. Your own child who’s “spiritual but not religious” now.
Don’t plan an intervention. Don’t prepare a theological argument.
Reach out with a question about their life. No agenda attached. “Hey, I was thinking about you. How are you doing?”
That’s it. That’s the start of presence.
See what happens.
The Invitation
You may not be able to retrieve the ones who’ve already left. That’s a hard truth, and I’m sorry. Some of them need to wander for a while. Some of them are working through wounds you didn’t cause. Some of them will find their way back eventually, in God’s timing, not yours.
But you can become someone worth finding.
You can become the kind of parent, mentor, pastor, or friend who makes Jesus make sense. Not through arguments or apologetics (though those have their place). Through presence. Through honesty about your own doubts and struggles. Through creating space where hard questions lead to deeper exploration rather than dismissal.
You can stop asking “How do I get them back?” and start asking “What am I building that might be worth returning to?”
And then build it.
Where This Leaves Me
I don’t have this figured out. I’m a couple years into rebuilding my own faith, still processing what it means to be part of a community after so many years of spiritual independence. Some days I still want to retreat into the safety of private spirituality where no one can hurt me and I don’t have to deal with the messiness of other believers.
But there’s something in Hebrews about not giving up on meeting together, about encouraging one another “all the more as you see the Day approaching” (Hebrews 10:25, NLT). And I’m starting to realize that’s not a guilt trip about church attendance. It’s an invitation to build something worth showing up for. Something that encourages. Something that holds people.
Maybe that’s what the young people in your life are looking for too.
Not a destination to be returned to.
A community worth being part of.
I wonder what would happen if we stopped chasing and started building that instead.
There’s a section in Paul’s letters about the church as a body, how each part needs the others, how we can’t say to any member “I don’t need you.” I’ve been sitting with what that means for how we think about the ones who’ve drifted. Maybe they’re not rejecting the body. Maybe they’re waiting to see if the body will notice they’re missing.
Something to think about.
