Gen Z isn't losing faith — they're losing confidence
We hear a lot about Gen Z walking away from faith. That isn't the whole story, and the part we're missing may be more important than the part we keep repeating.
Young adults are showing up. They're serving, joining small groups, bringing friends, and talking about Jesus more than the generations ahead of them. Lifeway Research's State of Discipleship study, released in June 2026, found that Gen Z churchgoers share their faith stories more often than any other generation surveyed. In the previous six months, the average Gen Z churchgoer had told someone their faith story nearly seven times. For churchgoers 61 and older, it was closer to three. Gen Z is not silent about Jesus.
But the same study found something troubling. Gen Z trailed every other generation in two of its eight signposts of spiritual maturity: exercising faith and living unashamed. On living unashamed, they scored 46.0 out of 100, against 66.9 for boomers and older, the widest generational gap in the study. They also reported lower agreement with several core theological beliefs. Nearly half said they typically doubt God is involved when something happens that they can't explain, and nearly half said that during difficult seasons, they sometimes question whether God loves them or will provide for them.
Young believers are willing to talk about Jesus, but many are still learning what it means to trust Him when their life gets hard. Faith may get them to church on Sunday and into a conversation about Jesus on Monday. The harder question is what happens on Tuesday, when a prayer hasn't been answered, circumstances haven't changed, or they begin wondering whether God is really paying attention.
Some of that is just age. But I also think about the culture they grew up in. This generation has heard repeatedly that truth is personal: live your truth, find what works for you, don't tell someone else what's true for them. Then they meet Jesus, who claims to be the truth for everyone. For someone raised to distrust absolutes, it makes sense that they might talk boldly about Jesus one day and wonder the next whether they really had the right to.
I've been thinking about that gap because I lived in it, too.
At 17, I left home and started living on my own terms. I could have told you exactly what I believed if you asked me on a Sunday. Even while making choices, I knew didn't honor the Lord or His Word, I would still get dressed after a night of partying and go to church. You would never have known what the night before looked like, because I was there, sitting in church.
I still believed in the Lord. I had simply stopped allowing that belief to shape the rest of my week. After years of chasing freedom that kept leaving me empty, I found myself sitting in a jail cell at 22. That was when I started asking whether truth existed outside of me.
It did. Truth wasn't something I could create or change according to what felt right in the moment. Truth was found in Jesus. That's why John 14:6 has meant so much to me ever since. Jesus said, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” He didn't say He was one possible truth among many. He said He is the truth.
My problem wasn't that I didn't know what Christians believed. I knew. My problem was that I wasn't living as though it were true.
That's why I don't look at a young person who loves Jesus, talks about Him, and still wrestles with doubt and assume something is wrong with their faith. Scripture gives us plenty of room for people who believe and still have questions. In Mark 9, a father comes to Jesus desperate for his son to be healed. He tells Jesus he believes, and then immediately asks Him to help his unbelief. Faith and doubt show up in the same sentence, and Jesus doesn't send him away.
Wrestling with questions is not the same thing as walking away. But questions have to be taken somewhere solid, and that is where the Word matters.
The Word is what holds
The answer isn't another program or a better strategy. It's knowing God's Word. Not a few verses, and not whatever we absorbed on Sunday, but learning it well enough that it starts shaping how we think and stays hidden in our hearts for the moments we need it.
That growth is quiet, and slow, and mostly nobody sees it. You open Scripture when there's no reason to and nothing in you wants to. You keep praying about something that hasn't moved in a year. You obey God in a decision no one will ever know you made. And you stay close enough to a few people that they can ask how you're really doing and you can't get away with an easy answer. Confidence in God doesn't arrive all at once. It grows.
And this is also where boldness comes from. Boldness isn't a personality trait reserved for people who are naturally outgoing. In Acts 4, after the believers were ordered to stop speaking in the name of Jesus, they prayed for boldness, and Scripture says they were filled with the Holy Spirit and continued speaking the Word of God boldly. Paul said something similar from the other direction. He wasn't ashamed of the Gospel, because it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes. Their confidence wasn't in themselves. It was in Him.
Practice is part of growing
The answer isn't to tell young believers to stop talking about Jesus until they have everything figured out. None of us would ever talk about Jesus if that were the requirement.
In Philemon 1:6, Paul prayed that the sharing of Philemon's faith would become effective through knowing every good thing we have in Christ. The sharing and the knowing belong together.
Every time a young believer offers to pray for a coworker, tells someone what Jesus has done in their life, or answers a question about their faith, they are practicing something. Sometimes they find out how much they actually know. More often they find out what they don't. Someone asks them something they can't answer, and they go home and opens their Bible because now they want to know. Or they pray for a stranger and get to watch God do something they didn't expect.
Sharing our faith isn't only what we do once we're spiritually mature. It's one of the ways God matures us. That is what the numbers alone can't capture.
A generation willing to talk about Jesus is something worth encouraging. Scripture gives them something solid to stand on, while trusted people can help them ask difficult questions, grow in prayer, understand why they believe what they believe, and learn what it looks like to live that faith out in everyday life.
Faith that only shows up on Sunday isn't a Gen Z problem. It's a human one. Every generation has lived with some distance between what we say we believe and how we actually live. I lived in that distance for years, and no one sitting near me on a Sunday would have known it.
What encourages me is that this generation is already showing up and already speaking up. They don't need to be told to stop until they have everything figured out. They need His Word hidden in their hearts, the boldness to live it out on an ordinary weekday, and people who keep walking with them until what they're describing is what they're standing on.
Because Sunday matters. But so does Tuesday.
Naomi Anderson is the co-founder of Verity Collective.
