Receiving the Prophetic Voice of Young Adults

Rachel Collins and Falon Barton at the Restoration Collective conference in November 2025
emerge-collaborative.com

We have talked a lot already yesterday and today about shrinking numbers in our churches. We have experienced it personally and we have also seen it in the stats. And I have been grateful for the way we’ve challenged the correlative relationship between church health and church growth.

Because the stats have actually turned around. Church attendance, particularly among young people, has plateaued. It is no longer declining. In fact, some recent data suggests that young people in their teens and 20s may be the most regular church attenders for the first time in a long time.

But it’s not the good news it appears to be on the surface. This plateau is tied almost exclusively to young men who are drawn to Christian nationalism and patriarchy. The temptation to innovate into “getting young people back” into church has been strong, and in many cases, well-intended — but it’s leading to malformation like white Christian nationalism.

Thankfully, this is Restoration Collective. The folks in this room are inclined toward hope, not cynicism or despair. Rachel and I keep coming back to this group because you all care deeply about the local church and the kingdom of God without anxiety. This group is already equipped to see and hear the departure of young adults prophetically. Their departure is an invitation for us to reflect, to listen, to be transformed.

Young adults in every generation are always criticized by older folks because they call out the unhealthy parts of the status quo and call forth better ways for our communities to function. In the church, we call that a prophetic voice. And sometimes, the loudest message is walking away in silence.

But why are so many young adults done with church? And what do they want from us, as ministers and leaders, even if they never step foot inside our buildings?

Many have posited theories about why this might be. We went straight to young adults and just asked.

We conducted a comprehensive research study with young adults between the ages of 18 and 23 who consider themselves “done” with church and asked what drove them away.

Turns out many of the theories are spot on. They’re tired of partisanship, sexism, homophobia, abuse of power. They described instances when their doubts were met with hostility instead of openness, when their concerns were dismissed instead of taken seriously. They wanted relevance to their lives and could not find it in the pew.

Many of them said they still love Jesus, and they’re done with the church because it looks nothing like Christ.

These reasons probably don’t surprise you, just like they didn’t surprise us. In fact, we’d venture to guess that those of you who minister in churches or on college campuses have gone to painstaking efforts to do the opposite of their concerns.

But a couple trends did surprise us.

Young adults who described themselves as “done” were not monolithic — despite our best attempts to narrow the sample. Instead, they fell into one of two categories. 

The first group: I’m literally so done. The donest I’ve ever been. Stick a fork in me. I’m totally done.

The second group: I’m kinda done. But I could be wooed. I’m open. I might return. I’m done … until I have a good reason not to be.

They both had the same concerns.

But the first group spoke of pretty rough experiences with adults in their lives. Namely, their parents. But also mentors and other congregants.

Whereas the second group spoke fondly of conversations about faith that they had — and continue to have — with adults in their lives.

As ministry professionals, we often think we are the most important. We think our strategies, our knowledge, and our care supercede everyone else’s. As long as we as pastors know that young adults are prophetic, as long as we know how to stay calm in the midst of spiritual struggle, as long as we know how to ask good questions, then we are good to go, right?

The reality is, young adults aren’t coming straight to us. They’re talking to their peers. And then they’re talking to their parents. Then they’re talking to other congregants, like friends’ parents and mentors and lay leaders. THEN if we’re lucky, we may get to hear from them. 

Our conclusion?

Parents (and older lay leaders) are the most underutilized discipleship resource in young adult ministry.

So what does this mean for congregations? For leadership? For college ministries and ministers?

It means our task is not just to practice good pastoral care and leadership with young adults when they are with us. It means equipping their parents and mentors — really, our entire congregations — to do the same. 

So, based on our experience and research, what can we prioritize in young adult ministry as we head into 2026?

First, we need to create opportunities for intergenerational ministry.

Intergenerational spaces must exist in our ministries in order to facilitate mentorship and care. We cannot rely on silo-ed groups based on age, which has little to do with stage of life and provides little support to the participation, discernment, and discipleship that young adults need. We don’t need more programming for them. We need holistic connection.

Second, we need to provide substantive training to parents and congregants so that they can better minister to the young adults in their lives and in our churches.

That is, we all need to become better at encouraging hard questions and receiving young adults non-anxiously.

Do your congregants have a solid enough faith that they can hear the doubts, questions, and criticisms of young adults? Can they ask good questions without sounding defensive? Do they know how to let go of control while still being proactive and involved? These skills often don’t come intuitively, but they are vital for helping young adults feel like they belong in our communities.

And last, we need to allow young adults to challenge and reshape the ethos of our churches.

By equipping our congregants to receive young adults as they are, we can then shift into the real work of allowing the prophetic voices of young adults to change how we participate in the kingdom of God. How we embody the good news of Jesus.

To use language from yesterday young adults want what we want: resonance. The temptation to innovate looks something like making young adult ministry into Youth Group 2.0. The young adults we talk to can see through that. They are looking for resonance. They are looking for real, tangible, experiences with God and community.

Those of us in this room are committed to restoration, not just as a tradition but as a movement and a call to renewal. We are primed for this.

But receiving the prophetic voice of young adults is communal, not individual. Our task is to invite everyone in our churches and our ministries on that journey to do the same. 

But how? As we were transitioning out of college ministry at Pepperdine, we started to look around for how we could swim upstream, how we could help congregations faithfully understand and support the journey of faith in young adulthood. We couldn’t find anything that holistically equipped parents and older adults to care for young adult’s emotional, relational, social, mental, and spiritual wellbeing. We could not find the resource that we wished the congregations of our college students had.

So we created one.

In this ministry endeavor, we are creating courses, publishing podcast episodes, and compiling resources to pull back the curtain on emerging adulthood, especially during the college experience. We want to invite you to sit with us in our office with young adults and to hear their stories, their questions, and their lives. (By the way, thank you. So many of you in this room have encouraged and supported us on this journey of using our gifts and experiences to launch this ministry.)

We want to end by sharing three of the things we do with churches and families to help them receive the prophetic voice of young adults, so that all of us can grow in our faith.

First, we help familiarize ministers and their congregants with the developmental stage of emerging adulthood. It is a unique stage of life sociologically, neurologically, and developmentally, and only by understanding it can we receive and support young adults well.

Second, we equip congregants to practice a ministry of presence with young adults. We don’t need more programs and more flash. Young adults can smell a gimmick a mile away. We need congregants who are comfortable inviting young adults into their homes, asking good questions, and providing a non-anxious presence in the face of their doubts, critiques of the church, and spiritual struggle.

Lastly, we help ministry leaders discern how they can create spaces for all of this to happen in a way that is peacefully resonant and contextually relevant, rather than anxiously innovative.

If this resonates with you, we love Restoration Collective, and we’d love to come alongside you and your ministry in any way that might make sense to you. Come chat with us if we sparked something for you, and we’ll also put our website on the marker board in the back. Thank you, everyone.