What do we actually know about the “quiet revival”?

Last year, the UK’s Bible Society's Quiet Revival report claimed that monthly church attendance among 18 to 24 year olds in England and Wales had leapt from 4 per cent to 16 per cent. Many church leaders got excited, appearing on podcast episodes and writing articles with a hot take on a surge in Christian interest amongst Gen Z.

But in March this year, the Bible Society withdrew the report. YouGov found fraudulent respondents in the sample. The more sober British Social Attitudes data, released in May, put weekly Christian attendance in the UK among under 35s at about 4 per cent. There was no statistical evidence of a Gen Z revival after all. 

People often ask me, am I experiencing early signs of Gen Z revival at Merri Creek? And my answer has been, no – but some kind of shift has occurred: the Spirit seems to be doing something. It’s early days. Let’s wait and see. 

Last Tuesday The Guardian released a curious report on the Archdiocese of Los Angeles which currently has 8,598 people preparing for baptism or reception into the church, up from 54 per cent in 2025. The parish beside the University of Southern California saw enrolment rise 57 per cent. The parish at UC Santa Barbara has just had its largest initiation class ever. 

One good year does not undo decades of disaffiliation, and nobody serious is calling this a national revival. But what is interesting is why these young Americans say they are coming to church. They talk about loneliness, instability, a hunger for truth and meaning, the pull of community, the longing for ritual and tradition. One priest described Catholicism as offering rituals and a history that reaches far beyond “the algorithm”. Another suggested that the Instagram-shaped life had been tried and found wanting. A separate study of more than two thousand people entering the Catholic church across twenty American dioceses found the same motives: goodness, truth, peace, purpose, and the attraction of a two-thousand-year tradition. This is the real story, a story about changes in plausibility.

When Charles Taylor argued that we live in a secular age, he did not mean that people used to believe in God and now they don't. He meant that the conditions of belief have changed. Faith is now one option among many, always contested, never simply assumed. He called the horizon we live inside the immanent frame: a world that feels complete in itself, with no obvious need for anything beyond it. Alongside that came a confident assumption. Educated, technologically advanced societies become less religious. Religion survives as a residue of the past. 

Perhaps that assumption is what is starting to crack. It is no longer obvious to everyone that secular modernity has answered the great questions. Consider what life inside the immanent frame promised, and what it has delivered. Unlimited connectivity has produced extraordinary loneliness. Endless choice has not generated meaning. Expressive individualism has not settled the question of who we are. Technological mastery has not removed anxiety. Prosperity has not abolished longing. The algorithm knows what we like but it can’t tell us what life is for.

These American converts are drawn to ritual, silence, tradition, community and sacred time. A story that began before they arrived and will continue after they are gone.

The modern life is like living in a machine of acceleration, moving faster, seeking more, pushing for constant innovation, bespoke, and frictionless. We must keep speeding up simply to stay where we are. Dynamic stabilisation as Hartmut Rosa calls it. But what we really long for is a living relationship with a world that answers back. Perhaps this is why those young students are seeking out ancient, slow, and strange spirituality. They long for practices they have to submit to. If this is true, then the churches most tempted to shave off their strangeness, and speed up to look more attractive and relevant, may be destroying their plausibility.

In Melbourne, we should be careful about importing overseas stories wholesale. Australian research still shows substantial disaffiliation. Yet NCLS has found real spiritual openness among younger Australians, and its most recent surveys suggest that religious and spiritual Gen Z Australians report more hope about the world, the nation and their neighbourhoods than those who are neither.

The embarrassment of the UK’s Quiet Revival should teach us something. We wanted it to be true. So when the numbers arrived, we passed them on with remarkable speed and remarkably little scrutiny. But why do we need the graph to go up before we believe God is at work? Christianity does not become more true when attendance rises, and it does not become less true when attendance falls. Paul planted, Apollos watered, but God has been making things grow. The growth was never ours to measure our worth by.

There is an irony here. Modern institutions survive only through constant growth; stability requires acceleration and expansion. Christians can catch the same disease. More churches, more attendance, more baptisms, therefore success. The longing for revival can actually be an insecure and desperate longing to feel alive: an anxious clamouring to justify our existence. 

This is not the gospel. That is the immanent frame and the age of acceleration pretending to be spiritual.

So before we jump on the revival bandwagon, we should search our hearts. But at the same time, let’s not overlook the interesting and surprising things the Spirit is doing. A generation formed entirely inside the secular age is discovering that the immanent frame and exclusive humanism does not bring true and lasting fullness. Most Gen Zs have not walked through a church door. But they are watching Tik Tok, maybe even reading the Bible on their phone, sitting in the back of a Mass, trying to pray, wondering whether the universe might be more than matter.

Jesus said, “blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.”

Let’s be the kind of community that is ready, and worth finding, when hungry people walk through our doors.