The Current - What's driving Gen Z's return to Christianity?

Episode Date: December 2, 2025

Christian churches across Canada say more young people are turning to faith — reversing a decades long trend. Current producer Juliana Konrad wanted to find out why and talked to young people, church leaders, and experts about why Gen Z is turning to Christianity — and what it says about what it means to be young today and face an uncertain future.

Hello there, it's me, Gavin Crawford, host of the long-running podcast, Because News, a weekly show where I quiz three funny friends about the most recent headlines. This week, we've got girl historian Carly Thorne, comedian Chris Siddiqui, and Jeopardy Legend, as well as host of CBC's bookends, Matea Roach. We'll find out the latest in brain science, investigate a Christmas crime, and why not grab a shot of sourpuss? If you're experiencing shorter days' invisible fatigue, you're either in the winter doldrums, or maybe you're the American president.

In either case, come hang out with us. by following Because News, anywhere you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. It's a Sunday at the Avant Life Church, a non-denominational Christian church in North Vancouver. The music is loud. There's a band on stage, four guitars, drums, backup singers. It's dark inside, but the stage is lit up. It feels like a concert.

As the song fades, the music changes. The congregation has its eyes closed. You're here right now, you know you need to recommit to Jesus. The pastor asks people to raise their hands and commit their life to Jesus and hands raised throughout the congregation. This room is full. About 100 people in this modern church. There are no wooden pews here, just chairs, but everyone is standing. And about half the people here are in their 20s and 30s.

Avant's services have become much busier this past year, and they're not alone. Christian churches across Canada say more young people are turning to faith, reversing a decades-long trend. The current's Juliana Conrad wanted to find out why. And she joins us from Vancouver. Juliana, good morning. Good morning, Matt. Why did you want to look into this? Yeah, well, I actually started going back to church myself a couple months ago.

So a bit of backstory. I was raised Christian. I went to a Baptist church growing up, and I also went to a private Christian school. But a couple different factors sort of pushed me away from it. But the primary thing was that I was, the Christian school that I went to was quite religiously conservative. And so I started to question some of what I was taught as I got a bit older. Some things didn't align with my beliefs on social issues, especially things like LGBTQ issues and gender roles and sexuality. And so as I got older and learned a bit more about the world and had some more freedom and sort of questioning these things, I sort of – I don't know.

I just – it didn't – it wasn't a priority for me. I didn't agree with some of the things. And so I took a bit of a step back. But that changed recently, right? Yes. Yeah. Why? Well, my life is really good.

I want to say I'm a very happy person. but I just for the past couple of years have been feeling as if, I don't know, a bit ungrounded. Like I've just been sort of feeling a bit all over the place and I'm a happy person on the day to day, but it sort of felt like the happiness was surface level almost. Like I knew that it could be deeper or more like sustained and long lasting. I don't know. And so I just felt like there were something missing and I felt like I needed some sort of guidance. and it's funny, I've like read all the spiritual self-help books and I've done the things and I've tried all the things and none of it really worked in terms of the way I wanted to feel.

And so I just decided to give Christianity another go. I'm 24 and I figured I grew up and I did have happy memories of it growing up. So I'm still figuring it out, but I'm looking to see if there's a version of it that I can embrace. Do you know what you were looking for? It's a big question. I think that I was just looking, that I am just looking for something, something to ground me, something that I can feel confident in, also something that is bigger than myself. I mean, we talk all the time on the radio and in conversations with friends about how stressful and chaotic and scary the world can be, and especially as a young person, it's a weird time to be to be 24. And so I think I've just been hoping to find something that can kind of ground me and bring me a bit of peace, I guess, amidst all that uncertainty and chaos and just, yeah, I don't know. I just want to feel joyful all the time.

And so you started going to church again. I did. Yeah. So one of my friends goes to Avant Life Church. It's the church in North Vancouver that we just heard from earlier. And one of the things that I wanted to do was to try a couple different churches in Vancouver. So I went with her a couple times to Avant, and the first Sunday that I went, I was really surprised at the number of young people I saw. And Avant has seen this explosion in young people coming to their services from the conversations I've had with people there.

And this is actually true across the country as well. A lot of church leaders are saying they're also seeing church attendance increase. And most of that is because of young people. And so I was just curious to learn more about why. We heard, I mean, in the introduction of this idea that it's, I mean, like a concert, for example, with the band on stage. It sounds like Avant is intentionally trying to appeal to young people. How is that working?

Oh, they totally are, and it's working super well. You know, we heard off the top, it sounds really fun. Like going to church is really fun. A lot of the congregation is under 35, and I spoke with one of the pastors there. His name is Matt Giannacchus about this and, you know, trying to appeal to young people. And he said it's been working so well. They've had so much growth. They've actually had to add a second service.

We have two services because there's so many kids and there's so many teens and there's so many young adults because there's so many people that want to know Jesus and it's just it's happening. So it feels amazing to be a part of it. What we're clearly seeing is the younger generation is falling in love with Jesus because they're finally hearing something true and it's finally fulfilling what nothing else could. I've been going to Avant's 1130 a.m. service and like I said, there's lots of young people there every week. And from what I understand, a good chunk of these are not just young people, but new people too, people like me. And so what did you hear from people like you about why they're

there? Yeah, I spoke with Carter Griffin about that. He is 21 and he grew up in West Vancouver in a non-religious family. And Carter started going to Avant just over a year ago. He said he started seeing all these young religious influencers pop up on his social media. And because of those reels and the things he was seeing, he got kind of curious about faith and the church and what it all meant. And so Lentee Carter takes up a family friend on an invitation to go to church and he goes. And he says the community he found there was so welcoming that it made him want to keep coming back. It felt like home, like the second I go in.

It felt like everybody wants you to be there. They're excited that you're there. Even if they've never met you before, they're excited. that you're there. They're excited that there's somebody new there, right? So when I first went to this church, I met so many people that were like interested in the same stuff I'm interested in, have the same hobbies, going through the same struggles, doing the same stuff, like in school, working, right, trying to build a life for themselves. It was super, super important seeing that, both in like social media, seeing young people talk about God. And also when I go, when you go to church and

seeing all these young people who just want to, they just want to be your friend, you know. I mean, the social media influencer piece is super interesting, but he says in real life, he felt like it was home when he got there. And clearly they've created this welcoming environment. It's interesting because there have been articles, particularly in the United States, saying that young men have been turning to religion more than young women. What do we know about whether that's actually happening here in this country? Yeah, I spoke with Joel Tiesin about that question. Joel is a professor of sociology at the Ambrose University in Calgary. He studies the sociology of religion.

And he says, yes, young men are finding faith. But he thinks that gender argument has been a bit overplayed, at least in Canada. And here's what he had to say. It seems that the guiding narrative is that it's actually women who are becoming less religious. Women have historically been more religious than men on many different markers of religiosity, which makes it appear then that, oh, look at men. seem to be more religious. Something must be going on there. While there might be young men who are turning to religion, becoming more religious, more devout, et cetera, this seems to be more about

women becoming less religious over the course of time. So lots of young men and young women are making their way to church, but Joel says there's not necessarily a dramatic difference in numbers across the genders. You are one of those people who is making your way to church or making your way back to church. You are also a curious person. So who else did you talk to about what's going on? Yeah, I spoke with Nia Offendi. Nia is 21 years old and lives in Coquitlam, a city about 30 kilometers east of Vancouver. And Nia started coming to Avant just a couple of months ago, like me. And I actually happened to be there on the day of her baptism.

Oh, wow. Yeah, it was really cool. It was a really special day. There was a whole bunch of people getting baptized. She was one of them. And there was this big tub of water set up in this little grassy space sort of between the church building and the church parking lot. And I was in awe of these people, not just. just because of their commitment to their faith, but also because it was freezing cold that

morning. And my friends and I were sitting there in awe of just how brave they were to get baptized in that really cold weather. Well, we thank you for Nia. Thank you that you heard the cry of her heart and you answered and you deliver and you set free. In the name of Jesus we pray, amen. Amen. So that was Pastor Matt praying over Nia right after her baptism. And Nia also has quite an interesting story. She wasn't raised religious. She, at this point in her life, does not believe in God. She's not interested in religion at all. But her partner is religious and they go to a vaunt and convinces her to come one day. And Nia says the first day she went to church that day, it totally changed her life. That same day, I raised my hand in wanting to learn more about

Jesus. And after that day, after that Sunday, I just wanted to go to church. I wanted to know more about Christ. I wanted to dedicate my life to him. And I just got baptized today. And I know it's been like a short amount of time and people are thinking, oh my gosh, you might be actually crazy. You might just be caught up in the wave. No, this is like revolutionary. Like I have never felt more fulfilled and loved in my life. I've never had this great of a community in my life. Nothing has ever given me that same

relief, that same love, that same kindness, that same calm that Christianity did, that Jesus Christ did. Because now I'm able to forgive, I'm able to let go, I'm able to not be angry, be patient, and believe that God has a path for me and to not

feel lost in this world. There are two kinds of Canadians, those who feel something when they hear this music. And those who've been missing out so far. I'm Chris Howden. And I'm Neil Kuxel. We are the co-hosts of As It Happens. And every day we speak with people at the center of the day's most hard-hitting, heartbreaking, and sometimes hilarious news stories. Also, we have puns.

Here Why As It Happens is one of Canada's longest running in most beloved shows. You can find us wherever you get your podcasts. She says it was revolutionary, that she has never felt that way before she went to church. I mean, what did you hear from other people at the church about what faith has done for them? Yeah, I spoke with a couple people from Avant, and they all said similar things about what church and faith has done for them. So we spoke about the finding community aspect of it. But again, like, I don't know, you can hear it when you're listening to Nina and Carter, they speak with this energy and this joy. And, like, I can hear it listening to it now. But in person, like, it comes across so much. They're so happy. It's almost infectious. And, you know, I experienced something really similar the first day that I went to Avant. Every single person there was so excited. I was there. It was actually quite overwhelming. I was, like, had this emotional experience and I was crying. And a thousand people kept coming up and introducing themselves to me. But it was great. I mean, everyone was so nice and so welcoming. It made me feel welcome in a way that I haven't really

anywhere else before. And I know that journalists don't really talk about our feelings very often, but the day that I went there, like it really felt like my heart had been touched in a way. Yeah, I don't know. It does fulfill something deep inside of you and something that's something that everyone I spoke to for this story told me. They felt this feeling of joy and fulfillment now that they never did before when they weren't practicing or engaging in faith. And here's Carter again. Life is so good with the Lord. Like Jesus loves you so much. God is so good. Oh, it's just so amazing. And it's just like so much comfort. You feel so much comfort. And there's so much peace in your heart, no anxiety. Like all the anxiety I had was gone.

And like, sure, I still feel nervous sometimes. Sure, things still happen. But, you know, I have peace that he has a plan. And that plan is going to be better than anything I could ever imagine. I really like hearing Carter say that because I think that that peace and that comfort he speaks of is something a lot of people want to feel right now. And so it makes sense, to me at least, that when they find it, they definitely want to stick around from wherever they're getting it from. I said in the introduction that Christian churches across this country see more people, young people, turning to faith.

What do we know about, are there numbers that show how many young people are actually going to church across this country? Yeah, we do have some data. We know that young people have always gone to church less than their older counterparts. But for the first time, that's actually not true anymore. So according to Statistics Canada, 22% of people ages 15 to 24 are attending a religious service at least once a month. And it's interesting because 15% of Canadians age 25 to 64 are attending a service once a month. So there's a 7% increase in how often that 15 to 24 people my age, that that age group are attending religious services. And I spoke with Andrew Bennett about this.

He is with the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, and he's a deacon at a church in Ottawa. And Andrew Bennett is also part of this organization called Cardis. It's a think tank that looks at religion in Canada. Cardis has surveyed Canadians on their religious beliefs and found that young people ages 18 to 34 are actually above the national average for how committed they are to their faith. And he makes an interesting point. They're actually more religious than their grandparents. grandparents' generation. And why this is so interesting is that that generation, there's kind of this

kind of social pressure or social expectation, cultural expectation that you would be religious. That was, I think, much more common in terms of Canadian society and what people expected culturally. But for this 18 to 34 age cohort, there is no expectation that you be religious. In fact, quite the opposite. So to see that we have, you know, 20 to 21 percent, of the 18 to 34 age cohort being religiously committed, that's very significant and quite interesting. Andrew Bennett also told me that, interestingly enough, that age cohort is actually also more non-religious. So he says there's been a hollowing out of what he calls the mushy middle. Young people are either really religiously committed and engaged or they're not at

all. There's less people in the middle kind of being like, maybe I'm Christian or maybe I go to church like once a year on Easter or whatever it is. There's less of that. There's been a hollowing out of that middle area. And he says that people who are in, in the faith, want to be all the way in. I'm really interested in the why of this. If there is less pressure to be religious, why are people turning towards it? We heard a little bit about community.

But what else is going on that would motivate somebody to turn to religion? Yeah, I spoke with Kyle Grenum about this. He told me that secularism wasn't working for him anymore. So Kyle is 32. He lives in Grand Prairie in Alberta, and he's been going to St. Joseph. It's a Catholic church in his area since 2021. And Kyle told me he was raised nominally Christian. So his family went to church when he was really young, sort of like the, you know, twice a year on Easter and Christmas kind of thing.

But over the years, that stopped being a priority for his family. So he says that for the most part growing up, religion didn't really. have any relevance in his life. But this changed for Kyle when he was in his early 20s. For my late teens, I played in a rock band, and my life was sort of based around that, going to bars, playing shows, going to parties, this kind of thing. But to make a long story short, I eventually found that that was just as shallow and materialistic of a life as what I thought it would get me away from. I had kind of come to a point in my life where I'd kind of become disillusioned with that other way of viewing things. This idea that freedom comes through

being able to just do whatever you want and follow whatever impulse comes your way. There's an intuitive sense amongst our generation more and more that secularism is a bit of a failed experiment, if you will, and it doesn't really provide happiness or fulfillment to most of us as we're entering adulthood. So given how he feels about secularism, how did he end up embracing Catholicism. Yeah. In 2016, Kyle is back in Newfoundland for university and he's got a friend from school who invites him to go to Catholic Mass with him and, you know, given everything we've just heard from Kyle about where he was at in his life, he was interested in exploring that. So he starts going and he says that it had a really powerful effect on his life. Kyle ends up getting baptized two years

later. And one of the things he said was that he was really drawn to the ritualistic nature of Catholicism. Just the fact that it was so intense. everything was was so ordered and done with with a specific purpose in mind to me this was very appealing because i had felt a bit lost and and you know maybe in a bit of depression isolation because my life was so disordered and chaotic and here was something that that was the exact opposite of that as soon as i found it there was something intuitively telling me this is what i need this is true freedom you know there's a kind of paradox there that freedom comes from discipline from the ability to place lim it's on yourself because then you're truly in control of your life and you're not just sort of blindly being pulled by the chains of your passions and appetites. Do we know why this is happening now? I mean, if church attendance for young people has been declining in decades, why is that being reversed now?

I asked Bishop Jenny Anderson that question. She's the senior pastor at St. Paul's in Toronto. It's one of the largest Anglican churches in Canada. And she says that St. Paul's is also seeing a very big increase in young people attending their services, so much so that they've actually added a new church called St. George's, downtown Toronto. She told me that she thinks the pandemic is a factor in this. As we know, people were isolated and lonely and kind of craving a sense of community and connection or asking questions like what is happening with the world. They started to see a lot

of people come to their YouTube services. They would live stream and a lot of people started introducing themselves to the church that way. And then as soon as the pandemic was over and the church doors physically opened back up again, a lot of people from that online community started coming in person. So she says that's one reason. But the main thing that she thinks is similar to what we just heard from Kyle, that this is really about what she sees as the failure of secularism. Fundamentally, secularism's been like tried and tested now for a couple of generations. And people are not that impressed. Like secularism has made some really bold promises for a few generations. Freedom and hope and a certain kind of lifestyle and certain like your

relationships are going to be great. And it's not delivered. It is not delivered. People are more anxious, lonely, depressed at any time in recorded history in the West. So I just think there's so much confusion about what it means to be human, what it means to be young, what it means to have relationships, what it means to build a life with purpose and meaning. And I think people are now looking around going, okay, what else is out there? Because this hasn't been great. Does that sound familiar? Yeah, it does. She makes a lot of really great points that there is so much going on in the world and a lot of it is meant to be really great, but a lot of the times it doesn't leave people feeling that great. And that's something that I've experienced too. And, you know, my friends

and I are always talking about these sorts of things about how relationships are so hard right now and there's a mental health crisis among people our age. And so I totally resonate with what Jenny says there that there's all these promises of freedom, but it's really easy to still feel lost sometimes amidst at all. But it's also a bit difficult because I'm still sort of grappling with some of the hurt the church has caused. You know, there's the Catholic Church abuse scandal, the church's role in indigenous residential schools. Some churches are still openly anti-LGBQ, and those things have hurt a lot of friends of mine. We were taught things growing up that did not sit true to what we believe in ethically and morally, and that ended up pushing a lot of us away from the churches we grow up. That's also something that I spoke to Jenny Anderson about because I was trying to reconcile those two things.

And so she admitted to me, which is really nice to hear that the church has hurt people, and that it can lead to complicated relationships with faith, particularly for people. like me. The church is a fallible institution made up of human beings trying to represent God faithfully. And so we fail at representing God faithfully. That's always going to be the case. There's no excuse for it. I think you're always going to have people who came across basically a bad representation of Jesus. And that's a tragedy. And sometimes it really damages people. At St. Paul's, we're not a perfect church. There is no perfect church. But something we say every single Sunday at St. Paul's is you are welcome here, whether you're curious about faith, critical of faith, or committed in faith. It was really nice to have this conversation with Jenny and to hear someone in a leadership position admit that the church has made mistakes. But also to say that it's okay to still have questions about these things. Because my experience growing up was that I was sort of expected to blind.

finally believe what I was told and I wasn't really allowed to ask many questions. So to hear someone say that, yes, you can be critical of the church, but you can also still engage with faith. That was really healing for me. I mean, we started this talking about you and what you were looking for. How are you feeling about, if you don't mind me asking, how are you feeling about your faith now? Yeah, I'm still figuring it out. It's tricky. I mean, it brings a lot into my life for sure, but I'm also still kind of grappling with all those questions about what I was taught that I don't believe in now and trying to figure out what is true to the Christian faith and what isn't, what teachings I've been taught that are good representations and what

aren't. And so unpacking all those threads is going to be a lot of work. But I also know from personal experience that the church does bring a lot of hope and joy. Yeah, I'm trying to balance those two things, it's not necessarily the easiest task or the simplest task. But at the end of the day, the Bible and Jesus, the message of Jesus is about love and acceptance and forgiveness, loving your neighbor, putting other people before yourself. When I spoke with Jenny Anderson, she called it a message of radical inclusion. It's a story for everyone. I do believe that there is a church community that resonates with all these things that we've just been talking about in terms of my personal story. So I'm going to keep praying and looking for that community, try different churches in Vancouver, figure out which place resonates with me and feels like a home. Yeah, it's a work in progress. I'm definitely still figuring out, but I do have faith that I will figure it out eventually. Juliana, this is so interesting. Thank you very much for this. Thank you, Matt. Julianna Conrad is a producer here at The Current. She was in Vancouver.

You've been listening to the current podcast. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon. For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca slash podcasts.