A Search for Meaning

This search doesn’t look the same for everyone.

For many young men, it often shows up as a desire for discipline, strength, and purpose. Social media is awash with ‘fitfluencers’ urging them to get control of their lives, build their bodies, and impose order. Many promote meditation and spiritual focus as part of that journey.

Figures like Jordan Peterson or Andrew Tate speak into this vacuum, offering narratives of meaning amid uncertainty. Some draw on Bible verses, but often without a clear or faithful understanding of the gospel. We’re seeing some of these young men arrive in churches – serious, searching, but carrying very different assumptions about who God is.

For young women, the search often takes different forms. Wellbeing regimes and manifestation practices are driving interest in spirituality and self‑discovery. Others find comfort in what’s been dubbed ‘little treat culture’ – small luxuries or indulgences that offer a brief dopamine hit. These can distract from the pressures of life, but they also point to deeper longings for comfort, identity, and worth.

And marketers have noticed.

Money talks

Every Friday, I get an email from Boots encouraging me to “treat myself” with half‑price cosmetics (it’s oddly reassuring to know that digital marketing systems still occasionally misfire).

Innocuous, perhaps.

But it goes deeper than that. The tarot card market in the UK has boomed since COVID, with most users aged between 18 and 34. Even mainstream brands are tapping into spiritual language. Airbnb urges us to “Belong Anywhere.” Online, you’ll find endless content on how to market to SBNRs – “spiritual but not religious”.

I’m reminded of my time working at Unilever, where whole marketing strategies were built around detailed consumer personas: identifying emerging desires, unmet needs, and cultural shifts long before they became mainstream. As a rule of thumb, if big business has spotted a trend and is investing in it, the signal is probably real.

Will we get to them before others do?

So, the question remains: will we reach these young people before others do?

If they’re already coming into your church, that’s wonderful. But for every young person who walks through the doors, there are hundreds more who might be open to the gospel yet never cross the threshold. Some don’t feel church is for them. Others simply don’t know it’s there.

When the Quiet Revival headlines broke, some of us perhaps got carried away. Young people are streaming into churches felt like Slam dunk. Just make sure the coffee’s good and welcome them in.

But we can’t afford complacency. We need to lay aside any sense of quiet self‑congratulation and see young people as they really are – searching, vulnerable, and in need of hope – before someone else fills that space.

“More easily said than done, Graham,” you might say. You’d be right.

But there’s much we can do.

Simple is effective – why not knock on your neighbour’s door and get to know them. Or even better, get a team together and methodically knock on every door in your neighbourhood, or at least one section of it. Behind those doors are people of all ages – some you may speak to at exactly the right moment.

Another is to use the most effective evangelistic resource we have for reaching young people: other young people.

Young Christians already inhabit schools, colleges, friendship groups, and online spaces full of spiritual hunger. They are uniquely placed to reach their peers. And yet many young Christians feel ill‑equipped or lacking in confidence to do so.

Let’s not miss out

The noise around the Quiet Revival may have faded for now, and some of the data may yet be revised, but what remains is impossible to ignore. There is a genuine openness among young people – a hunger for meaning, truth, and hope.

This moment is an opportunity, and opportunities like this don’t last forever. If we seize it, the reward is not statistics or headlines, but something far more precious: A young boy declaring “I had no reason not to follow Jesus”. We see it at Stockwell Baptist Church and in countless others we work with – young people encountering Jesus for the first time.

The question now is not whether God is at work, but whether we will join him.