I was getting increasingly annoyed.
Over the last few years I had been hearing more and more stories of increasing openness and interest in faith. Stories of miracles and visions, stories of answered prayer and stories of people finding Jesus.
But I wasn’t seeing these stories first hand – just hearing about them from others. It was annoying.
So in my frustration, I prayed: “Jesus, why I am not seeing these stories? I want to see you moving too.”
Over the next couple of weeks, Jesus answered my prayer. The Evangelical Alliance’s latest research Finding Jesus details the whys, hows and whats of people finding faith in adulthood. And in Jesus’s kindness I got to see some of the reported insights up close.
I was chatting to a guy who had come to our church for the first time one Sunday, I asked what had brought him to church and he answered, “Chat GPT.” Our findings said that 23% of young people had found online resources, especially YouTube, helpful in exploring faith and here was a young man saying that after listening to Jordan Peterson, he’d been further exploring the Christian faith and Jesus. When he asked AI what he should do, it told him to try our church. (Well done, Chat GPT!)
That same Sunday, people were invited up to share stories of answered prayer. One woman stood and shared that she had been praying for her husband to come to Jesus for 40 years and it had felt as if he was still as far away from him as ever. She had no faith. Then one morning that week, she woke and prayed the smallest faith prayer:
God, I know you are the God of the impossible.
That was it. The smallest kernel of faith. That day, her husband gave his life to Jesus.
Whilst our research shows that younger people are coming to faith in larger numbers, still 20% of our survey respondents came to faith over the age of 55. It’s not all about Gen Z!
The next week, my pastor shared a story of a woman who had started coming to our church five months earlier after having a dream about Jesus. That week as the pack down team were stacking chairs, the woman came up and asked, “How do I become a Christian?” My pastor said, “We can pray now if you’d like?” She was shocked, expecting a long, drawn-out course and study and process, not a simple prayer on her knees as people collected the coffee mugs around her. She was baptised a few weeks later.
She was shocked, expecting a long, drawn-out course and study and process, not a simple prayer on her knees
Our research shows that people are coming to faith quickly; 59% of respondents said that conversion took less than a year, and 28% of respondents said that it was a spiritual experience that they could not explain that prompted them to start exploring faith.
As I started hearing these accounts in my church and meeting people firsthand, I began to realise how easy it would have been to have missed these testimonies, or at least not connected them to each other and to the wider stories of answered prayer and faith encounters. The change in season we are witnessing at the moment is rightly being defined as quiet. It isn’t loud and obvious – it’s more like scattered mustard seed. We don’t notice that it’s growing until suddenly we see it’s grown into the largest of all the plants (Mark 4:30–32). My prayer of frustration has now become a prayer of intercession: help me to notice your kingdom coming. Help us all to see what you are up to, to pay attention to the work of the Spirit and to join in with bringing in the harvest.
We don’t notice that it’s growing until suddenly we see it’s grown into the largest of all the plants
At Being Human we have long spoken about our heart to help people live out and share the good, true and beautiful news of Jesus. When Finding Jesus asked people what was it that drew them to the gospel, 49% of under 25s said that it was that the gospel is good, profound and beautiful. The God story, and the God of that story, is deeply and radically attractive to young adults in this moment. Each week we are chatting to people who are helping their friends or colleagues discover the goodness, truth and beauty of who they are and how they live when it is rooted in Christ. Finding Jesus reveals that it is often the conversations and the practical outworking of Christians around someone that prompts them to explore faith for themselves.
So, whether it is life questions like, “what is my purpose?” or “where can I find hope?” or cultural conversations like migration, climate change or assisted dying, Being Human is here to help you to live and share the beautifully good news that all these questions and more find their truth in Jesus.