By J. D. Greear, author of Everyday Revolutionary
Perhaps you’ve seen all the headlines about Gen Z returning to church, with young men in particular leading the way. It’s not just happening in America—in the U.K., Gen Z attendance has quadrupled over the last few years—something no one saw coming. What surprises many onlookers is that these young zealots lean theologically, politically, and socially conservative. Gen Z YouTuber “Redeemed Zoomer,” for example, who has nearly 600,000 subscribers, founded “Operation Reconquista,” whose express aim is shifting mainline Protestant denominations towards theological conservatism. And that’s not to mention the crowds that the late Charlie Kirk and psychologist Jordan Peterson are able to draw on college campuses.
Some say this movement is a reaction to the overreach of heavy-handed woke culture. Others believe it’s a generation that senses the foundations of secularism are crumbling, and they are looking to flee it for more solid ground. Others of us see in this the revival many have been praying for.
However you interpret this trend, it provides a real moment of opportunity for the church. The question is, What are we doing with it? Political operatives seem primarily excited about the voting potential of this new movement.
And politics are important, but I want to urge us to consider that the Lord Jesus has a greater purpose for this movement beyond politics.
In the final seconds before Jesus ascended back to heaven, his disciples asked him: “Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” I find his response fascinating: “It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth” (Acts 1:6–8).
The disciples were asking about the timeline for establishing Jesus’ political kingdom and what they might do to help bring it about. But that’s not your concern, Jesus said. For now, my power is coming upon you to testify. In other words, Kingdom restoration is not what I want you to be concerned with right now. I’m giving you my power for witness. Go to lost nations all over the world and tell them about me. In the words of Lesslie Newbigin, be instruments of and signposts for this coming Kingdom.
As history has amply attested, everywhere the gospel is preached, societal transformation follows. The greatest societal revolutions in human history came because Christians brought their worldview into the public sphere. As theologians N. T. Wright and Michael Bird point out:
"Most people in today’s world recognize as noble the ideas that we should love our enemies, that the strong should protect the weak, and that it is better to suffer evil than to do evil. People in the West treat such things as self-evident moral facts. Yet such values were certainly not self-evident to the Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Vikings, Ottomans, Mongols or Aztecs." (N. T. Wright and Michael F. Bird, Jesus and the Powers (Zondervan, 2024), 28)
Still, Jesus gave his disciples a different primary commission: faithful testimony. That requires different priorities and different strategies than culture war. Faithful testimony is not less than clarity about biblical truth, it is more.
It’s possible, you see, to be a “successful” culture warrior and still fail in your primary assignment.
In Luke 12, Jesus was asked by the younger of two brothers to adjudicate on his behalf, weighing in on issue particularly relevant in first-century Palestine: The older brother was using his position and existing laws to cheat the younger brother out of his rightful inheritance (v. 13). This younger brother had a legitimate social justice complaint!
Instead of giving a specific—you might even say political—answer to this social justice complaint, Jesus withheld his opinion. Instead he said, “Man, who made me a judge or arbitrator over you?” (v. 14). He then preached a sermon on greed, warning both brothers (and the listening crowd) about the idolatry of money.
Why not give his opinion on this case? Was he not up to the task? Did he not care?
The Welsh preacher D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones said that it wasn’t because Jesus didn’t care, or even that he felt unqualified to give an answer. Dr. Lloyd-Jones said simply that had Jesus weighed in on this one, two things likely would have happened: First, he would have cut off from his influence anyone in Israel who agreed with the older brother; second, the next day he likely would have had a line a mile long of people wanting him to weigh in on their justice issues, which would have kept him from his primary mission, preaching the gospel and making disciples. Involving himself in this question would have taken Jesus away from his primary agenda, seeking and saving the lost. So he sat this one out so he could stay on mission.
I’m not saying that we should back down from anything God’s Word says. Jesus certainly didn’t. We are responsible to preach the whole counsel of God in every situation. John the Baptist lost his head for preaching against the socially-accepted sexual sin of King Herod, and Jesus called John the greatest prophet ever to live. I’m just saying that in the days to come, we may have to choose what takes priority—reaching people or leaning into the tribalism associated with culture war.
Discerning when to sit back and when to speak out will require self-control, wisdom, and massive amounts of humility. But hear me: It’s possible to speak the truth clearly and boldly and still not be a faithful witness to Jesus.
Again: fulfilling our mission is not less than speaking with boldness and clarity on social issues; it is more. John said that Jesus’ glory was that he was “full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). Grace without truth is sentimental liberalism; but truth without grace is Christless conservatism. Neither of them is faithful testimony to Christ. John even puts grace before truth, which is significant because in Greek they tended to put the dominant characteristic first. While Jesus never compromised truth, he led with grace and majored in grace. What people thought about first when they thought about him was grace. The aroma left in their nostrils after they’d talked with him was grace.
So let me say it once more: It’s possible to speak the truth clearly and boldly and still not be a faithful witness to Jesus. Our primary agenda, the thing we must pursue above all other agendas, is keeping the way of salvation clear and our witness to Jesus accurate.
In the 3rd Commandment, God told his people never to take his name in vain, which meant they were never to associate the splendor of his name with things that undermine his reputation in the world. Saddling the sacred name of Jesus to the back of a donkey or an elephant inevitably violates the third commandment. Jesus’ reputation is the most valuable commodity of the church; his is the only name under heaven by which we can be saved, his finished work our only hope of salvation.
We must keep the name of Jesus holy and the way of salvation clear.
A few years ago I got a letter from a young lady in her twenties that included a picture of her being baptized at our church. I hadn’t been there on the day she got baptized, and she wanted to tell me her story.
When she first came to our church, she wasn’t a Christian. She didn’t exactly fit the profile of “likely future Baptist.” She had graduated from an elite West Coast university and moved to the Triangle to do grad work at one of our universities. She’d visited our church a few times with her friends, but she told me that the first personal interaction we’d had was over Twitter. Her Twitter handle was something like “LeftLinda,” and she had said something snarky in response to a pro-life post I had put up. Normally I don’t respond to snipes on Twitter, but I did to this one, and I’m not even sure why. I did my best to respond as Jesus might, with grace and truth. I had no idea she went to our church. We went back and forth a couple of times, then we dropped it and I never thought about it again … until this letter showed up at my office.
“I was ‘LeftLinda,’” she told me, “and I didn’t like your pro-life stance. But I kept coming to the church, and eventually I was convinced by the truth of the gospel.” She’d been attending for several months and was growing by leaps and bounds.
She told me, “I knew you were pro-life; I knew you thought most of my political beliefs were wrong. I knew all of that . . . but even with those things, you didn’t make the Summit the ‘Republican church.’ If you had, I never would have been able to bring myself to go. But because you didn’t, I heard the gospel and I got saved.” Now she’s in the process of reexamining everything. That includes her politics. But it started with heart change.
Faithfulness to Jesus is not less than clarity about truth in the culture, it is much more. The primary agenda of the church is not to rally Gen Z to conservative causes, but to reach people like LeftLinda for Jesus.
We’re at an inflection point in history that we will never get back. Will we capitalize on it for the Great Commission, or commandeer it for short-term political ends?
If we choose the latter, then when the societal pendulum swings back the other direction, which it always does, we’ll be left not with a stronger church, but a weaker one, and, even more tragically, a burned-over generation that has tried “the church thing” and found it, like other political movements, to be futile, unsatisfying, and empty.
And what does that look like for people in the pews? The Apostle Paul gives a surprising answer: “Live quietly” (1 Thessalonians 4:11). That may seem like strange instruction from the man who stood before an amphitheater full of angry Ephesians, but for Paul, that didn’t mean living invisibly, however. It meant living in a way that so blessed the surrounding community that they can’t imagine life without us; in a way that sets us up for loud testimony. Paul describes the “quiet life” as consisting of 5 elements: creation-fulfilling, holiness-reflecting, excellence-pursuing, redemption-displaying, and mission advancing. This “quiet life” is not withdrawal; it’s preparation for loud impact.
As Gen Z returns to church, we pastors need to put before them a positive vision of what faithfulness to the mission of Jesus looks like in today’s “negative” world, to show them how they can live as everyday revolutionaries.
About the author
J. D. Greear is the pastor of The Summit Church in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, which has grown from 300 to over 14,000 under his leadership. He has a bold vision to plant 1,000 new churches by the year 2050.
J. D. completed his PhD in theology at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is on the board of directors for Chick-fil-A and recently served as the 63rd president of the Southern Baptist Convention.
J. D. and his wife, Veronica, live in the Research Triangle of Raleigh, North Carolina, with their four kids, Kharis, Alethia, Ryah, and Adon.
His many books and Bible Studies include Everyday Revolutionary.