Young Men Are Coming Back (Part 1)
They’re Carrying More Than You’d Think
Subject: Something’s shifting — and it’s not just attendance.
Preview: For the first time in 25 years, men are outpacing women in church attendance. Here’s what’s underneath that number.
Men,
Even though this article leans toward pastors, every man needs to hear what’s in it. The young men it describes aren’t a statistic — they’re the guys sitting a few rows over from you on Sunday, and some of you were that young man not long ago. Read it as if it’s addressed to you, because in a lot of ways it is.
I’ve been watching this data for a few months now, and I wanted to send it to you directly rather than let it sit in a report — because I think it changes what you should be planning for this fall.
The headline first. In 2025, 43% of men reported attending church weekly, compared to 36% of women — the larrgest gender gap Barna has recorded in 25 years of tracking, and a full reversal of a pattern that held for a generation.1 Young men are a significant part of that shift.
That figure is for all adult men, not young men specifically — worth saying up front, since the two get conflated and the age-specific picture is more complicated. Barna’s most recent pastor survey fills it in some: two in five senior pastors report higher engagement specifically among Gen Z and Millennials over the past year, and the typical Gen Z churchgoer now attends nearly two weekends a month, up from just over one a month in 2020 — the highest attendance level Barna has ever measured among young Christians.2
But it’s not an even story. In that same survey, 40% of pastors reported rising engagement among men 18–35 this past year. Another 17% reported it falling — the same age group, moving in opposite directions depending on the church. The split tracked closely with church type: non-mainline churches were nearly three times as likely as mainline ones to report the increase (47% vs. 17%).3
Read plainly, that’s not a story of universal revival. It’s a story of some churches figuring something out on purpose — and others watching the same young men walk past them.
Here’s the part that doesn’t show up in an attendance chart. A 2025 Gallup poll found that 25% of young American men ages 15–34 say they felt lonely “a lot” of the previous day — well above the U.S. national average of 18%, and the highest rate recorded among any group across the 38 OECD countries Gallup surveyed, where the median was just 15%.4
That isolation didn’t show up overnight. Research from the Survey Center on American Life found the share of men reporting zero close friends rose from 3% in 1990 to 15% by 2021 — a fivefold increase — while the share of men with six or more close friends was cut roughly in half over the same span.5
Put those two findings side by side and the picture sharpens: a large number of young men are walking into church for the first time in years, and a large number of them are doing it while quietly starved for real connection.
That combination is either the best discipleship opportunity most churches will see this decade, or it’s a young man who visits twice and doesn’t come back — because nothing about what he found was built for what he actually needed. A sermon, however good, doesn’t know a man’s name. The thing that reaches a lonely 24-year-old isn’t a better program. It’s a person who shows up for him consistently enough that he stops expecting to be forgotten.
Most churches don’t have a structure built to do that on purpose yet. That’s exactly what I want to walk through with you in my next newsletter — including what’s actually getting in the way, and what a weekly structure for this looks like in practice, without a new staff hire or a year of planning.
If you’re already seeing this in your own church — the return, the loneliness underneath it, or both — I’d genuinely like to hear what it looks like where you are. Just hit reply.
Now that you’ve been informed and challenged, what are you going to do about it? Whether you’re a pastor, a men’s ministry leader, or a man who’s noticed the younger guys filling the seats around you, don’t wait for my next newsletter to start. Reach out through otm.co and schedule a call with Vince or me — we’d be glad to help you think through how to best reach this younger generation.
Roger Medley
VP, Ministry Services — On Target Ministries
www.otm.co
Sources
1. Barna Group. “New Research on Church Attendance: Decline of Women or the Rise of Men?” 2025. barna.com/trends/church-attendance-women-men
2. Barna Group. “New Barna Data: Young Adults Lead a Resurgence in Church Attendance.” 2025. barna.com/research/young-adults-lead-resurgence-in-church-attendance
3. Barna Group. “Are Young Adults Engaging More at Church? What Pastors Are Seeing.” Survey of 507 U.S. Protestant senior pastors. March 2026. barna.com/trends/young-adults-church-engagement-pastors
4. Gallup. “Younger Men in the U.S. Among the Loneliest in the West.” 2025. news.gallup.com/poll/690788
5. Cox, Daniel A. “The State of American Friendship: Change, Challenges, and Loss.” Survey Center on American Life, 2021. Note: compares a 1990 Gallup survey to the 2021 American Perspectives Survey — two distinct surveys, not one continuous tracking poll. americansurveycenter.org/research/the-state-of-american-friendship-change-challenges-and-loss