For years now, our team at Barna has gone to great lengths to listen to the stories and experiences of teenagers and young adults across the religious spectrum—from devoted Christ followers to ex-Christians, from passionate adherents to other faiths to those for whom religion is an artifact of a bygone era.

Over a decade and a half, we’ve been privileged to interview nearly 100,000 young people. We’ve been interested in every aspect of their lives, trying to put the scraps of evidence together to form a coherent picture for Christian leaders to understand and respond to.

I have written three books based on what we’ve heard that help to address the spiritual journeys of young adults: unChristian(2007), which asks, What does Christianity look like to young non-Christians?; You Lost Me (2011), which asks, Why do young adults walk away from church and from faith?; and Faith for Exiles (2019), which asks, What practices distinguish resilient disciples among young Christians?

Through our careful listening, we’ve come to hold several core convictions about the emerging generations, whom we call Millennials and Gen Z:

- They are coming of age in a radically different context, one that could be defined as chaotic, as we'll describe.