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“There were people jumping, people dancing, people on the ground crying, people just being present at the moment and encountering God,” Lena Marlowe recalled.
The 21-year-old is still ecstatic about her experience singing with the campus choir at Asbury University in Kentucky when the so-called “Asbury revival” took place in February.
What started as a regular inter-denominational service at the small Christian college transformed into two weeks of around-the-clock, non-stop worship.
An estimated 50,000 people from 260 colleges joined in. Some even drove cross-country.
The spontaneous revival, which made headlines around the country, is an early indication that a generations-long decline in religiosity may be reversing.
Today, one in three Gen Z adults aged 18 to 25 say they believe in a higher power, according to new polling from Springtide Research Institute, and that’s up from one in four in 2021.
Gen Z-ers and religious leaders alike tell The Post that more young people are open to spirituality, but many of them are rejecting traditional religious labels in favor of more fluid groups that consider themselves non-denominational or interdenominational — accepting to all Christian denominations, but not adhering to the dogma of any particular one.
For Marlowe, that statistic is not shocking — nor was the fervent popularity of the Asbury revival.
“I wasn’t surprised at all,” she said. “I actually didn’t think that my generation was that far away from God.”
Marlowe’s family belongs to the African Methodist Episcopal Church, but she said she’s spent the past several years “deconstructing” her religious upbringing and finding her own relationship with God in college.
“The revival was really impactful,” said Marlowe, who now identifies as Christian but does not affiliate with a church. “It made me feel more encouraged to just keep praying and to believe in what God is doing. I saw His power in a different way.
“[The revival] was really what I feel like heaven is going to be like.”
Although he hasn’t witnessed something quite as dramatic as the Asbury revival, Marcelo Leite said he’s watched Gen Z come to God firsthand.
Leite, 24, is a youth pastor at Countryside Christian Nondenominational Church in Clearwater, Florida, where he preaches to middle and high schoolers.
During his three years in the role, youth interest has skyrocketed.
“I’ve seen a huge, huge growth just in our area,” he told The Post. “It’s been just exploding.”
Just a few years ago, his Wednesday night youth group would attract around 60 attendees.
Today, attendance can run up to 300 to 500 people.
Leite said his growing Gen Z congregation has a very different spiritual outlook than their Millennial predecessors.
“The previous generation, in my opinion, was more atheistic and agnostic, versus now in this generation I’m seeing a lot more openness to spirituality and to different things being possible,” he said.
The Florida native found his way to God following a dark chapter in his own life.
When Leite was 15, he discovered the body of his stepfather who had died from an overdose — an experience that sent him “spiraling through his teenage years,” drinking, smoking, and partying.
“I had really, really deep depression, and I didn’t know where to turn,” Leite recalled. “I would go to church sometimes, but didn’t really care about it at all.”
But attending a religious summer camp after graduating from high school inspired him to explore his own faith.
“I just suddenly felt the draw, and I started to do my own research, digging in and reading the Bible,” Leite said. “And I realized that my whole life has to be for Jesus because there’s nothing else that matters.”
And, like his own story of finding God through hardship, he thinks other young people are enduring so many hardship events — from the pandemic and lockdowns to rising rates of depression and suicide, as well as general hopelessness and anxiety driven by social media — that they’re turning to faith for solace.
“A lot of these students went through a really dark point in their life [with the pandemic], just being alone and isolated,” he said. “But now they’re able to actually look for community.”
It was a longing for community that inspired 23-year-old Jonathan Ahn to start going to church last October.
The NYU urban planning master’s student was eating alone at Boka, a Korean restaurant near campus when he was approached by Billy Kim.
Kim, the pastor of the nearby evangelical interdenominational 180 Church, invited Ahn to eat with his church group.
The connection was instantaneous.
“I really liked the vibes and the sense of community that they were giving off, so I tried their church,” Ahn said. “It just felt like I had a sense of belonging.”
Every Sunday since, Ahn has attended the church, which meets in an AMC theater in Manhattan’s Flatiron District.
“It was so refreshing to find the right fit for me and the right community for me to grow in faith,” Ahn, who was raised in a non-religious household in New Jersey, said.
“Church has made me self-reflect more and help me become a better person than I was last year.”
In addition to leading the evangelical interdenominational 180 Church, Billy Kim, 36, has been a chaplain at NYU for the past eight years.
Over that time, he mentored Millennial and Gen Z students, and he’s noticed a marked uptick in student interest in spirituality — albeit paired with a suspicion of tradition.
“I’ve watched the trajectory from Millennials to Gen Z,” Kim told The Post. “What I noticed is that Gen Zers are more spiritual but not necessarily committed to a religious institution.”
Kim says Gen Z has “kind of rejected” their parents’ religious framework “in favor of a looser structure” and was not surprised to hear that, although Ahn, Marlowe, and Leite are all Christian, none identify with a denomination.
In Leite’s experience, even his contemporaries who reject religion entirely are still open to a higher power: ”Whether it’s Christianity or other religions or new age stuff, more and more of this generation is identifying with something rather than nothing.”
“I feel like this generation is searching for something real and genuine,” he said. “They’re searching for the truth.”
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