In the summer of 2020 as Covid was swallowing up our freedom to worship, I sat down and wrote about a beach in California. Every Friday that July, people gathered at lifeguard station 20 on Huntington Beach. By the fourth week, about 2,500 showed up and roughly 300 were baptized in the Pacific.

The woman behind it was Jessi Green. I'd known her since she was a World Racer, and before that, a New York socialite whose life Jesus turned upside down before she ever left for the field.

Years earlier, during a 21-day fast, Jessi had seen it in a vision: hundreds of people in the ocean being baptized, then turning around to baptize the people behind them. She heard the Lord say the next revival would be for the equipping of the saints.

She and her husband Parker left their jobs and their families and moved across the country on the strength of that word. When critics said it was reckless to gather during a pandemic, she gave an answer I still think about. Yes, people were dying. They were also dying for lack of hope.

I admitted something in that post. I had been praying for a move of God among young people for fourteen years, a dream I'd written about in Dream of a Generation Fully Alive. After all that time, I had almost given up believing.

What the Young Ones Are Telling Us

This spring, Barna Group and Gloo released new findings from their 2026 State of the Church research, and I read them twice. Nearly three in ten American adults now say a spiritual revival could be coming. Among Gen Z, that number climbs to 38 percent, higher than any other generation.

That's good news, but the why is what stopped me. Boomers who expect revival point to young people turning toward God, a search for meaning, and prayer. Gen Z points somewhere else entirely: mental health challenges, anxiety, and job loss.

The grandparents look at the grandkids and see hope. The grandkids look at their own wounds and see a door.

David Kinnaman of Barna was careful to say the research doesn't predict a revival. But he noticed that for younger adults, this belief is "being forged in some of the most difficult circumstances of their lives." I've spent four decades walking with young people across six continents, and that sentence describes what I've seen better than any statistic could.

The Door Has Always Been Pain

People rarely come running to God when life is working. They come when the floor gives way. I watched it in Emily, a young woman I wrote about in Gen Z's Quiet Revival. She showed up carrying church hurt, mental health struggles, and a fractured family, and she traveled to the edge of the world to ask God if He was still real. She didn't want better theology. She wanted to know if anyone was out there.

Gen Z seems to understand something many of us spent years forgetting. Brokenness is not the end of the story; it's usually where God starts writing. "The Lord is close to the brokenhearted," the psalmist says, and this generation is taking Him at His word. Jessi called the upheaval in our culture a threshing floor. It's the place where the grain gets beaten loose from the husk, and nobody enjoys it, but that's where the harvest comes from.

Those of us who are older often learned to keep our struggles quiet so we'd look like we had it together. Gen Z has decided they won't do that. I've come to believe that honesty is part of what makes them ready. As I wrote in The Church Gen Z Actually Wants, they can tell immediately when someone is performing, and they're drawn to people who will tell the truth about their scars.

So What Do the Rest of Us Do?

When your son tells you he's anxious, or your daughter loses the job she worked so hard for, every instinct says to fix it fast. Yes, maybe get them good help, that matters. But don't rush past the moment either. Ask what they sense God might be doing in it. Tell them about the season when nothing in your life worked and God met you anyway.

Go back to the word Jessi heard on that fast: equipping. If revival comes through this generation, it won't need us on a platform. It will need us alongside them, handing over everything we've learned about how God shows up in the dark. Those Boomers in the survey are right to watch for young people turning toward God. What matters for us is whether, when they turn, they find someone standing there.

I've written before that the ones who go looking for God tend to find Him. I believe that more now than I did in 2020, when I was close to giving up. Two generations are looking at the same horizon from opposite sides of the pain, and I think God is on both sides.

The next time a young person in your life tells you they're struggling, don't just pray that it goes away. Pray that God meets them in it, and ask Him what part you're meant to play.