Some conversation online about this Sunday’s headline. Back in 2020 our podcast Irreverend was getting a full mailbag of people coming to faith (often youngish) but feeling very frustrated with the lack of engagement by the churches. I’ve known sincere people laughed at when approaching vicars to share a religious experience. Aside from a couple of suffragan bishops I couldn’t get any interest in this Quiet Revival for four years. The establishment narrative pushed over and over by ++Welby and ++Cottrell was that “young people today” were not coming to church because the church lacked a “radical inclusion” and was toxic (Welby’s words). In other words the Church was not liberal enough and also needed to urgently ramp up its social justice profile. Look at the homepages of these major UK denominations and see how the Church is stuck in this bubble. There’s little difference from the homepage of the Guardian or the BBC. It’s all about “The Message”. This take was plainly a terrible distortion of reality but one that the boomer hierarchy remains stuck in. They will not budge. That’s my experience. Now I suspect those in the high command centres will continue to misread what is happening and misinterpret headlines as “We need to move more Left-Ward” rather than focus on a confident faith that is fluent in the supernatural and can speak to the meaning crisis. GenZ from what I can see are not coming to faith because of the troubles in Gaza or Ukraine, or even climate change. They are finding God because everything else has been found wanting. They are coming to see that it is a zero sum game between nihilism or Jesus Christ (as McIntyre predicted in his second edition of After Virtue). It’s Jesus Christ or the worst kind of digital Brave New World dark age that may rob them of their humanity and their soul in this world and the next. This is what too many clergy have lost fluency in. They can speak eloquently about your carbon footprint but seem to show little interest in the inner life, let alone the salvific work of Christ.