In Overlooked Spaces, a Faith Reborn

When I arrived at Butler University, I carried with me a familiar story. I had heard it from colleagues, from church leaders, and from the wider conversation about faith and young adults. Campus faith life, I was told, was thin. Students were busy, focused on other things, and largely uninterested in religion. 

I did not argue with this narrative. In fact, I quietly prepared myself for it. After all, many congregations I love were telling a similar story about their own young people.

There were no microphones or stages. What there was, instead, was time. Time to speak honestly. Time to listen carefully. Time to linger.

In my first weeks on campus, nothing challenged that assumption. Faith did not seem to sit at the center of student life in any obvious way. If I had stopped paying attention there, I might have concluded that the story I inherited was accurate.

But campus—and religious—life has a way of revealing itself slowly, if you are willing to stay curious. As the weeks passed, I started noticing expressions of faith that I had not expected. Student gatherings for worship were in fact happening, some of them quite large. There, students sang, prayed, and organized themselves around familiar Christian rhythms.

“Faith had not Vanished”

Encountering these communities forced me to admit something important. The assumption that faith had largely disappeared among young adults was simply wrong. Faith had not vanished. I had accepted a dismissal that did not match the facts.

And yet, that realization was not the deepest discovery.

What began to hold my attention most were the spaces that existed alongside these larger services. Smaller gatherings that were quieter and less formal. Meetings that did not always announce themselves as religious, but where faith formation was unmistakably taking place. These gatherings happened in dorm lounges, borrowed classrooms, coffee shops, and living rooms. There were no microphones or stages. What there was, instead, was time. Time to speak honestly. Time to listen carefully. Time to linger.

Pressure to Perform

In these smaller circles, students talked openly about anxiety, vocation, justice, relationships, and the future they were inheriting. They asked questions that have always accompanied young adulthood. Who am I? What is worth giving my life to? How do I live well in a world that feels increasingly unstable? What was new was the setting in which the students carried these questions. The path into contemporary adulthood felt less secure. There was pressure to perform, curate a life, and make decisions with long consequences while still feeling uncertain formed the air they breathed. Even if the perennial questions were familiar, the anxiety made them sound different. 

What struck me was these small gatherings were doing formative work rather than simply providing space for expression. Young adults were learning how to live with their questions, informed by faith. Meaning was not delivered to them. It was being made together. In these circles, students practiced listening, named their fears, held uncertainty, and imagined a future with others. Faith was not imposed or defended. It was integrated into the texture of daily life.

That shift made something else visible. When we misread where and how faith formation is happening, we risk directing our energy toward fixing what is not broken, overlooking the quiet work of the Spirit already unfolding among us.

All are Welcome Here?

It was then that I began to understand how a church’s disillusionment can function as a lens. When we expect spiritual absence, we stop noticing where formation is actually happening. Churches often say that young adults are welcome, but quietly operate as if they have already given up. Have you ever been to a place that has a welcome sign at the door, but mentally or systematically does not welcome you? Everything inside assumes you will not stay long. The structure is not built with you in mind. The imagination of the community, its sense of its own future, does not include you, even if its language does.

I wondered whether this is how many young people experience congregations shaped more by resignation than by hope. Young adults may be greeted at the door, but are rarely entrusted with meaningful responsibility. Their questions may be tolerated, but not treated as sacred. The life of the church carries on as if young people are not really coming, and then their absence is interpreted as proof that they do not care. Disillusionment becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. We stop asking the right questions, not because we do not love young people, but because we have accepted a story about them that narrows our imagination.

An Unexpected Ecology

What I was encountering on campus was not a lack of meaning making. Young people were in pursuit of meaning; it simply came in a different or unfamiliar ecology. Faith was present among them, but it was often woven into relationships rather than programs. It showed up through companionship rather than doctrinal certitude. In these small communities, belief was not always articulated clearly, but belonging was practiced faithfully.

The early church would have recognized this instinctively. The Book of Acts tells us that the first believers devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. They gathered in homes. They shared life. Formation happened not through polished systems, but through proximity and mutual care. Faith grew because people stayed close enough to one another to be changed. That pattern has never disappeared. It simply becomes harder to see when we expect faith to look institutional in order to be real.

Habits of the Heart

As theologian James K. A. Smith has argued, we are shaped less by what we say we believe and more by the practices and communities that form our loves.[1] What I have witnessed on campus makes that insight tangible. Students are being formed not simply by content, but by communities that practice attention, companionship, and shared life.

One experience in particular crystallized this for me. A student told me that he wanted to combine his love for Jesus with his passion for exercise. I had said to him, almost in passing, that faith is not confined to church buildings and that it can take root in every part of our lives. I did not know how seriously he would take that invitation. A few weeks later, he returned with a plan. He had spoken with a local community center, secured a room, and organized an eight-week Saturday exercise class he called Sweat and Surrender.

The exercise class itself was ordinary. Jumping jacks, squats, tired laughter. The music conveyed Christian themes. Scripture and brief prayers appeared on screens as encouragements to keep going. I visited twice. What astonished me was not the novelty of the idea. It was the conviction. Here was a young adult who trusted that his love for Jesus and his love for movement belonged together. Standing there, sweating and struggling to keep up, I realized we were doing church. Not because it resembled a worship service, but because it resembled the earliest Christian gatherings. Bodies together in an ordinary space, sharing encouragement, scripture, and presence.

This was not an answer to all the church’s challenges, but it widened my imagination.

Companionship Uber Eats

That insight followed me off campus and into my own congregation nearby. As I worked on this essay, I held the first meeting of a young adult ministry group at the church where I serve as associate pastor. Eight young adults signed up at launch. The initial meeting was over Zoom, since not everyone was local. Through a small grant from the Forum for Theological Education (FTE), everyone was able to order Uber Eats, and we shared a virtual meal together. It was simple, and in its own way, sacred. 

I asked a question that I thought I already knew the answer to: What do you want this group to be? Of course I had my own hopes. But I also wanted to honor what I say I believe about young adults, so I told them plainly that this was our shared space and that I wanted to build it with them, not for them. I wanted to hear what they wanted.

Their replies were unmistakable. They wanted a group where they could be themselves and not judged, and still be held accountable to their Christian life. They wanted to grow in faith and journey together. In other words, they were describing the church—not as a place of performance, but as a community sturdy enough for discipleship, where grace and accountability belong together. I left that Zoom call less worried about young adults, and more concerned about whether our churches still look like what they set out to be.

A Never-ending Quest

Younger generations are often dismissed as allergic to accountability, as if they only want affirmation without responsibility. But that night, what I heard was not avoidance. It was longing. They were not asking the church to lower the bar. They were asking for a community strong enough to hold them to the ethical life they say they want. The desire for authenticity, truth, grace, and growth is not new. The human heart is the same as it ever was. The longing is the same. What changes, sometimes only slightly, is the form of that quest. The container. The pace. The setting. The way community is built even when people are dispersed, busy, anxious, yet still hungry for God.

And with that, the focus turns back to us. Have churches’ fears, or the pressure to keep things running smoothly and habitually, replaced the very qualities young adults are asking for—authenticity, accountability, growth, companionship? 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer warned that those who love their idea of community more than the community itself risk destroying it. I think the church’s unease about young adults often pushes us toward ideas rather than toward people. We search for solutions. We look for the one or two programmatic changes that might magically reverse decline. We measure success quickly. We look for proof. But spiritual formation has never been efficient. It has always required patience, a willingness to be present without guarantees.

Hidden in Plain Sight

What I am discovering is not a detailed strategy for reaching young adults but an attitude or posture that I believe is worth reclaiming. Faith among young people is not absent. It is often hidden in plain sight. Augustine wrote that our hearts are restless until they rest in God. That rest is rarely delivered through technique or playbook. It is discovered through trust and belonging, through a community that can hold a person long enough for them to become whole.

I do not believe the traditional practices of the church are obsolete. Worship, preaching, sacraments, and service remain essential. In fact, I think young adults need these more than we sometimes imagine. They need a story larger than their anxieties. They need practices that steady the heart. They need communities that teach them how to live with hope when the world feels heavy. What might need renewal is the attitude we assume when approaching young adults, and the level of honesty we apply when evaluating whether our congregations embody what we proclaim. 

I began this work assuming faith had faded. I discovered instead that it had multiplied its forms. What I learned on campus is that faith does not disappear when it leaves our expected spaces. It often becomes quieter, smaller, and more relational, but no less real.

If that is true, then the invitation before the church is surprisingly practical. We do not need to convince young adults to embrace the purpose of church. In many ways, they already do. What we need is the courage to make our congregations reliably resemble what we claim the church is. The question is whether our communities are structured for relationship rather than spectatorship. Whether young adults are merely invited to attend, or are they trusted to belong, to lead, and to be formed.

Quiet Faith, Not Absent Faith

I want to leave readers with questions I am still asking. Where have we mistaken quiet faith for absent faith? Where have we allowed disillusionment to narrow our imagination? Do we assume young adults do not want accountability when, in fact, they are asking for it? And if the deepest human longing is unchanged since ancient times, what simple changes in form, practice, and posture might help our churches become the sacred spaces where young people can finally find what they are looking for?

Perhaps we should seek not specific answers but recommit to inspiring others—which, if we are willing to see it, invites us to hope again.

The Rev. Aziel Núñez ’14 M.Div. is Director of The Compass Center at Butler University. As a child of evangelical missionaries, he lived in Mexico City, San Diego, Madrid, and Chicago. He is also a lecturer at Christian Theological Seminary and is an associate minister at Christ Indianapolis United Methodist Church. He holds a Doctor of Ministry from Boston University and a B.A. from Colgate University.