Last month I wrote about why I still believe in Sunday School. I made the case that it uses time families have already set aside, that a class can always add a chair instead of turning someone away, that new teachers get to learn alongside experienced ones, and that inviting someone to church is a lot easier than inviting them into a stranger's living room. I have watched small groups come and go over the years, while Sunday School classes hold steady with people who have not missed a Sunday in years.
Since then I have been paying closer attention to which churches are actually growing with young families. What I am seeing is not what I was told to expect. The churches filling up with young couples and kids are, wait for it, traditional congregations. And the data is starting to back that up.
What the data shows
For most of my adult life the standard story was that young people were leaving, and the way to win them back was to make church look less like church. That story is not holding up.
Barna Group's State of the Church research found in 2025 that Gen Z and Millennial churchgoers now attend more often than any older generation, averaging about 1.9 and 1.8 weekends a month respectively. That is nearly double where they were in 2020 and the highest levels Barna has recorded for young Christians. Gallup data released this spring showed the share of young men who say religion is very important to them jumped 14 points, to 42 percent.
Look at where many of them are going. An analysis of diocesan data by Hallow found the average U.S. Catholic diocese saw roughly 38 percent more people enter the Church at Easter 2026 than the year before, with young adults in their twenties driving much of the growth. Across nearly 60 college campus ministries, participation in adult initiation classes more than doubled. Stanford, which averaged four adult baptisms a year for three decades, brought 46 students and young adults into the Church this Easter. Orthodox priests are reporting record attendance and more inquirers than their clergy can handle. These are the oldest and most structured expressions of Christianity in America, and right now they cannot keep up with demand.
Protestants are seeing the same pull. A Lifeway Research survey released this summer found that churchgoers ages 18 to 29 are about twice as likely as those 50 and older to want more liturgy in their services. Meanwhile, nearly half of nondenominational churchgoers said their church has no liturgical style at all. Young adults are not asking us to strip away more. They are asking for more of what we already set aside.
I am not telling anyone to change denominations. I am saying the demand for traditional church is real. Traditional does not mean old, small, or stuck. It means rooted: a church that knows what it believes, teaches it on purpose, and gives people a place to show up every week and learn it. In technology we would call that product-market fit.
The small group bandwagon
I have watched pop-up churches follow the small group model one after another, and I have watched some large churches encourage people away from the building, with the idea that home groups get the church out into the community. There is some truth in that. But as I said last time, I have watched groups come and go, and too many of the ones that last drift into cliques or settle for shallow study.
The broader numbers point the same direction. Lifeway Research found that the share of weekend worshipers involved in a small group, Sunday School class, or similar group has slipped from 49 percent in 2010 to 44 percent. Among Southern Baptist churches, the share where fewer than a quarter of attendees are in any group grew from 6 percent in 2018 to 9 percent in 2023. Churches have spent years encouraging people to join a group, and fewer people are doing it. The church is pushing a model people simply are not drawn to.
What I find most telling is where groups actually meet. Lifeway's State of Groups study found that 92 percent of churches have groups meeting at the church building, and on average 79 percent of all groups meet there. Fewer than one in three churches have any groups meeting in homes. Even churches that adopted the small group language kept meeting in the building, because that is where people show up.
The clique problem is about structure, not people. A home group lives in someone's living room, among someone's friends, usually by invitation, so it tends to close itself off even when nobody intends it to. Lifeway's own guidance warns that groups can quietly become closed to newcomers. A Sunday School class has a room number on the door and a sign in the hallway, and anyone can walk in.
I wrote last time about a newcomer who walked into a church Bible study, asked to join, and was told there was no room. I keep hearing versions of that story. Many of us in Gen X were taught the opposite: when someone new walks in, you give up your seat. That is more than good manners. Jesus told us to take the lowest place at the table, and James warns against handing the best seat to whoever seems most important.
Closed groups create a quieter version of the same problem. When seats are scarce, people start positioning themselves for the "in table," the group closest to the pastor or church leadership. Nobody sets out to build a hierarchy, but scarcity turns proximity into a prize. Sunday School is not immune to this, and most of us know a church with "the pastor's class." But a room with an open door and space for more chairs is much harder to gatekeep than a living room with eight seats.
The depth problem is structural too. Many small groups lean on a video and a few discussion questions. In August I sat in a Sunday School class in Nashville while a friend of mine taught. As he went, people kept walking in, so many that we had to go find more chairs. He was not a comedian or a polished storyteller. He was an exceptional teacher. He asked good questions, drew people into the text, and engaged the room so well that nobody wanted to leave.
That is the gap in most small groups. As I mentioned last time, training teachers simply has not been made a priority. Most group leaders are trained, if at all, to facilitate: start the video, read the questions, keep things moving. Facilitating is not teaching, and it is a big reason so many groups stay shallow. Sunday School, done well, has a teacher, a curriculum, and a plan to move people through the whole of Scripture over years, not weeks. It also gives a new teacher the chance to sit under someone like my friend and learn by watching it done well.
Sunday School works, and the numbers say so
Lifeway's State of Discipleship analysis, released in August, found that churchgoers who attend a small group Bible study such as Sunday School five or more times a month score 74.1 on its discipleship assessment, compared to 60.4 for those who do not participate at all. Those same people are in worship more than nine times a month. Lifeway has also found that the higher a church's share of attendees in an ongoing Bible study, the more likely that church is to see worship attendance grow over five years. Study and worship feed each other.
In the Southern Baptist Convention, more than 2.6 million people took part in Sunday School or a small group Bible study in 2025, up more than 3 percent and the fourth straight year of growth. People will come to a Bible study hour when we offer one.
It fits how families live, and it is safer
Sunday School fits a busy family better than almost anything else a church can offer. Weeknights already belong to ball practice, homework, and work that follows people home. Sunday morning is time families have already given to the church. One drive, one morning, everyone in the same place.
Then there is the question home groups rarely solve: what do we do with the kids? Either the parents pay a babysitter, the kids end up in a back bedroom with whoever drew the short straw, or one parent spends the evening watching children and misses the study. In Sunday School, the kids go to their own class with a teacher and a curriculum built for their age. They are being discipled, not just supervised, and both parents get to sit down and study.
It keeps families together, too. They arrive together and leave together, and "what did you learn today?" becomes a real conversation on the ride home. That is discipleship happening inside the family, which is the goal anyway. Young parents also walk the same hallway as people who have raised their kids and buried their spouses. That kind of mentoring rarely happens in a group of eight couples the same age.
When my wife and I lived in Philadelphia, our neighborhood was predominantly Jewish, and we loved watching how our neighbors kept the Sabbath. Saturday was not one more day on the calendar. Families went to synagogue together and then spent the rest of the day together. That is what Sunday can be for a Christian family: a family and faith day. Deuteronomy 6 tells parents to teach their children when they sit in their house and when they walk by the way. Worshiping and studying together in the morning, then spending the day together, is how faith gets passed down. Small groups add another appointment to an already crowded week. Sunday School gathers it all into one day set apart.
Safety matters here as well. Most churches now screen the people who work with children. The 2020 Faith Communities Today survey found that 70 percent of evangelical congregations run background checks, and Lifeway found that 94 percent of Southern Baptist churches with 250 or more in attendance do. Those checks catch real problems: of the screenings run through Lifeway's program since 2023, 12 percent turned up some kind of crime. Add a two-adult rule, check-in and check-out, and windows in classroom doors, and a church building carries a layer of protection a living room does not have by default. Church insurer Brotherhood Mutual also notes that hosts of ministry-sponsored home groups can face lawsuits if someone is hurt. And when church leadership knows someone needs extra care, that knowledge can be acted on at the building in a way it simply cannot be in a private home. None of this is a judgment on the good people who open their homes. It is about systems and accountability, and the church building already has them.
Stewardship and purpose
Many pastors miss that the church building should be used as much as possible. A facility that sits empty most of the week is not fiscally responsible. The mortgage, insurance, utilities, and upkeep are paid every month whether the rooms are full or not. Classrooms full of learners on Sunday morning are good stewardship.
More important than the budget, the church is educational by nature. Jesus told us to make disciples, "teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you," and the word disciple itself means learner. The early church devoted itself to the apostles' teaching, and that pattern did not come from nowhere. Jewish tradition has long called the synagogue a house of prayer, a house of assembly, and a house of study, and the everyday Yiddish word for it, shul, simply means school. Jesus taught in the synagogues, and Paul's habit was to go there and reason from the Scriptures. The church inherited a building meant for learning. The modern Sunday School movement began in 1780 when Robert Raikes started teaching poor children in Gloucester to read, with the Bible as the textbook. Teaching is not an add-on program. It is central to what the church is for.
The young adults and young families walking back into our churches are not asking for a better show. The data says they want depth, structure, and roots, and the churches offering those things are the ones filling up. Sunday School already has what they are looking for: a room with an open door, a teacher who knows how to teach, a class for the kids, and a morning the whole family shares.
So turn the lights on early, unlock the classrooms, and put a faithful teacher in every room. They are coming.
Sources
- Barna Group, "Barna's Top Trends of 2025, Part 2": https://www.barna.com/research/barnas-top-trends-of-2025-part-2/
- Religion News Service, "New study shows Gen Z and Millennials are now the most regular churchgoers": https://religionnews.com/2025/09/03/new-study-shows-gen-z-and-millennials-are-now-the-most-regular-churchgoers/
- The Daily Declaration, "Young Men Are Becoming Increasingly Religious, Polling Confirms" (Gallup data): https://dailydeclaration.org.au/2026/04/23/young-men-religion-poll/
- National Catholic Register, "US Dioceses Report Elevated Numbers of Easter Baptisms and Confirmations": https://www.ncregister.com/cna/us-dioceses-report-elevated-numbers-for-2026-new-catholics
- Washington Times, "U.S. Catholics see 38% surge in adult converts over Easter weekend": https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2026/apr/6/us-catholics-see-38-surge-adult-converts-easter-weekend-analysis/
- Stanford Review, "Catholic Conversions Surge at Stanford From 4 to 46 Annually": https://stanfordreview.org/catholic-conversions-surge-at-stanford-from-4-to-46-annually
- Northeastern University / New York Times, "Orthodox Church Pews Are Overflowing With Converts": https://cssh.northeastern.edu/orthodox-church-pews-are-overflowing-with-converts/
- Charisma, "Gen Z Is Twice as Likely to Want This Type of Church" (Lifeway liturgy survey): https://mycharisma.com/news/gen-z-is-twice-as-likely-to-want-this-type-of-church/
- Lifeway Research, "Research Reveals Importance of Small Groups, Evangelism, Assimilation for Church Growth": https://research.lifeway.com/2023/03/07/research-reveals-importance-of-small-groups-evangelism-assimilation-for-church-growth/
- Lifeway / Baptist Press, "Complicated picture of Southern Baptist churches emerges from statistical analysis": https://news.lifeway.com/2025/03/11/complicated-picture-of-southern-baptist-churches-emerges-from-statistical-analysis/
- Lifeway Research, "Small Groups Remain Key Aspect of Churches' Discipleship Ministry": https://news.lifeway.com/2024/09/12/small-groups-remain-key-aspect-of-churches-discipleship-ministry/
- Lifeway Research, "6 Reasons Worship Attendees Aren't Group Participants": https://research.lifeway.com/2025/01/13/6-reasons-worship-attendees-arent-group-participants/
- Lifeway Research, "Small Group Participation Linked to Higher Discipleship Scores": https://research.lifeway.com/2026/08/04/small-group-participation-linked-to-higher-discipleship-scores/
- Christian Daily, "Survey shows majority of evangelical churches in US offer small groups": https://www.christiandaily.com/news/us-evangelicals-meet-in-small-groups-what-does-that-mean
- Lifeway Research, "Southern Baptists See Attendance and Baptism Gains Amid Membership Declines": https://research.lifeway.com/2026/05/05/southern-baptists-see-attendance-and-baptism-gains-amid-membership-declines/
- Baptist General Association of Virginia, "How Many Churches Use Background Checks?" (Faith Communities Today 2020 data): https://www.bgav.org/blog/how-many-churches-use-background-checks
- Lifeway Research, "Most Southern Baptist Churches Use Background Checks, Fewer Receive Abuse Training": https://research.lifeway.com/2024/07/18/most-southern-baptist-churches-use-background-checks-fewer-receive-abuse-training/
- Brotherhood Mutual, Safety Library ("Minimizing the Liability in Facility Use"): https://www.brotherhoodmutual.com/safety-library