Church homelessness is lonely and exhausting. And the only antidote is Christian community.
When my family moved from Washington State to California, my parents braced my brother and me for a church search that could take some time. But after just one Sunday, we fell in love with a congregation, and my family still attends there more than 15 years later.
In leaving home for college, I hoped for the same narrative. Instead, I found it to be the complete opposite. In fact, up until about six months ago, I had been going on six years without a home church—which is a familiar reality among many Gen Z Christians.
Roughly one-third of young people are attending church less often today than they did before the pandemic. A 2022 study from the Survey Center on American Life found that the pandemic appears to have caused those who already had the weakest commitments to regular religious attendance—including young people, single folks, and self-identified liberals—to stop attending church altogether at a much higher rate than other Americans.
Throughout my church search, I struggled with thoughts of self-doubt, wondering if I was the problem: Was I just being too picky in my expectations? Was I discounting churches for superficial reasons? In my mind at the time, the reason I had not yet found a church home was a mix of equally valid contributing factors over the course of my college career.
In my first year, I visited what felt like hundreds of churches by bus, since I didn’t have a car. And when the pandemic hit during my sophomore and junior years, I began tuning into my beloved church from back home. By senior year, I was determined to find a community and released any expectation of finding a one-to-one comparison with my home church.
I began commuting 40 minutes into the …