Is this a ripe moment for a rooted Church?
I've spent the last 23 years of my life in Christian higher education in Western Canada. This means I’ve had the opportunity to observe young adults and to ponder what it means to come of age, both in life and more importantly in Christian faith.
I’ve also been surrounded by narratives of church decline for most of these years. A recent article pegs regular church attendance in Canada around 15% which is a sharp decline from roughly 66% in the 1950s. The article says disengagement from church is particularly notable among younger generations. These are well-known trendlines that bring familiar worries.
The article goes on to highlight all the ways Canadians are filling the gaps. Wellness culture, a near sacred attachment to nature, various interest groups and online communities, volunteerism and social justice work, yoga – each on the rise and each in their own way trying to fill the need for meaning, community, health and moral purpose. The article concludes with ambivalence. "Whether these spaces can deliver what religion at its best once provided remains genuinely uncertain. Some of them will. Many won’t. And that uncertainty is itself part of the story: a society working out, without a blueprint, what it wants to carry forward and what it’s ready to leave behind."
This is a succinct overview of 2026 Canadian religious life. A society with a fading religious memory, lacking a shared blueprint, seeking what humans have always sought – meaning, purpose, community, goodness, beauty and maybe even a sort of individualized "truth." This has been the cultural wallpaper for Canadian ministry for multiple decades. But change could be on the horizon.
Recently there have been a growing number of tentative but hopeful reports of increased openness to Christian faith, especially among young people. This has been mapped most thoroughly by UK podcaster and writer Justin Brierley through his book and podcast series The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God. It tells an intriguing story of a halting and underreported Christian resurgence in some unexpected corners of contemporary Western cultural life.
The causes are hard to pin down – maybe postpandemic crisis of meaning, response to cultural fragmentation and rootlessness, political polarization? Maybe mental health crisis, economic instability, loneliness? Maybe God is on the move. Maybe it’s all of the above?
It’s too soon to say if the tide of faith might be coming back in. But let me offer two observations. First, this is the first time in my career that reports about increased openness to Christian faith have surfaced in any meaningful way in Canada. Second, I have seen a renewed interest and spiritual energy among the young adults within my professional and personal networks. The evidence is partial, fragmentary and anecdotal. But it’s worth paying attention to.
Psalm 1 paints a memorable picture of a person whose delight is in the law of the Lord.
New York Times columnist David Brooks once described contemporary Western culture as an unsteady tree. A tree depends upon a strong root system to support its branching out. In the same way, Brooks argued, we flourish when our lives are a "series of excursions from a secure base" – from roots in faith, family, community and shared sources of meaning. His point is simple – you can’t have healthy branches without well-developed roots.
Brooks worries our society has neglected the roots while celebrating the branches. The result is an unsteady tree with sprawling branches of individual rights, axiomatic moral values and unquestioned notions of personal significance and sovereignty. These branches rest upon withered historical roots of transcendent purpose, shared identity and attendant moral obligations.
This tree can remain upright for a season. But eventually cracks will emerge. We may be seeing a generation emerge that is weary of the burden of self-sustained meaning and identity maintenance. They can feel the tree is unsteady.
Psalm 1 paints a memorable picture of a person whose delight is in the law of the Lord. This is a striking contrast to our 2026 cultural background. This person’s attention is fixed on a transcendent reference point. "That person," the psalmist says, "is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither – whatever they do prospers." The metaphor of a flourishing, God-honouring person is a healthy, rooted tree.
As Christians our branches are sustained by a deep root system – our identity in Christ, commitment to Scripture, embeddedness within the Church, guidance under the Spirit and hope in the final coming of the Kingdom of God. We may be entering a season where the cracks in our unsteady cultural tree are starting to show, a ripe moment for a rooted Church to point joyfully and confidently to the Source of streams of living water.
