I was a young man during the Jesus Movement of the late sixties and early seventies. I remember it vividly. Long-haired kids who had washed out of every other dream were getting baptized in the Pacific Ocean. Country churches that had been graying for decades were suddenly packed to the rafters. Time magazine, which had published a cover three years earlier asking Is God Dead?, ran a follow-up cover featuring a stained-glass portrait of Jesus and a single word: Revolution.
I never thought I would see the like of it again in my lifetime. Now, in 2026, I am wondering if I am wrong.
What happened in Orlando
On February 15 of this year, more than five thousand college students filled the Addition Financial Arena at the University of Central Florida for an event called UniteUS. The format was simple — worship, the Word preached, an invitation to follow Christ. By the time the night ended, organizers reported approximately sixteen hundred decisions for Christ. Hundreds were baptized on the spot, in any pool of water the building could produce. Student-athletes, some of whom had brought non-believing teammates, wept on the floor of the arena.
This is not a one-off. Similar things have been happening on campuses up and down this country for the past three years. The Asbury Revival in early 2023 was the first major one to capture wide attention — a chapel service that simply kept going for two solid weeks, drawing pilgrims from forty-eight states and several countries. Since then, smaller versions of the same have unfolded at Auburn, Texas A&M, Cedarville, Liberty, the University of Kentucky, and dozens of less-publicized places. Worship after the service ends. Confession. Repentance. Baptisms in fountains. Phones put away.
And the demographic profile is striking. It is not the children of homeschoolers. It is, to a significant degree, the very generation everybody had written off — Gen Z, raised on phones, formed by the lockdowns, fluent in cynicism, the most heavily-medicated cohort in American history. They are coming.
Why this might be the real thing
I will not pretend I am sure. Awakenings are rarer than the Christian press makes them sound. But there are three reasons I am cautiously, prayerfully hopeful that something real is underway.
One — The conditions are right
Spiritual awakenings have, historically, broken out in periods of cultural collapse and personal pain. The First Great Awakening came at a time of rationalist cooling. The Second came at a time when the new American republic was teetering toward moral chaos. The Jesus Movement came at the tail end of Vietnam, Watergate, and the failure of the sexual revolution to deliver the happiness it promised. Gen Z has lived through a global pandemic, lockdowns that derailed their adolescence, an economy that priced them out of homeownership, a phone-mediated social life that left them lonelier than any prior generation, and a public morality that keeps changing every six months. The soil is broken. The questions are real. The conditions are right.
Two — Barna's data backs the eyewitness reports
I am normally suspicious of survey-based "revival" claims. But the convergence of independent data sources at the moment is hard to dismiss. Barna found, in February of this year, that 38% of Gen Z adults believe a spiritual revival is likely in the next twelve months — the highest of any generation. Pew's research shows 71% of young adults believe in something spiritual beyond the natural world. CBN reported in April that 66% of American adults now claim a personal commitment to Jesus Christ. The numbers are softer when you ask about church attendance — that institutional indicator continues to lag — but the spiritual hunger is unmistakable.
Three — The pattern looks more like Acts than like a marketing campaign
What strikes me most about UCF and Asbury and the others is what is not driving them. There is no celebrity preacher behind these gatherings. There is no slick brand. There is no political movement. The events tend to be student-led, low-budget, and spontaneous. Worship runs over. People do not want to leave. Baptisms happen because somebody asked. That is the Acts pattern. Pentecost was not a marketing event. It was a fire that fell where the fuel was already prepared.
The danger
I would not be a faithful pastor if I did not also name the danger. Awakenings are fragile. They can be killed. They have been killed before. The early Methodist movement was on fire for a generation and then, within fifty years, it had become exactly the kind of dead institution it had once protested against. The Jesus Movement, for all its glories, lost a great many of its converts to charismatic burnout, doctrinal drift, and the simple absence of mature discipleship.
What awakenings need to last is what they always need: strong local churches, willing to do the slow, unglamorous work of forming new converts into mature disciples. An arena full of weeping eighteen-year-olds is the doorway. The local church is the room. If we lose the next year by trying to run too many more arena events and not investing enough in the ten-year work of teaching these kids how to read their Bibles, pray, marry well, raise their children in the Lord, and stay in the faith when their twenties get hard — we will have wasted an awakening. As we have, more than once, in this country's past.
What this asks of the older church
If you are over forty and reading this, you have a role to play that the eighteen-year-olds at UCF cannot play for themselves. You have what they desperately need and rarely encounter — spiritual stability. You have raised children. You have walked through a marriage that almost ended and didn't. You have buried a parent. You have read the Bible all the way through more than once. You know what discouragement looks like at thirty-five and at fifty and at sixty-eight, and you know how to keep walking.
That is exactly the asset a generation hungry for revival has the least access to. Their parents, in many cases, gave them everything except a faith. Their churches, in many cases, gave them entertainment instead of catechesis. What they need is a great-grandmother who will teach them to pray. A grandfather who will read the Bible with them on Saturday mornings. A pastor who is not interested in being famous on social media and is just trying to make disciples in his actual neighborhood.
That is what a real awakening looks like, when it goes the distance. The sparks fly in the arena. The fires keep burning in ten thousand kitchens, where someone older makes coffee and opens a Bible with someone younger and says let me tell you what He has done for me.
Pray for the kids on the quad, beloved. And get ready. They are coming. And the church that is ready to receive them, with both hands open, will be the church the next generation in America will thank God for.