The Friendship Gap: Why Gen Z Women Are Leaving Church and How Pastors Can Help

The Quiet Crisis Nobody's Talking About

Three months ago, a young woman named Emily sat down with a pastor in an office she'd grown up attending. She'd been involved in youth group, led worship at her church, and had genuine faith commitments. Now 22, she hasn't been back to church since her freshman year of college.

When asked why, Emily didn't mention doubts about theology. She didn't cite intellectual arguments against faith. Instead, she said something that reveals a much deeper problem: "I felt alone in a room full of people."

Emily's experience isn't unique. It's part of a pattern so significant that major Christian research organizations have started sounding alarms.

According to Barna's 2025 research, 38% of Gen Z women (ages 18-24) now identify as atheist, agnostic, or having no faith, compared to just 32% of Gen Z men. That gap has widened dramatically since the pandemic. Even more striking: among young adult women, Bible reading has plummeted to just 31% (compared to 37-41% across other Gen Z groups), church attendance sits at a historic low of 30%, and prayer among young women 18-24 dropped to 58%, lower than their male peers.

This represents not just a demographic shift, but a theological crisis. Yet underneath the statistics lies something that traditional church metrics miss entirely.

Gen Z women aren't leaving the faith because of what they believe. They're leaving because of who they don't know.

The Loneliness Epidemic Inside the Church Building

Here's what's particularly devastating: Barna's research reveals that Gen Z women report a critical lack of meaningful support from adults in their lives. They describe feeling disconnected not from God, but from church community itself.

Research shows that 57% of this generation says meaningful relationships matter more than sermons, programs, or music. Let that sink in. The thing they need most, genuine relational connection, is the thing many churches are least equipped to provide at scale.

The problem isn't that Gen Z women don't want community. It's that they can't find it in the spaces meant to provide it.

Think about the typical church experience for a young woman: she arrives at a 45-minute service, sits among hundreds or thousands, shakes hands with friendly ushers, joins a small group of strangers while worrying she won't fit in, exchanges pleasantries but no intimacy, and leaves feeling more alone than when she arrived.

Compare that to her Monday: she opens Instagram or TikTok and finds influencers who seem to know her. Who address her specific struggles with anxiety, identity, and belonging. Who make her feel seen, even through a screen.

The digital world, for all its emptiness, is offering something the local church isn't: the impression of being known.

When Spiritual Formation Happens Only in Isolation

Tim Keller wrote extensively about spiritual formation, and one of his most challenging insights was this: you cannot become deeply Christian alone. Faith, he argued, is not an individual transaction between a person and God, but a relational reality that requires community.

This is not modern therapeutic language. This is ancient Christian theology.

The Apostle Paul speaks constantly about "one another" (love one another, bear one another's burdens, confess to one another, pray for one another). Not primarily as a nice-to-have, but as constitutive of what it means to follow Jesus.

C.S. Lewis understood this too. In his essay on friendship in The Four Loves, Lewis wrote that friendship is "unnecessary, like philosophy, like art," and yet profoundly necessary for spiritual growth. He observed that friends see each other's souls in ways that solitary individuals cannot see their own. People need friends who walk beside them to become fully who they are meant to be.

But here's what's happening to Gen Z women:

They are being asked to become disciples without disciplers.

Young women transition from high school youth groups (where relationships are often pre-built through peer groups) into a void. By 22, they're expected to navigate college, independence, faith questions, identity crises, and romantic relationships, all while discovering that the church has no intentional space for them.

One mother watched her daughter attend a church of 1,500 people and know fewer than five people by name after six months. Nobody invited her to coffee. Nobody asked about her struggles. Nobody walked alongside her.

So she found community elsewhere. And eventually, she found a worldview elsewhere too.

The Research Gap Hiding in Plain Sight

Barna's research points to something pastors often miss: the relationship gap is a retention gap.

Young women aren't just experiencing generic loneliness. They're experiencing a specific kind of spiritual loneliness: the absence of older women, mothers in the faith, mentors who model what authentic Christian womanhood looks like and who have walked the messy road to get there.

The research on intergenerational faith transmission is sobering. When religious transmission happens intentionally (when older generations deliberately pass on not just doctrine but lived faith), the numbers change dramatically. Families with strong intergenerational spiritual relationships show exponentially higher rates of faith continuity.

But what happens when that transmission breaks down?

Gen Z women are left in a peculiar bind. They may intellectually believe Christianity is true, but they haven't seen it lived by women they trust. They haven't been discipled. They haven't been mentored. They've been programs-to'd and sermons-to'd, but not truly known.

And in a generation that craves authenticity above all else, the absence of genuine relational discipleship feels like religious hypocrisy.

The Friendship Framework: A Theological Path Forward

What if churches reimagined their approach to young women not as a program problem, but as a friendship problem?

Francis Chan, in his book Multiply, emphasizes that Jesus didn't build the church through programs, he built it through intentional relationships. He knew 12 people deeply, poured into them, and those 12 eventually reached the world.

The alternative to scale is not ineffective pastoral care. The alternative to growth metrics is not spiritual depth. But abandoning intentionality in relationships in pursuit of either is a false choice.

Here's what Barna's research suggests needs to happen:

1. Create Space for Genuine Spiritual Friendship

Not small group Bible studies with discussion questions and curriculum. Real friendship. Women gathering to be known and to know others.

Gavin Ortlund has written beautifully about the lost art of Christian friendship: relationships that aren't task-oriented, that aren't trying to "do" ministry, but that simply exist for the sake of mutual spiritual encouragement and challenge.

This requires vulnerability. It requires messiness. And it requires time that can't be scheduled into a 90-minute program slot.

2. Rebuild Intergenerational Discipleship

Deliberately connect older women (mothers, grandmothers, women in their 40s, 50s, 60s) with younger women (ages 18-30) in mentoring relationships.

Not formal mentoring programs. Those often fail because they treat discipleship like a curriculum.

Real mentoring: a 45-year-old inviting a 24-year-old to coffee. Sharing honestly about her own faith crisis and how she worked through it. Praying together. Introducing her to other women. Saying, "Your faith matters. Your questions matter. You matter to me."

The Alabama Baptist's recent reporting on Gen Z women notes that this kind of relational investment, such as "generational gatherings for women" focused on fellowship, food, prayer, and honest conversation, is one of the few interventions actually moving the needle.

3. Make Women Visible in Church Leadership

Much of the cultural and institutional mistrust Gen Z women express toward church relates to trust in leadership itself. When they see leadership failures, hypocrisy, or exclusion (especially around women's voices and agency), it signals that the community isn't safe for them.

This doesn't require abandoning theological convictions about gender or complementarity. But it does require intentionality about whether women are seen as spiritual leaders, whether their gifts are recognized, and whether they have advocates in the room when decisions are made.

4. Know Your Young Women Relationally, Not Administratively

Here's a hard truth for pastors: a church management system knows that Sarah attended twice. It doesn't know that Sarah only knows two people. It doesn't know that nobody invited her to lunch. It doesn't know that she cried in the parking lot after the second service because she felt invisible.

Pastors could know these things. But it requires intentionality. It requires treating pastoral care not as a program to check off, but as the core calling of the role.

The Tools Matter, But Only If Relationships Come First

Relationship intelligence tools like FlockConnect are designed to help pastors identify exactly these gaps. To see who's isolated. To flag when a member hasn't connected with anyone in three weeks. To surface the young women who might otherwise slip through the cracks.

But here's what pastoral leaders have learned from using these tools: the tool only works if there's intentionality behind it.

A pastor who uses a relationship tool but doesn't act on what it shows is like a doctor who orders blood work and ignores the results.

The real power isn't in technology. It's in what technology makes possible: giving pastors back the time they need to actually shepherd their flock.

When pastors aren't buried in spreadsheets and manual tracking, they can:

• Grab coffee with the young woman who's isolated
• Introduce her to a mentor
• Notice she hasn't been there in three weeks and reach out
• Know her story well enough to invite her into community
• See her, really see her, the way Jesus saw people

A Pastoral Challenge: What Would Change If You Knew?

Here's a question for pastors and church leaders: What would change in the approach to young women if there was a clear, real-time picture of who was isolated? Who only knew one or two people? Who was at risk of quietly slipping away?

Would the church:

• Make one phone call a week to a young woman sensed to be disconnected?
• Ask an older woman mentor in the church to reach out to someone?
• Create an intentional gathering just for young women to build friendships?
• Evaluate whether the church felt welcoming to someone experiencing real loneliness?

The research is clear: Gen Z women need friendship, not programs. They need mentors, not managers. They need to be known.

And they need to see that faith isn't a solo journey, it's a communal one, anchored in relationships with real people who've walked the road before them.

The Theological Bottom Line

At the heart of this crisis is a theological confusion that's infected much of American church culture.

Many have come to believe that a person's faith is primarily an individual affair. You have your relationship with God. Someone else has theirs. Everyone comes together once a week for an hour and then goes their separate ways.

But that's not biblical Christianity.

The Apostle Paul tells the Corinthians: "If one part suffers, all parts suffer. If one part is honored, all parts celebrate" (1 Corinthians 12:26). He's describing an organism, not an organization. A body, not a building.

Gen Z women are leaving because they've been invited into a building, not a body. They've been offered a transaction, not a transformation.

But imagine if a church was a place where young women encountered:

• Older women who modeled faith through real struggle and real grace
• Genuine friendships built on shared faith and mutual encouragement
• A community that noticed when someone was struggling and reached out
• Leaders who saw them, knew them, cared for them by name

Imagine if spiritual formation didn't happen in isolation, but in the context of the people who loved them.

That's not a program. That's not a new youth group model.

That's the church as it was meant to be.

Next Steps: Starting Where You Are

If this resonates with what's happening in your church, here's where to start:

1. Look around. Can the pastoral team actually name the young women in the congregation? Do you know their stories?

2. Listen first. Invite 2-3 young women to coffee. Ask them: "What would make you feel more connected here? What are you looking for spiritually? Who do you know in this church besides the person who invited you?"

3. Connect deliberately. For one young woman known to be isolated, identify one older woman who could be her mentor. Make the introduction. Make it easy. Make it relational.

4. Track intentionality. If your church isn't already, start paying attention to relational health, not just attendance and giving. Tools can help with awareness, but awareness is the first step.

5. Preach about friendship. Make it clear from the pulpit that being Christian is fundamentally about relationships. Reference C.S. Lewis on friendship. Teach from Paul's "one another" passages. Make it theological, not just practical.

Final Thought: The Cost of Not Knowing

When Barna researchers asked Gen Z women why they're disconnecting from faith, the reasons varied. But beneath nearly every reason was the same thread: loneliness. The absence of being known.

Churches talk a lot about "knowing God." But perhaps there's been a forgetting of what Jesus knew: you can't really know an invisible God well unless you're practicing knowing visible people.

The Apostle John put it bluntly: "If you love God but hate your brother, you're a liar. For you can't love the God you can't see if you won't love the people you can see" (1 John 4:20, paraphrased).

Gen Z women aren't looking for a perfect church. They're looking for a real church. A church where they can be known. Where they can belong. Where they can see authentic faith lived out by real women who've struggled and found grace.

The job of a pastor isn't to make the church cooler or programs better. It's to make sure nobody, especially not young women, slips through the cracks of relational care.

And that starts with knowing who you're shepherding, and why they matter.

Related Reading:

• Why Church Members Leave (And How to See It Coming)
• How to Identify Isolated Church Members Before They Leave
• Why Church Relational Health Matters: The Impact on Member Retention

About This Article

This post draws on recent research from Barna Group (2025), theological insights from Tim Keller, Francis Chan, Gavin Ortlund, and C.S. Lewis, and observations from pastoral leaders navigating the Gen Z crisis in their churches.

For churches experiencing this challenge, know that you're not alone, and you're not without solutions. The answer isn't better technology. It's better theology that leads to better relationships.

Try FlockConnect free for 14 days to start identifying who in your congregation might be at risk of slipping through the relational cracks.