While you were watching Gen Z men fill the pews, you may have missed that Gen Z women are quietly walking out the back door, and the data is hard to ignore.
A recent report from the Public Religion Research Institute found that 43% of women under 30 now identify as religiously unaffiliated—up from 29% in 2013. That’s not a blip. That’s a generational shift happening in real time, and it’s showing up in Southern Baptist churches across the country whether we acknowledge it or not.
This is not an article about the SBC’s position on women in ministry. Faithful Baptists can know what they believe and why and still have a serious, Gospel-driven conversation about why young women are leaving and what the church can do about it. Those are different conversations, and confusing them helps no one.
This one is about what happens in the pews, in the hallways, and in the discipleship structures of your local church—and what you can do about it this fall.
What the Numbers Actually Say
The PRRI data tells one part of the story. Nearly two-thirds of Gen Z women who have left or drifted from the church say they feel churches don’t treat men and women equally. That’s a perception problem as much as a theology problem — and it points to something churches can address directly.
But the numbers don’t tell the whole story. Research from Lifeway and others consistently shows that relational investment is the single strongest predictor of whether a young person stays in the church. Teens with three or more adults personally investing in their spiritual lives are 3.5 times more likely to remain in church as young adults. The same dynamic holds for young women specifically.
So the data raises a practical question: who are the adults in your church personally invested in the lives of your Gen Z women?
The Discipleship Gap Nobody Is Talking About
Here’s what many churches have built: robust children’s ministry, a solid student ministry, a women’s Bible study on Tuesday mornings, and maybe a young adults group if you’re staffed for it. We have all of these at my church. But what many churches haven’t built is a clear, intentional pathway for young women to be known, mentored, and spiritually formed by older women in the congregation.
Paul’s instruction to Titus is worth sitting with here. “Older women are to be reverent in behavior, not slanderers, not slaves to excessive drinking. They are to teach what is good, so that they may encourage the young women” (Titus 2:3-4, CSB). That’s not a program, it’s a culture. And it’s one most churches have to be deliberate about building.
The churches that are actually retaining young women right now aren’t doing it with better programming. They’re doing it with intentional, intergenerational relationships: older women in the faith making room for younger women to ask hard questions, wrestle with doubt, and be loved through it.
What This Looks Like Practically
This isn’t complicated, but it does require leadership from the pastor. A few things that are working:
Churches are organizing what some are calling “generational gatherings,” not women’s ministry events with a wide-open age range, but deliberate, smaller settings where younger and older women are in the room together for fellowship, Scripture, and honest conversation. The structure creates the connection. Beth has done this in our church through churchwide tea parties and other events.
Mentoring cohorts are another approach: pairing women 50-plus with women 18-30 around a shared study or project, with pastoral blessing and light structure. The key is that it’s not left to chance. Someone has to make the introduction, and the church has to signal that this relationship matters.
Some pastors are also finding that the Sunday morning experience itself sends signals. Who is welcomed on stage? Who is acknowledged? Who is prayed for by name? Young women are paying attention to whether the church sees them—not as a demographic to manage, but as image-bearers being formed into the likeness of Christ.
The Deeper Pastoral Question
The real issue underneath all of this isn’t a Gen Z problem or a women’s ministry problem. It’s a discipleship culture problem.
If your church has built structures that serve young children and older adults well but leave a gap in the 18-30 range, that’s not an accident. It reflects where attention and resources have gone. Closing that gap for young women starts with asking an honest question: Does our church have a clear answer for how a 22-year-old woman is supposed to be known, discipled, and spiritually formed here?
If the answer is “she can come to Tuesday morning Bible study,” that’s not enough, and young women are telling us so with their feet.
The gospel has always been for the outsider, the overlooked, and the one who wonders whether they belong. The question for your church isn’t whether you believe that. It’s whether your 22-year-old women experience it as true on a Tuesday afternoon when no one is watching.
That’s the work. And it starts with you noticing who isn’t in the room.
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