(RNS) — Whether young people are returning to church has dominated the religion conversation for months. In September, the evangelical Christian polling firm Barna Group reported that Generation Z and millennials now attend church an average of 1.9 weekends per month, outpacing older generations. Citing the data, Christianity Today ran the headline: “Gen Z Now Leads in Church Attendance.”

But that finding comes with a critical caveat: The Barna study only measured frequency among people who already go to church. It tells us that the young people who show up, show up slightly more often. It does not tell us that more young people are showing up. In fact, data suggests they are not.

Pew Research Center found “no clear evidence of a religious revival among young adults,” in recent polling. Young people remain far less religious than older Americans and less religious than young adults were a decade ago. The American Time Use Survey showed no increase in church attendance among young adults between 2021 and 2024. And in January, sociologist Ryan Burge made the case in The New York Times that young men are simply not returning to church. Additionally, research that I led for TryTank Research Institute with over 4,000 young adult parents found that among the religiously unaffiliated, over half say it is “not at all important” for their children to be religious as adults.

The pipeline churches once counted on is not just slowing; it is closing. Fewer young people are in the pews than in any previous generation. That is the baseline reality.

We have a shrinking pool of young churchgoers who attend slightly more often, and a culture eager to read that as a revival. It is not.

But here is what both sides of this debate are missing: The question of whether young people are showing up matters far less than what happens when they do.

Our team at Future of Faith, of which I am co-founder, recently completed what we believe is the first national empirical study on the impact of listening on faith formation. We surveyed 884 adults and 1,138 teenagers, and conducted 20 in-depth interviews. The findings were striking. Eight in 10 teenagers told us that listening was important in the moments that shaped their faith the most. Seventy-seven percent said they felt more connected to someone who listened without judgment. And three-quarters said being listened to helped them stay open to faith and spirituality in the future.

In other words, listening is not a soft skill. It is the mechanism through which trust is built and faith takes root.

This matters because trust has not disappeared among young people, but it has relocated. Our research found that 76% of teenagers and over 70% of adults report high trust in people they know personally. But only 16% to 26% trust institutions or people with titles. Faith leaders can no longer rely on authority, tradition or position to hold people’s attention. They have to earn trust through relationships. And the primary currency of relational trust is listening.

The entire revival debate is built on an institutional framework: Are they coming to us? Are the numbers going up? But young people are not asking whether churches have better programming or more relevant worship. They are asking whether anyone in that building will actually hear them.

To be sure, attendance data has its place. Knowing who is in the room matters for planning, staffing and resource allocation. But the obsession with head counts reveals the same institutional mindset that contributed to disengagement in the first place. We keep measuring what is easy to count and ignoring what actually makes people stay.

The churches and ministries we work with that are seeing genuine transformation share a common trait: They have made listening a practice, not an afterthought. They are training leaders to ask better questions, to follow up on what they hear, and to build systems that remember what people share. They are treating every conversation as an act of ministry. And they are finding that when young people feel genuinely heard, they do not just come back. They bring others.

German Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in “Life Together” that “the first service that one owes to others in the fellowship consists in listening to them.” He called the failure to listen a form of spiritual tyranny. That warning feels uncomfortably relevant now.

In a world where trust in every institution is eroding, the church has an extraordinary opportunity to become the place where people are actually heard. But that will require trading the question “How do we get them back?” for a more honest one: “Are we willing to listen to what they have to say when they arrive?”

The revival everyone is debating will not be measured in attendance figures. It will be measured in whether people feel known. And that starts with listening.

(Josh Packard is co-founder of Future of Faith and author of “Faithful Futures: Sacred Tools for Engaging Younger Generations.” The Sacred Listening Study is available here. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)