Welcome to a special edition of Youth Updates! This month, our podcast was recorded live at Youth for Christ’s 30-Hour Livestream fundraiser in May! If you’d like to donate towards our work, please head to: yfc.co.uk/donate
As always, we’ve created a blog of all the content we chat about, but you may want to listen to the podcast to hear the full conversation.
Pop Culture: Minecraft Mania (…Still!)
Minecraft isn’t anything new by any means. In fact, it was released in 2011 meaning that many of today’s teens (and young adults!) grew up with it. However, with 300 million game sales, and an estimated 219 million monthly active players – it is the best-selling single video game of all time and still has unrivalled popularity.
For those who’ve managed to avoid Minecraft for years or have seen it floating around on McDonald’s menu boards recently – Minecraft is a game set in a 3D ‘block’ style world with the emphasis on mining, building, exploring and creating.
Despite being as old as some of those in our youth groups, Minecraft continues to have a large and loyal community and this year, with the release of ‘A Minecraft Movie’, a new surge of momentum has arrived. The movie is the highest grossing film of 2025 so far and has seen a wave of enthusiastic support.
It has drawn many young people and children into the cinemas and memes linked to the game have been causing a frenzy. For example, you might have heard of ‘lava chicken’ or ‘chicken jockey’ which are two of them! In response to the memes ion the film, some young people have been seen throwing popcorn and milkshakes around or even bringing chickens into the cinema – much to many cinema’s chagrin!
Needless to say – Minecraft is going nowhere soon!
Faith & Spirituality: Unprecedented Openness
At the moment, there’s a buzz going around about the increased openness of Gen Z (and Gen Alpha too) towards faith and spirituality, but what is actually going on and what are people seeing? We’ve gathered a few stats from different surveys to back up the discussion that’s taking over as well as reflecting on what this means!
- In January, a survey of 10,000 people conducted by OnePoll found that Gen Z’s are half as likely to be atheists as their parents or grandparents and revealed that just 13% of under-25s identified as atheists.
- It’s even hit mainstream media – The Times reported that Bible sales increased by 87% between 2019 and 2024.
- Bible Society and YouGov’s ‘The Quiet Revival’ showed that church attendance has risen by 50 per cent over the last six years, busting the myth of church decline.
- In the same report YouGov surveyed over 13,000 UK adults and found that over 2 million more people are going to church now than in 2018. 33% of all churchgoers being aged 18 – 34. Yet in 2018, 4% of 18 – 24-year-olds were monthly churchgoers. That figure is now 16%.
For years there were talks of the decline of Christianity, but things are back on the up. Whereas perhaps ‘cultural’ Christians stopped going to church – we may now be seeing the return of those genuinely seeking a connection with Jesus.
As a team, we recently went to an event called Spring Harvest and we saw this trend play out there also. Young people were ready from the get-go to engage with God and we saw a vast amount of young people who wanted prayer around evangelism. For example, prayer that their Dad would come to know Jesus or that they’d have confidence to share Jesus with their friends. The openness is both with non-churched young people seeking out Jesus and churched young people wanting to share Jesus.
The good news here is that, based on our own research (Z-A of Spirituality) that when a young person shares their faith with their friends, that roughly 1 in 2 of them will be influenced by that.
The news is certainly positive, but the real question in all of this is ‘are we ready for more young people and young adults to enter our churches?!’
Sources:
- https://www.thetimes.com/uk/religion/article/spiritual-gen-z-drive-increase-in-bible-sales-vnphxfjn5
Word Of The Month: Let’s Get Quizzical
This month’s ‘word of the month’ looks a little different as within our livestream we asked two youthworkers to go head-to-head to see how many of some of our previous ‘word of the months’ they could define. For the full conversation, listen to our podcast! In the meantime, these are the words they had to guess – how well would you do?!
Words:
- Rizz
- Cap/no cap
- Ick
- Sigma
- Skibbidi/skibbidi toilet
- Coded
Words (Answers):
- Rizz: short for charisma; it means confidence and the ability to attract people’s attention (often used when someone is attractive)
- Cap/no cap: Cap means something is a lie, no cap means it is not!
- Ick: a feeling of disgust; something that grosses you out
- Sigma: refers to someone who is cool, or used as a filler word for example ‘What The Sigma?’
- Skibbidi/skibbidi toilet: a nonsense filler word, origin is a Youtube/TikTok clip
- Coded: showing similar traits to whatever you’re describing, e.g. that’s so 90s coded