Gen Z Is Looking for Friends

Just outside the city of Minneapolis, my small blue Toyota Corolla trundled into the extensive parking lot of one of the largest high schools in Minnesota. Locking my car among a sea of vehicles, I secured my mask and walked through the piercing winter wind with the throng of faceless individuals into the school’s main doors.

In the fall of 2021, COVID-19 protocols still lingering in public schools, I was a student teacher in an 11th-grade classroom. This school boasted it was one of Minnesota’s most diverse public high schools, and I had the privilege of engaging with an array of students representing a number of countries, backgrounds, and belief systems.

When my last day of student teaching arrived, I was taken aback by some of the responses from my students—the ones who expressed the most remorse over my departure were the students who’d hardly spoken a word the entire semester. They made efforts to stop by the classroom and say goodbye to me, dropping off little gift bags and notes. One of the students, a recent refugee from Myanmar, wrote me a letter in broken English that said, “I will miss you, your soft sweet voice saying ‘Hi’ everyday and the tap tap on your computer. You made class feel like home.”

I was stunned. My heart, captured by warmth and wonder, pondered her response. I made class feel like home? And for a refugee—a student who hasn’t been able to call somewhere “home” for who knows how long?

To further my bewilderment, out of all my students, she was one I rarely got the chance to interact with—she attended the single class I never taught but merely observed. When she walked in, I greeted her by name. That was about as far as our interactions stretched.

Since then, I’ve considered the power and radical ordinariness of relationships. If merely showing up daily and greeting my student was important, what would have happened if I got to be part of her life and was in a setting where I could share the gospel with her? What if the way to reach hearts begins with simply showing up day after day and taking an interest in someone’s life?

Gen Z Needs Friends

As I reflected on effective ways to reach Gen Zers, I asked family and friends for their thoughts, and their responses all boiled down to the same thing: relationship. Many Gen Zers are suffering from disconnection and isolation, living according to blatant lies that color their reality. Self-hatred and self-obsession simultaneously reign in their beings, and they’re clouded by confusion.

How do we evangelize to a generation living in this dichotomy? How do we participate in painting life and beauty into the picture of their lives?

Through relationships.

In Tim Keller’s sermon “Mary’s Song,” he emphasizes how, when Mary is informed by the angel Gabriel that she’ll be the mother of the Messiah, she obediently submits with the words, “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word” (Luke 1:38). We don’t witness vivid emotion on her part. However, immediately following that encounter, she “arose and went with haste . . . and greeted Elizabeth” (vv. 39–40). After Elizabeth hears the news from Mary, she erupts with praise toward God for what he has done. It’s not until then that we read Mary’s poetic song of overwhelming joy and humbled praise to the Lord in Luke 1:46–55.

Keller emphasized that we don’t fully experience the beauty and nearness of God unless we’re in fellowship with other believers.

We don’t fully experience the beauty and nearness of God unless we’re in fellowship with other believers.

In a world where the individual is prioritized, how could Christ be magnified if we sincerely prioritized cultivating fellowship—what the Oxford Dictionary defines as “friendly association”? In our everyday lives, this could look like learning and remembering names, smiling and waving, greeting and taking an interest in the lives of our neighbors and coworkers, cashiers and fellow gym-goers.

Gen Z Needs Older Friends

As believers called to disciple making, we take this friendliness even deeper in our inner circles. Evangelism through fellowship and hospitality—the building of relationships through receiving someone, whether at home, school, work, or elsewhere—is a profound means of grace to reach the hearts of wanderers. Despite what many people think, Gen Zers crave this kind of relationship, especially with older and wiser adults who take the time to know them and speak into their lives.

Some of my most formative moments in high school were when my mentor did this for me. I spent time with her at her house, with her young kids running and screaming and playing. Amid the chaos, we talked about God and life, and I found a space that felt like home—a place where my affection for the Lord was stirred.

Gen Z Needs Ordinary Friends

In Jesus’s ministry, we see radical ordinariness—how it was a regular practice that “many tax collectors and sinners were reclining with Jesus and his disciples” (Mark 2:15). Often we fall into the temptation to “spot treat” the problems of friends and unbelievers from afar rather than walking with them through their lives and trials. We can discount the wildly influential and ordinary practice of simply being with people—the ministry of presence. We’re more comfortable giving words, not time.

Often we fall into the temptation to ‘spot treat’ the problems of friends and unbelievers from afar rather than walking with them through their lives and trials.

Most Gen Zers we encounter aren’t literal refugees like my student was, but they are in the metaphorical sense: they’re isolated, often feeling displaced and unsettled, lonely and eager for the comfort of something or someone familiar and safe.

Making and forming disciples happens in the toy-littered living room, the sticky-countered kitchen, and the coffee shops and walking trails and break rooms where we share boosts of encouragement to endure everyday life. Gen Zers crave the simplicity of hospitality. It’s where hearts begin to open and affections are stirred for something more than what the world offers.

What if we resolved, with God’s help, to start being hospitable, welcoming, relationship-oriented people anywhere, to whomever God puts in front of us on a regular basis? It may be that even those who seem the shyest or least interested will be affected the most.

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