How to help a lonely generation find belonging

I was a lonely middle schooler.

Wherever I went, I never felt like an insider. I struggled to fit in at school and even at home. Despite being extroverted and outgoing in personality, my friendships were few and thin.

It was no better when I showed up at youth group (which was rarely). There was exclusion and bullying. Our short-term seminary student youth director liked to play games that required athletic skill (which I was lacking) and sometimes actual violence; I remember a popular game in which we literally slapped and punched each other.

My loneliness peaked somewhere around seventh grade, taking a turn in eighth and resolving more in high school. But the scars of those years took a long time to heal and stick with me even today. Maybe it’s part of why I like serving in middle school ministry. I can empathize with kids who don’t have the easiest time navigating all the social dynamics.

But here’s the thing. Yes, I’ve been a lonely middle schooler. But I’ve never been their age. I didn’t even grow up with the internet, let alone smartphones and social media. I got my first cassette-tape Walkman in seventh grade. My cohort didn’t survive a global pandemic. It was a different era.

Loneliness looks different for middle and high schoolers today. Of course, this isn’t only about teenagers; we’re in an epoch of loneliness as a society. The more we understand what’s going on and what’s at stake, the more responsive we can be to minister well to the young people around us.

Challenges for young people today

Loneliness on the rise

The statistics are grim. As a society, we’re lonelier, more isolated, sicker, and more depressed than ever before. Depression rates in the US are at all-time highs, with young people leading the increases. According to the 2023 Surgeon General’s Advisory on Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation,

Loneliness is far more than just a bad feeling—it harms both individual and societal health. It is associated with a greater risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, depression, anxiety, and premature death. The mortality impact of being socially disconnected is similar to that caused by smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day, and even greater than that associated with obesity and physical inactivity.

While loneliness and being alone aren’t the same thing, there is often a connection between the two. For at least the past two decades, Americans’ time alone has consistently increased while our time spent with others has decreased. When you grow up in that environment, it shapes your own sense of how you relate to others.

Sixty-one percent of Gen Z young adults report feeling lonely or isolated often in their teen years, more than any older living generation. They also spent less time with their friends as teens and less frequently attended religious services as compared with older generations.

Pandemic impact

The COVID pandemic and its aftermath certainly played a part in this story, though the trajectory was already in place. Most young people carry losses and unresolved questions from the pandemic like rocks in their backpacks—somewhere down under everything else, not really drawing much attention, but unmistakably weighing them down.

More than ever, those teens aren’t putting on backpacks at all. Chronic absenteeism from school skyrocketed since the pandemic, with many American families renegotiating their relationships with school and more kids and teenagers missing school for physical or mental health reasons, opting out, or refusing. The net result is that many young people spend less time around their peers at school than in the past.

Social media and smartphone use

Both the Surgeon General and the American Psychological Association have released health advisories with clear warnings about the impact of social media use among adolescents.

Developmentally, teenagers need to be together—in person, in the same space at the same time. But the downward trend of peer-to-peer time has been accelerating for well over a decade as smartphone, social media, and gaming use have all dramatically increased. Kids and teens spend less time in person with peers than prior generations, less time in free play, less time outdoors, and less time taking risks.

Psychological researchers such as Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge have compiled decades of research to draw direct lines between the rise in smartphone and social media use (sharply increasing around 2010-2013) and the downturn in time young people spend together. The same conglomerations of studies show correlations between this friend time deficit and the rise in numerous mental health concerns (most notably clinical anxiety and depression) and suicidality.

Youth sports participation

Finally, the decline of youth sports plays a role in rising loneliness. While overall participation has been rising again over the past couple of years, fewer boys play organized sports than a decade ago, as well as fewer Black and low-income youth, as the costs and stakes are increasingly higher in increasingly competitive elite leagues. This means fewer young people reap the benefits of social capital that come with youth sports participation, including friendships with peers and relationships with coaches.

How youth ministries can help lonely young people find connection

While this picture sounds bleak, the good news is that loneliness can be addressed without funding, medication, or dramatic policy changes (though these also can be useful tools). For those of us who serve in youth ministry, we have incredible opportunities to help address loneliness among the young people entrusted to our care—and some of the best tools are already in our hands.

Maximize your environment for belonging

At its best, youth ministry is all about belonging. It’s about welcoming strangers and regulars alike, and creating environments where you don’t have to fit in to be “one of us.” Our research shows that belonging is one of teens’ 3 big questions, and often the one that drives the rest. When you don’t feel like you fit, you don’t want to be there at all. When you do, belonging changes everything.

We can’t assume that students who show up feel like they belong, especially if they attend different schools or hang out with different friend groups outside of church. We need a purposeful plan to incorporate young people who may feel on the outside or like they don’t have a good friend in youth group.

For starters:

• Learn names and call students by name when you see them (in or out of church). This is one of the most important disciplines of youth ministry leaders. It builds trust, fosters belonging, and makes people feel seen. Just last Sunday, I greeted a 14-year-old by name who was visiting for the second time, and he shot back, “You remembered my name?!” There are few words more powerful to hear than the sound of your own name.
• Plan time for welcome and connection. Not only does a young person need to be called by name, they also need to be given something to do, play, eat, or engage with to feel at ease.
• Reach out directly to students who haven’t attended recently. A personal text can make a huge difference. Give special consideration to students contending with chronic illness.
• Ensure every student hears from an adult leader on their birthday.

Give them reasons to get off their phones

Staying in touch with friends through social media can increase connections for young people. But when social media is used as an escape from in-person interaction with others, kids lose out. It can become easy to “hide in plain sight” on devices to protect themselves from rejection.

We’re also contending with brain chemistry. The dopamine hits teenagers get from device notifications are the intended results of tech creators who want young people to keep coming back to that platform or game (or better yet, never leave). If we want to break that cycle, even for an hour or so during youth group, we need to do more than mandate no-phone zones. We need to give them reasons to want those times and spaces, and to be glad they came.

The solution is not to try to entertain students. That’s good news, because we can’t compete with the entertainment available on their devices anyway. Instead, we can:

• Plan thoughtfully for engagement, including how we prepare for Bible teaching and group games. Students can tell when a leader has created opportunities for full participation from every group member.
• Make it as accessible as possible for a majority of students to attend your off-site retreats and trips, which can be especially powerful environments for building connection and trust.
• Remind yourself and your leaders to model the phone behavior we want students to practice when we’re together. Show young people that they are more interesting and important than whatever is on our screens.

Connect them with the broader church and community

Perhaps more than ever, young people need connection points to build relationships across generations and contexts. We can serve as catalysts for those connections by tapping into the potential of the church to broaden teenagers’ relationship webs.

• Eat together! As a parent, I’m often struck by how my older teen and young adult kids recall stories from shared meals with church people—in homes, at church, or on all-church retreats. Eating with others is one of the great human rituals of connection, and sharing tables shortens the distance between generations, if even for a few moments. (Playing together—from board games to active sports—creates similar effects.)
• Connect students and adults across generations. Our Sticky Faith work suggested that every student should have at least five adults in the congregation who know them by name, are praying for them, and are cheering them on. We call this the 5:1 ratio. (Serving together can be a great way to broker these intergenerational introductions.)
• Give students opportunities to serve both within and beyond the church. Amplifying a young person’s sense of usefulness can combat loneliness. And group service opportunities create unique environments to build relationships. If you’ve ever led a mission trip, you’ve seen this principle in action. But serving close to home or even within your congregation can generate similar results.

Show them how in-person connection changes everything

In our digital era, people spend more time at home than ever before. We aren’t always avoiding each other on purpose, but the isolation does contribute to loneliness. Youth ministry can combat loneliness simply by bringing young people and adults together in person.

We are humans with physical bodies that need to be near other physical bodies to be healthy. We actively respond to the presence of other people, physically and emotionally, and even more so when we sing together, move together, or say the same words (think liturgical actions and prayers here). Shared experiences of awe are especially powerful.

What’s more, when we’re together and we truly listen to one another, the impact can be profound. New research from Future of Faith finds that 7 in 10 teenagers report that being listened to has deepened their faith, while 8 in 10 teenagers agree that listening was important in the moments that shaped their faith the most. Other research highlights that listening to other people’s perspectives can also foster belonging.

Your youth ministry can make a difference

Ultimately, we can’t manufacture belonging or magically cure loneliness. We can’t force students to be kind to each other. We can’t change a student’s internal perception of themselves or others. But that doesn’t mean we have no tools to work against loneliness. Youth ministry can be an incredible environment in which young people can feel seen, heard, known, and loved—the elements of connection that dissolve loneliness and boost belonging.

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