The Resiliency of Gen Z: A Youth Pastor’s Perspective

As society went into lock-down during the early stages of the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, for many of us in church leadership—youth pastors, in particular—we were nervously waiting for a mental health fall-out as our students lost their in-person communities and connections. We got online youth group and Zoom small groups going as quickly as possible. We made sure to over-communicate the ways students and parents could contact us. We planned virtual social hangouts and coffee hours in case any student needed to talk or see our faces. We expected our students to be knocking down our digital doors with care needs, prayer requests, and other crisis concerns.

However, it turns out that even during a worldwide pandemic, most students really wanted to laugh, be silly, share funny stories, play games, and hang out—the same things they typically do at in-person gatherings.

 If there is one thing this pandemic has taught us, it is the resiliency of Generation Z, particularly within the younger subset. Despite everything going on around them, they are able to laugh and have fun. While their older peers in high school and college are lamenting the loss of graduations and proms and looking ahead to an uncertain future, the sixth, seventh, and eight grade students I primarily minister with are still having a blast playing with silly virtual backgrounds on their online classes and showing off their pets to the camera during school.

This trend seems to hold true with their younger, elementary-aged peers as well. For example, there was the viral story of one story of a fourth grade student who changed their screen name to “Reconecting…” in order to trick his teacher into thinking he was having internet connectivity troubles; it would have worked if he hadn’t misspelled “reconnecting.” While kids certainly missed their friends and teachers, in twenty years most of the younger members of Generation Z will look back on this time as a long summer when they played a lot of video games and spent time in the back yard or riding bikes in their neighborhoods.

While there are certainly exceptions to this light-hearted resiliency, many within Generation Z are already dealing with high rates of anxiety and depression which are potentially going to be exacerbated by COVID-19. However, in other ways the typical causes of teenage anxiety and depression have been removed during this time: With schools no longer in session, the fear and threat of school shootings is not looming in teenagers’ minds. For many students, middle school is not a fun time, and with school being taken online instances of in-person bullying have gone down. Perhaps through this pandemic, Generation Z has finally reached a point where they have hit “too much” screen and social media time, and they are putting the phone down to go outside and play—something their parents have been begging them to do all along.

While there are probably many parts of ministry that are not going to look the same again, there are some certainties: teens will always find a way to show up, have fun, and laugh. They are resilient and creative and adaptative, perhaps more so than their youth pastors. Even during a pandemic, the kids are going to be all right.