Tanita Maddox: Showing Up for Gen Z

Published by Outreach Magazine | July 30, 2025

Tanita Tualla Maddox is the national director for generational impact for Young Life as well as an associate regional director for the Mountain West Region. She is the author of What Gen Z Really Wants to Know About God (IVP) and is a main session speaker for the upcoming 2025 Amplify Conference, October 21–22 at Wheaton College.

In the following interview with Outreach, Maddox talks about best practices for reaching younger generations, the burning questions on their minds and how the Christian life is like baseball.

You’ve dedicated a lot of your vocational ministry life to understanding and working with younger generations and loving them. So where does that love come from?

Wish I had a really good answer on that. The truth is, is I just love being around young people in a really inexplicable way. And I remember walking along the path [at a Young Life summer camp] with like a 15-year-old about two or three years ago. And I just remember thinking, I generally am enjoying this. I generally enjoy the company and friendship and conversation with young people. That occurred to me because it’s not work for me. So I don’t know where it comes from other than a gift from the Lord. But I just generally enjoy our adolescents.

That’s really cool. So, oftentimes we think of generations as discrete. I’ve been curious about how much of it is related to the [stage of life] that people are at—a 13-year-old [from any generation] is not gonna be thinking about a mortgage. But there’s also something unique about the cultural moment that Gen Z is growing up in. Most of them, in fact, probably all of them, don’t know a time before the internet existed and a time before smartphones were ubiquitous. What sets Gen Z apart from other generations when they were Gen Z’s age?

I think one of the fun parts about getting to be in youth ministry for so long is that you learn the difference between what is developmental and what is generational. Like you said, 13-year-olds generally aren’t considering what a mortgage rate is, so maybe that’s developmental. But then when they do reach that age, then you see generational trends on how each generation is navigating home buying and mortgages and things like that.

Three big questions that [researchers] Brad Griffin and Kara Powell talk about are Who am I?—so a sense of identity, Where do I fit?—which is a belonging question, and What purpose do I have?—a sense of changing the world, a sense of agency. These are questions that we work through in adolescence. And even some of the questions I talk about in my book, like, Will you accept me? Can I trust you? What is true?—those are ageless questions. They’re timeless. People have always asked them.

But what’s different is that your generational context can influence the lens [through] which you are experiencing those questions or the context around which you are finding the answers to those questions. And that ends up being what shifts.

A Gen Xer like me, who did not have internet, who had like five channels—which was a lot at that time—you had to purchase a magazine to get any kind of information outside of your little hole of information that you had. [Then] MTV showed up all of a sudden. That realm of information, of influence, is different than what millennials experience, what Gen Z is experiencing, what Gen Alpha with access to artificial intelligence is gonna experience.

I’m hearing two counter streams [with regard to Gen Z]. There’s the [stream that] Gen Z is experiencing a revival right now: the Asbury revival, the [gospel renewal] that is happening on [Ohio State] and other state school campuses. And then there’s [the stream of] the searching that’s happening, the loneliness, the isolation, the real mental health struggles that young people are experiencing nowadays. So where do you think the through line is for Gen Z with those two streams that are going on simultaneously?

This is a generation that looks at experience as informing what true is—so it becomes part of the conversation that truth does actually exist outside of our experience—but because this generation is experience-driven, they want to know it’s real [subjectively]. So actual real-life relationships with people who are following Jesus, where they can see your very real life, they can have dinner inside of your home and see the laundry stacked on the couch or the kids running around before bedtime or the dog stealing food off the counter, all those things, and how you respond to those things [are important]. They want to see faith in a real context. While I do know a teenager who met the Lord through YouTube, while we have faith questions being asked on Chat GPT, there is still a very real hunger to see real faith in real life practiced in everyday contexts.

That’s a really good word, because a lot of people from older generations who are thinking about reaching Gen Z, they’re like, Well, I don’t know how to use TikTok. Maybe I’ll just sit on the sidelines and wait for other people to do that. How can you encourage people from older generations to reach into that space that maybe they feel uncomfortable—that digital space, relational space?

Well, you know what’s interesting is that mentoring has been consistently one of the top things that Gen Z is looking for as they go into a career and other spaces. It just keeps showing up. Now, if I asked any of us, What does being a mentor mean to you? What does having a mentor mean to you? it’s gonna be a little bit different. In my context, of course, growing up in the ’80s, you found an older woman, you did a Beth Moore study at a coffee shop and filled out your worksheet, and that was mentoring.

Sometimes when we talk to our older Christians, [and ask, Would] you be willing to mentor a young person? they are thinking through a program of some kind. And Gen Z is not thinking in that way. You can ask and they’ll say, “I don’t want to be [in] a program. I want to be in a real-life relationship.” And so as we have those conversations, a lot have learned that our Gen Zers are like, I just kind of want to hang out with you, like go for walks, help you garden, come with you grocery shopping, have dinner at your house or have everyday activities so that when the big questions come, I can go there.

They’re not necessarily looking for a very stringent space that is programmed and timeline with specific goals and objectives. They’ve kind of tossed that aside. So, for our older generations, it’s really as simple as walking up to a young person in your church and introducing yourself and saying, “I’ve always been curious about people from your generation. Would you be willing to have a cup of coffee or go on a walk with me someday?” And then have some questions in your back pocket that you’re going to ask that young person.

This [2025] is the first apparently official year of Gen Beta. They’re the first generation that’s going to be living in a world where [they feel like] there’s never been a time before [artificial intelligence]. And that’s going to change education, that’s going to change everything. How do you disciple young people to think through [AI] in a good way, where they’re making good decisions, informed decisions, about how they’re going to use AI, how they aren’t going to use AI, and what that’s going to mean for them going forward?

Yeah, well, let’s back up because we already had “Dear Abby” as a place that people asked for advice that was not in their home. And I had a sweet encyclopedia Britannica from 1986 in my room that I accessed information from. So these topics are not new. It’s a different format.

But I also want to back up a little more. When we talk about generational study and identifying generations, we’re just going to be real careful about sometimes the years we put on things. Gen Alpha is still not actually identified, and it’s a very spicy conversation in the generational world with contradicting views, and really [Gen Alpha is] too young to really identify it.

So that 2025 year for Beta, that comes from Mark McCrindle in Australia and his working theory of generations that every generation after baby boomers is 15 years, no matter the events or circumstances that take place in their life. If you move forward to Jean Twenge, she’ll say 2013 is the start of Gen Alpha. If you look at Jonathan Haidt, he’ll say that we will not see a generational shift until the environment that causes so much anxiety in kids or our relationship to technology changes. I have my own theories of when Gen Alpha starts, but we’re all going, Hey, we don’t know what’s going on.

Regardless, artificial intelligence will be around for my kids’ entire school life. That is gonna be a reality for them. And while it’s hard to predict what the impact is, we can make some guesses. So, what I look at as far as some of the early research on how people are using artificial intelligence, some of the impact it’s already having on relationships and things, is I start to look at how much more important would the incarnation be when you were talking about a disembodied intelligence that exists there, a disembodied entity that you can have a relationship with. How much more important will the embodied person of Christ become as we begin to talk about what it means to have a relationship with Christ or this God incarnate that walks the earth, that knows us, that can be with us?

I did ask chat GPT a couple of days ago, “Can I have a friendship with you?” And it really did say things like, “I offer empathy and compassion. I’ll push back. I won’t argue with you. And I can offer those things in a friendship.” But it did [also] say, “I will not be able to empathize or share experiences, but I’ll always be here when you need me. And then it said, “Would you like a relationship like that?”

I was like, Oh. Oh no, no, no.

So really it’s weighing out this idea of what we think the perfect relationship is, [and that] is what Chat GPT is trying to offer. What we think we want in a relationship, and what we actually see in the person of Christ is what a relationship is supposed to look like.

So let’s lean into that a little bit. The core tenets of our faith never change, but the way we deliver it, the culture that we’re speaking to changes all the time. So what are you seeing in Gen Z that they’re finding most compelling about the gospel? Different generations find different aspects of it that just really resonate with them. What do you think Gen Z is really finding in the gospel?

One is that this is a God who does truly love you—like loved you from before you were born, loved you before he created the world, loved you in a way that he decided he was going to make a plan to make it possible for you to be with him. Like that kind of love. So, as they’ve grown up in a world where they don’t see those kinds of examples of love, where they see when people make mistakes, they’re kind of torn apart. You lose everything professionally, relationally, so on. When they see people being measured in likes, comments, popularity, trends—that everything’s measured as far as your value, whether or not you are someone to be loved. And then you end up sharing about this God who loves you completely, fully. I think it’s both compelling and hard to understand for our next generation at the exact same time, because it’s not a love that they have ever, ever experienced. I do think the incarnation draws us in also, that this is God that we can trust. He has walked the earth. We’ve all experienced abandonment. We have all experienced shame. We’ve all experienced aspects of injustice, and Jesus experiences all those things too. Maybe not those exact circumstances, but those experiences.

So, to have this God who we can’t say, You don’t know me, because he actually does. He does know us and he’s with us. So I think those are a couple of things, but we can dive more deeply into it. There are just so many things that are compelling about the triune God and the way that triune God has enacted redemption for us and continues to sanctify us after we follow him. We just have to pull the contextualization out for our young people so they can see it on their terms.

Let’s pivot a little bit to the idea of truth. It feels like truth is becoming more of a fungible thing. How do you speak to [the next generation] about objective truth when the culture around them is very subjectively driven?

We have to understand that for this generation, their experience of truth is that it has been weaponized. They have seen truth be used to hurt people, to exclude people. And I’m gonna use that “truth” in quotes, right? Whatever someone is saying is truth, they’re saying that it’s been used to cause pain. Truth is not necessarily a beacon of peace or rest for them. Their cultural and generational experience would say truth is actually really painful and harmful and can be really volatile. So, that relationship, just generationally, with truth is something we have to deal with. We do have to move in a little bit [asserting] truth does exist outside of our experience. I think we all know that in our heads, but then we sometimes interpret it [to] say, “Well, I’ve never experienced that, so that’s not true for me,” or “That might be true for you, but it’s not true for me.” We’re dealing with that wrestling inside the brain. Part of it is helping us understand that we’re all making judgment calls based on partial views of what we can see of anything, and especially of God.

Right now is the moment for personal testimony or personal witness, because what Generation Z does value is story, personal story: “I want to hear your truth, Jonathan, tell me your truth.” You get to tell your witness, your story, your testimony, your journey with Christ, and people cannot argue with that because that’s your story. We’re really living in a moment where personal testimony and witness has a microphone. It has a bullhorn. It has a platform to be able to share—in their cultural vocabulary: “Let me tell you my truth.” We have to hope and trust the Holy Spirit will transcend over their idea of “oh, well, that’s your truth,” and maybe open the conversation of, could that be true for me too?

Barna did a study a year or two ago about millennials saying, Yes, I’d love for everyone to be a Christian, but I don’t wanna be the one to convince them to be a Christian. You know like, I feel uncomfortable about the idea of evangelizing my friends and coercing them to believe something that I believe. So how do you think through evangelism with this generation and encouraging them that it doesn’t have to be programmatic, that it can be relational, that it’s evangelism in a Gen Z way?

Well, acceptance is really important to this generation, right? I mean, acceptance is important [for all of us], but there’s a different lens of it that’s coming up with Gen Z. Part of that is that acceptance involves agreement, not asking me to change. Like, you accept me for who I am, meaning I don’t need to change or adjust anything about myself for you to accept me.

So when we talk about evangelism, what can happen in their brains is they can translate [it]: If I’m sharing the gospel with you, I’m asking you to change. I’m saying there’s something inherently wrong about where you’re at right now. And that now is a generational definition of I am not accepting you because I am choosing to share this message. So we do need to adjust a little bit as we share with our Gen Zers on it: Do you know that the gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ, the Bible, answers every question that we are asking? What are the longings of your friend’s heart? What are they looking for? What are they experiencing in life that they are unsatisfied with the answers they have come up with so far? And can we offer them a different answer that is through Jesus Christ?

So you’re really not saying, “Hey, Jonathan, there’s something wrong with you, so let me tell you how to fix it.” None of us likes that. But if you say, “Jonathan, I am listening to you. I hear what you’re going through. I think that I might have an answer to the question that you’re asking.” And we offer that. Then we’re actually meeting our friends in a place that they are at.

Rebecca McLaughlin calls cultural apologetics the best kind of neighbor love we can engage with, because you’re saying, “I love you, and I’m listening to you. I know you well enough to know that this right here is actually the thing you’re asking about. It’s the thing that you’re looking for.”

So that’s part of it. Now that obviously takes a lot of maturity and maybe some theological education to get behind those things, but at the very foundational level, we can share our story. We can say when someone says, “What’s different about you? Why aren’t you freaking out? Why are you not struggling the way you used to struggle? How come this doesn’t bother you?” that we are ready with the answer of sharing our witness.

A lot of young people will have faith when they’re in grade school, high school, and then they go to college and that faith is not their own. Part of that may be a function of how we’ve been doing youth group as kind of a holding tank for young people until they get old enough to sit at the adult table. So how do you help young people engage with their faith, take ownership of it, and speaking particularly to church leaders, how do you create a culture at your church that engages young people more than just kind of putting them in a holding tank and waiting for them to get to a certain age.

Look, that’s the million-dollar question. My goodness. If I had a secret formula for that, I could make millions. Pew Research came out with their study of the religious landscape of the United States, and did say unstickiness is what’s sticking with our younger generations. The stickiness of having no faith is actually what’s, what’s happening with our young folks as they grow older.

So I’m a baseball fan. It is a painful thing to be a fan of, right? There’s 162 games in the season. And I personally am an Arizona Diamondbacks fan, which makes it even harder. I’m not like a Dodgers fan, you know—that’s the prosperity gospel life right there. I am in the thick of it. Every game is a new opportunity for heartache or for excitement. I was watching the game a couple days ago and thought, This has got to be what the Christian life is like. It is long. There are often more downs than there are ups in a game. You’re hoping to bat, you know, .500 on a season, right? The reality [is] this is a long haul. There are days when it’s great and there are days where it’s not. And we don’t necessarily get to see that in a sermon or a Sunday school or a youth group. We do get to see it with more life-on-life stuff.

But one of the greatest mistakes I think I made as a Young Life leader and as someone who is discipling folks, early on and probably [through] the first half of my career, is I would do easy Bible studies and messages out of easy passages where I could wrap everything into a nice and neat little bow and they could go along their way. And I stayed away from the stuff that was complex: If salt loses its saltiness, how does it become salty again? Oh, we’ll just skip that because I don’t know. I taught people that they should be able to find every answer in a nice little bow in Scripture for them. I did not teach them how do you follow a God that you do not understand or agree with all the time?

So now I’ve been leaning more into that. We do go into the fullness of Scripture. We go into the complicated parts of the gospel, and ask that question at the end every single time: Can you follow a God that you will not understand or agree with all the time? Because that actually is what it means to be a follower. That’s actually what it means to submit everything of who you are to who God is. It’s no longer me saying, Here’s my lens of what I think is good and right and true and fair, and I’m gonna run God through that lens and then decide if he’s those things—which is what our generations are doing. It’s actually trading all of that out and saying, God is the decipherer of all that, and I’m running it through him. I may not agree and I may not understand, but that’s actually what the Christian life is. It’s showing up to the next ball game, trusting that something’s going to happen when we’re there.

To hear more from leaders like Tanita Maddox who are helping churches mobilize everyday Christians to reach their communities with the gospel, register your team now for this year’s Amplify Conference, and join us in advancing the kingdom of God.