DC church sees 2,000% growth as Gen Z, millennials seek answers

A Southern Baptist church in Washington, D.C., says it has seen a 2,000% growth in attendance over the last seven years, a trend that the congregation’s leaders attribute mostly to Generation Z and millennials gradually returning to religious life after the COVID-19 lockdowns and, more recently, the shocking assassination of Charlie Kirk. 

After a period of stagnant growth in its first few years, the King’s Church now has nearly 600 members, according to Ben Palka, one of the church’s three pastors who also helped establish the church in the nation’s capital in 2018. 

“We just had a lot of grit, a lot of God’s grace the first couple of years to endure the storm,” Palka said. “And then during COVID, we decided to stay open, and the Lord really blessed that time. We grew. It felt like every month we doubled.”

From 2020 to today, the church, located blocks from the U.S. Capitol, has usually had about 600 to 700 people in attendance, Palka told The Christian Post. Like many churches, attendance numbers are verified by weekly church attendance and membership rosters. 

“We saw an influx of young people, particularly in 2020, and that was like a snowball effect,” Palka explained. “And we saw a lot of people who previously were not very serious about their faith get really serious about their faith. And we saw dozens and dozens of people — we see it every year — coming to faith in Christ.”

Wesley Welch, another staff pastor at King’s Church, also said that after a period of stagnant growth from 2018 to 2020, a “revival” occurred in the middle of 2020. According to Welch, the trend has continued, and it’s “growing fast.”

According to data that the church provided to CP, there were usually 30 attendees in 2018 and 50 in 2019. The number of attendees rose to 150 in 2020, 300 in 2021, 350 in 2022, 450 in 2023, 550 in 2024 and 650 in 2025, with year-over-year increases of 30 to 100%.

The King’s Church saw another influx in attendance, particularly among young people, after the assassination of Turning Point USA’s founder, Kirk, on Sept. 10 at Utah Valley University. Several pastors throughout the country reported that they had also seen a spike in attendance in the weeks after Kirk was fatally shot, particularly among young people.

Palka said that the King’s Church saw an influx of mostly young men, many of whom were “looking for answers” and for a “voice to speak sense” after Kirk’s assassination. 

Welch also remembered one young man who had yet to find his identity in the Lord, but he had identified with Kirk and the conservative values the TPUSA founder promoted on college campuses. According to Welch, the young man was “really shaken” by Kirk’s murder. 

“He started coming to church and seeking the Lord, and this fall, we were able to baptize him, which was amazing,” Welch said.

Daniel Davis, a staff pastor at King’s Church, believes that another reason some studies have reported higher worship attendance among Gen Zers is that younger people have had to “grow up in a world that is deprived of meaning.” 

“They’ve been fed the idea that you have to make your own identity, your own meaning, to become your own source of significance, and that’s a burden that no one can carry,” Davis told CP. 

“They live in the ruins of Christianity, Christian institutions and ideas that have just been trashed to a certain degree and torn down,” he added. “They have very strong intuitions, but they’re not able to ground them in anything transcendent or eternal.”

“But a lot of those intuitions do come from Christianity,” Davis explained. “I think that young people are connecting those dots in a way that maybe the older generations were able to rationalize — you know, these things just come from being a reasonable human being, or they come from evolution. But young people realize that doesn’t hold any water.” 

Research released last year by the Barna Group found that Gen Z churchgoers attend services more frequently than their counterparts in older generations. The data is based on 5,580 online interviews conducted from January through July last year.

After examining the church attendance patterns among 3,579 churchgoing adults, researchers found that the average attendance rate was 1.6 times per month. That number rose to 1.9 times per month among Gen Z, with Millennials close behind at 1.8 times per month.

In addition to seeking answers, Davis believes younger generations desire community, which is another reason the pastor thinks they may be drawn to church. While most young people are familiar with digital media and algorithms, the pastor asserted that today’s youth have started to realize that technology “is not going to love them or be their friend.” 

According to the staff pastor, the church has seen many people who initially began attending for the community aspect develop a desire to understand the Gospel better or learn about it for the first time.

In addition to Sunday worship services, the King’s Church invites people to join small groups, typically composed of 10 to 20 people who meet in homes throughout the city. Through its REC program, the church provides opportunities to build fellowship by attending ice skating outings, pickleball tournaments, dances and other community-building activities.

“I think there’s really a desire to recover human relationships and friendships,” Davis said. “And that’s not the same as the Gospel, but that leads to the Gospel. The Gospel produces those things.”