I'll tell you what’s interesting – we’ve seen a lot of men become Christians recently. The first time, I was encouraged. The second time felt coincidental. The third time felt like a pattern was emerging. As an evangelist and missiologist, I spend the vast majority of my time writing, speaking and relating and I drink a lot of coffee with a lot of leaders! Over the course of a few weeks and several lattes, I have repeatedly heard pastors, ministers and vicars tell me about the men that have been showing up and choosing to be disciples of Jesus.

A leader of a church in south London told me that they had seen a surge unlike anything they had seen before of men in their 20s and 30s walking through the door on a Sunday morning. What was striking was that they were not there to explore faith – they had ​‘done that already’. They shared that they have been researching faith, reading the Bible, watching online sermons and Christian videos. They had arrived ​‘ready to become Christians.’

In Sheffield, another pastor reported a similar picture and told me the story of a guy who was planning to take his own life when a friend, on that very day, texted him these words: ​‘Alistair, do you fancy coming with me to church tonight?’ After a few weeks and some miraculous answers to prayer, Alistair surrendered his life to Jesus. Since then, in his words, ​“I started praying every day and I started reading this Bible. I kid you not, my life shifted [just] like that. The joy, the love that I’ve felt, the only way I can describe it is just goosebumps.”

I also began noticing stories on social media of a number of high profile people who have become Christians. Amongst them, Louie Carabott, a social media travel influencer with 6.2 million views on TikTok declared publicly to his hundreds of thousands of followers that he had started going to church and had been baptised: ​“Honestly, it’s one of the best decisions I’ve ever made in my life.” On 5 February, Larry Sanger, the co-founder of Wikipedia, shared an article entitled, How a Skeptical Philosopher Becomes a Christian, after 35 years of disbelief. He writes: ​“It is finally time for me to confess and explain, fully and publicly, that I am a Christian.”

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"The joy, the love that I’ve felt, the only way I can describe it is just goosebumps."

It seems that something new is happening. It’s especially surprising as men are regularly described as particularly hard to reach. Sorted Magazine found that just a third of men felt comfortable in church. Those least likely to attend church are single, working class men, according to the Office of National Statistics.

I wonder whether the ​‘meaning crisis’, the failure of contemporary narratives, the positive stories online and other factors are all contributing – as well as a sovereign move of God of course!

I was recently speaking with a friend from Newcastle who leads a rapidly growing church. He spoke of the surge in men coming to faith since the new year, including one who decided to make it his new year’s resolution to find out about Jesus. So he typed a prompt into Chat GPT and asked artificial intelligence what he should do about it. AI told him which church to go to, how to get there and what to expect in a service. After complaining that the 35-minute Bible expository sermon wasn’t long enough, he became a Christian a week later!

One of the best things to have happened in my own life in the last year is that a good friend who I’ve known for 20 years has become a Christian. As someone close to him and his story, there are some people who have helped, but I would describe the single biggest factor as God’s relentless pursuit of him.

Since beginning to draft this article, a vicar in the West Midlands told me a pizza delivery guy turned up at his house (with a pizza) and said, ​“I think I’ve become a Christian.” He’s now baptised and is ​“on fire for the Lord!” 

As my Evangelical Alliance colleague Katherine Brown travels around churches, she asks people who have become Christians in the last two years to put their hands up. Her observation is that men are disproportionately represented as a majority. So be encouraged. God is on the move. In unsettled and uncertain times, many are turning to faith in Jesus. May we celebrate what is going on and pray for more in the lives and communities we are part of.