If you listen closely in Black group chats, barbershops, and DMs, you'll hear a quiet confession that's becoming less quiet every year: "I don't really do church anymore — but I'm in this online community and it's been life-changing." For a growing number of Black millennials and Gen Z adults, the most honest spiritual conversations don't happen in Sunday school. They happen in Reddit threads, Skool communities, Discord servers, and niche corners of TikTok.
This is not a fringe phenomenon. 27% of Americans now describe themselves as "spiritual but not religious" — an eight-percentage-point increase since 2012. Among young adults specifically, the Springtide Research Institute found that while 79% of young people still identify as at least somewhat spiritual, institutional religion is increasingly optional to that identity. And Black communities are living this shift at a sharper angle than most.
What the numbers don't capture is where the hunger goes after it leaves the building. The spiritual appetite doesn't disappear when someone stops attending church. It migrates — to online communities that are doing, with remarkable intentionality, what the church has always done.
What These Online Communities Are Actually Building
Scroll through Reddit's spirituality communities or browse Skool's growing directory of spiritual spaces, and the picture is striking. These are not just quote-sharing accounts or vague affirmation feeds. They are building full discipleship ecosystems — and they are doing it well.
These communities are doing what churches have always done — gathering the hungry, naming pain, offering practices, building identity — but with different sources of authority and a very different theology. The liturgical structure is familiar. The Lord it points toward is not.
"Sir, I can see that you are a prophet. Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship."
— John 4:19–20 · The Samaritan woman's question was not trivial. It was theological, urgent, and asked at a well — not in a temple.When Jesus meets the Samaritan woman, she is already engaged in a serious theological conversation about place, legitimacy, and belonging — the same questions many Black young adults are now asking in online communities. She did not come to a synagogue. She came to a well. He met her there anyway, and he did not begin by correcting her theology. He began by asking for water.
Why They Feel Safer — and Sometimes More Honest — Than Church
For people who have been hurt or marginalized in church spaces, online spiritual communities offer something the institution has often failed to provide: permission to be honest. Barna Group's research found that nearly 40% of people who stopped attending church regularly cited personal hurt as a primary reason. LifeWay Research found that 66% of those who left reported they were driven out by personal conflict or painful church experiences.
The therapist Dr. Jesaira Glover-Dulin, whose Atlanta practice serves people processing religious harm, defines church hurt as "the emotional, psychological, and religious harm done to parishioners either intentionally or unintentionally due to religious dogma and unhealthy leadership practices." She notes that roughly 75% of her clients are seeking help to resolve church hurt accumulated over years. These are not people who stopped believing in God. They are people the institution failed, and they went looking for somewhere their full humanity could be acknowledged.
Jesus never softens the call even as he expands the table. "If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me" (Luke 9:23). Grace and truth always travel together in his ministry. Online spiritualist communities often excel at grace — empathy, validation, inclusion — while being theologically thin on truth rooted in scripture and the historic witness of the church. As long as that imbalance persists, spiritually hungry people will continue to see Reddit and Skool as safer on-ramps.
The Theology Underneath the Warmth
Listen closely in these spaces and you can hear the theology being taught, often softly, sometimes explicitly:
"The universe is giving you a sign." · "Trust your energy, not religious rules." · "Connect with your ancestors — they will guide you." · "All paths lead to the same source." These are not neutral spiritual practices. They are doctrinal claims about the nature of God, the authority of revelation, and the basis of salvation — offered without identifying themselves as such.
Research from Word In Black and others describes Black millennials weaving together Christian language, Ifa and other African traditional religions, humanism, and self-help into fluid personal frameworks. TikTok creators offer meditations rooted in Black diasporic traditions while podcast hosts deconstruct religious trauma and rebuild spiritual identity outside the church. The hunger driving this is real. The theology it is landing on is not equipped to hold it.
The Old Testament is full of this dynamic. God's people, drawn toward blending Yahweh worship with surrounding cultures, hear the same prophetic challenge repeated: "How long will you go limping between two different opinions? If the Lord is God, follow him" (1 Kings 18:21). Paul encounters a sophisticated version of this in Athens — a marketplace of spiritual options, altars to many gods including "the unknown god" (Acts 17:22–23). His response is not condemnation. It is proclamation: I will tell you who that god actually is. The church's task in 2026 is exactly this — not to condemn the hunger, but to name its proper object.
"In him we live and move and have our being" — as even some of your own poets have said, "For we are indeed his offspring."
— Acts 17:28 · Paul quoting a Greek poet to reach people already reaching for GodFour Shifts Black Pastors and Seminaries Can Make Now
The solution is not to condemn online spiritual communities. It is to understand what they are doing well, honestly name where they are leading people away from Jesus, and build something more compelling.
A Word to Black Digital Disciple-Makers
If you are a Black pastor, content creator, or digital disciple-maker already ministering on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, or Skool, you are not just "doing media." You are standing at the well in John 4 and in the marketplace of Acts 17 — simultaneously. People are showing up thirsty and overloaded with spiritual options. That means two things that belong together:
You need seminary-level theological depth, even if you never sit in a traditional classroom. You carry pastoral responsibility for people you may never meet in person (1 Peter 5:2–3; Hebrews 13:17). And you need peer community and accountability — not just followers and metrics. Platform skill without pastoral formation produces influence without formation, and influence without formation is precisely the problem we are trying to solve.
Frontier Problem #2 is a community problem, not a content problem. Multiply exists to help churches build the kind of mid-week rhythm that keeps people connected to their pastor, their congregation, and the Word — between Sundays, through the same digital channels where these alternative communities are operating. The church that shows up daily wins the formation battle. Multiply makes that possible without burning out your team.
The Well Is Still Open
The Samaritan woman at the well was not lost. She was thirsty, theologically serious, and looking for something she could not quite name. Jesus did not dismiss her spiritual searching — he engaged it, corrected it with grace, and offered her living water. She became the first evangelist in John's Gospel, running back to her town to say: "Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did. Can this be the Christ?" (John 4:29).
The people who have left the Black church and found spiritual community on Reddit and Skool are not beyond reach. They are thirsty, theologically serious, and looking for something they cannot quite name. The question is whether the church will show up where they are — with the depth of the Black prophetic tradition, the truth of the gospel, and the grace to meet people exactly where they find themselves drinking.
The community your people are looking for already exists.
Help them find it inside your church.
Multiply builds the mid-week rhythm that keeps people connected between Sundays — scripture, conversation, action — on the same platforms where alternative communities are competing for their attention. We build it from your sermons. It runs automatically. You see the evidence every Monday morning.