The spiritually curious are not the hostile skeptics most Christians brace for. In Mark Matlock’s research with Barna, they are a large group of Americans who already believe there is something more out there and are not looking for an argument. What they want is more of the good things they have already tasted in life. You reach them by listening for that longing, recognizing it as your own, and showing how Jesus meets it more fully than the practices they are trying now.
That answer reverses how a lot of believers prepare to share their faith. To see why, it helps to understand who this group is, what Matlock’s data says about them, and where the church tends to stumble when it meets them.
A group the old categories could not see
Most church conversation sorts people into two bins: churched or unchurched, Christian or non-Christian. Matlock, who does analysis for Barna, says the data kept producing people who did not fit either picture. He estimated them at first at about 80 to 90 million Americans, then found the group was quite a bit larger than that. He and his colleagues named them the Curious. Those numbers are Matlock’s estimates from Barna’s research, and readers should treat them as his figures.
The size matters less than the posture. Matlock’s central observation is that “those who are outside the church are not necessarily against us.” He adds that they are not necessarily looking to fight or argue with Christians. If that is true, a lot of evangelism training is aimed at the wrong person. It prepares believers to answer an attack that this group is not making.
Matlock does not conclude that apologetics is finished. When a friend who is an apologist asked him whether he was saying apologetics is dead, he answered that there is “Still a huge need for apologetics.” His point is narrower and more useful. The case for Christianity still matters, but the way Christians approach people has to fit the people actually in front of them.
What the Curious are actually after
Here is the finding that should change the most conversations. When Matlock talked with people in this group, he noticed “they weren’t asking a lot of the big existential questions in life.” They were not mainly asking why they exist or whether there is a God. In his words, “Most people actually kind of believed there was something more out there, but what they were looking for is an upgrade.”
By upgrade he means something specific. People have experienced something good and want more of it. Matlock gives examples in their own voice: “I experienced justice. I want more of that.” He lists creativity, intimacy and compassion the same way. Spirituality enters as the means. He says they “saw spirituality as maybe the vehicle or the way that they get it.” That vehicle might be tarot, crystals, meditation, mindfulness or certain exercise practices. Matlock is careful to say these people are not necessarily open to Christianity as such. They are open to spirituality.
This is a real distinction for Christian witness. A person asking whether God exists needs an argument. A person who already assumes the spiritual world is real, and who is trying to deepen a good life, needs something else first: someone who understands what they are reaching for.
Whose life is this describing?
A careful reader should ask which Americans this picture fits, and Matlock himself raises the question. He ties the upgrade mindset partly to circumstance, noting that people feel these longings “especially in the US where we don’t wake up every day fighting for our survival as much” as people in places where a day can be spent walking for water. He links it to the upper levels of Maslow’s hierarchy and to an affluent, hyper-modern culture. The search for an upgrade assumes a certain baseline of security.
That limit matters, because not everyone who is spiritually searching feels secure. Lisa Fields recounted a planning conversation with two students at Florida A&M University ahead of a Jude 3 Project college event. When she asked about challenges on campus, one student told her everybody was depressed, that students were looking for something to fill a void, and that when something went wrong they did not know how to rebound. The students also told her crystals were big on campus. Matlock answered that the spiritually curious in his research were experimenting with those practices more than Christians were.
Put those two accounts side by side and the picture sharpens. The same practices can be pursued from abundance or from pain. One person picks up crystals to get more of a good life. Another picks them up because life feels fragile and nothing at hand helps. Lisa’s response was to shape the event around hope and peace, because that is what these students were hungry for. The upgrade lens is useful, but it does not excuse anyone from finding out which hunger a particular person carries.
Lisa also named a group that sits next to the Curious and is easy to miss: people raised in church. As a pastor’s kid herself, she said some of the hardest people to engage are church kids, pastors’ kids and missionary kids. She described “a whole population of people that can lead you down the Romans road themselves if they wanted to.” They know the message. They do not believe it. Matlock’s Barna work points the same direction. He said their research showed 55 percent of the religiously unaffiliated grew up in a Christian home. Again, that figure is his. For many young adults, then, the obstacle is not an unfamiliar gospel but a familiar one that stopped persuading them.
The shard of a broken mirror
Why should Christians treat these longings as a meeting place rather than a threat? Matlock offers a theological picture. He starts from Augustine’s idea of a void in the human soul. Inside that void, he suggests, is something like a broken piece of mirror that once reflected God’s image before sin shattered it. That shard is still trying to reflect part of God back. The hunger for justice, beauty, closeness and mercy is not random. It comes from being made by God.
This is Matlock’s image, offered as an illustration, and it should be held that way. It fits the biblical teaching that people are made in God’s image (Genesis 1:27), and it explains why the desires of the Curious are not simply wrong. It also explains why they are not enough on their own. Matlock puts it plainly: “But you and I both know, without Jesus, you’re not gonna fully experience that.”
Jesus described his own purpose this way: “I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly” (John 10:10). In context he is contrasting himself as the good shepherd with the thief who comes to steal and destroy. The verse speaks of life that comes through him. It is not a promise of comfort, health or wealth, and it should never be presented as one. Still, it speaks directly to people who sense that life could be fuller than it is.
So the practical move follows. Matlock says that while listening to someone describe what they care about, “I’m looking for the me too.” Then comes the second step: “And here’s how Jesus helps me do that better.” If a friend tells you a practice gives her a sense of peace, you have found common ground. You want peace too. You can say honestly where you have found it.
Where the church tends to stumble
Matlock’s research included a measure called the need for closure scale, which tracks how comfortable people are with ambiguity, uncertainty and mess. His finding is uncomfortable: “the church actually had a pretty significant higher need for closure than those that are spiritually curious.”
He is careful not to turn that into a moral verdict. On having a high need for closure, he says “it’s not like one’s good and one’s bad.” The problem appears when a whole community shares it. Then, he says, “We’re gonna give really short specific answers that we think should seal it up.” Young people bringing real questions, shaped by a world where faith, culture, country and politics are tangled together, conclude that the church cannot handle them and look elsewhere. Matlock draws the lesson as a father and a leader: “I, as a parent, as a church leader, would rather have somebody questioning their faith do that in the context of Christian community.”
He tells on himself here. As a kid he had a sign on his wall reading God said it, I believe it, that settles it, and it worked for him. It did not work for the people he later met, and he admits he just wanted them to believe and move on. He came to see that some people need time to work through hard things. He has watched people come out the other side of deconstruction, and he judges that many who were lost along the way left more because of how their community responded than because of their own journey.
Lisa Fields connected this to emotional health. Lisa Fields said, “We believe in absolutes,” and she was not trading conviction for vagueness. Her point was that “there’s something about being able to sit in the gray with people that takes a level of emotional health.” Matlock agreed and named the risk on the other side. He has written about emotionally healthy apologetics because people are sometimes drawn to apologetics out of their own lack of health, and then use it as a weapon instead of a way to connect. Patience with questions is not a soft view of truth. It is a sign that the person holding the truth is secure enough not to rush.
Is this selling Jesus as a product?
The strongest objection is obvious. If you meet people at their desire for an upgrade, are you presenting Jesus as one more lifestyle enhancement? Jesus did not market himself that way. He said, “Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me” (Mark 8:34). A gospel pitched only as getting more of what you already want would be a different message.
The objection deserves weight, and Matlock’s own account answers part of it. He does not treat the practices as neutral. Jude 3 teaches that the line is intent, not the object: practices meant to gain spiritual power, energy, guidance or destiny apart from God, such as astrology, divination or using crystals for spiritual cleansing, are not compatible with following Jesus, while sage burned for fragrance or a crystal kept for its beauty is not a spiritual practice. Jude 3 also takes the spiritual hunger behind these pursuits seriously while holding that they cannot deliver what they promise. Finding the shared longing does not mean calling the paths equal.
Matlock’s emphasis on trust also changes what the “upgrade” turns out to be. He said Christians sometimes present faith as buying into an ideology. He prefers the language of trusting Jesus, and he recalls being told in college of an African word for trust whose meaning was “lean on a tree and do not fall.” He admits he has never been able to find the word again, so the story is best taken as his illustration, not a verified term. The picture is still clear. Faith means putting your full weight on Jesus. In Matlock’s words: “I’m not trying to live according to a code. I’m not trying to become a more moral person.” He continues: “I’m trusting Jesus. I’m leaning on a tree that will not fall.” Whoever starts out looking for more peace or more justice ends up being asked to stop standing on their own feet. That is an invitation to surrender, not consumer advice.
Information and encounter
Matlock adds a hard word for believers. He said that “as I talk to a lot of Christians, they haven’t really had an experience with Jesus.” The result, he says, is that “they are sharing an idea or a moral code, or a set of behaviors or practices.” The Curious will not be drawn by a code they can find elsewhere. They may be drawn by a person who plainly knows Jesus.
Lisa pressed the same point from her own work. She described an atheist on a live Q&A who seemed to want proof of the resurrection, then said what he really needed was for Jesus to come down. She told him he needed an encounter, not a stack of facts, and she thought of Thomas, who said, “Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe” (John 20:25). Jesus met Thomas in that doubt. Lisa also recounted how Cheryl Sanders, reading narratives of formerly enslaved people for her dissertation, found that when they were asked why they were Christians when their enslavers also claimed Christ, they often answered that they had met Jesus. In Black Christian memory, faith has never rested only on whoever held the institution. It has rested on the Lord himself, apart from those who abused his name.
Lisa Fields drew the conclusion: “We are living in a generation where people need to encounter Jesus in a real way.” Lisa Fields added that “it makes it very difficult to walk away from Jesus when you’ve had a real encounter with Jesus.” None of this sets evidence aside. It places evidence within a relationship with a living Lord, which is what the Curious, already convinced the spiritual world is real, are most likely to notice.
Conversations that do not have to close
Many believers fear that patient conversation means never getting to the point. Matlock takes that worry seriously. He thinks there is a real need to invite a decision, and he compares it to fundraising: friends rarely give until you ask. But he adds that “we have to be better at discerning when that moment is.” He has seen Christians become a nuisance to unbelieving relatives because every conversation turns toward the same pitch.
He also points out that people can now feel the difference between friendship and a sales goal. They are asking, as he puts it, “do you care about me or am I a project of yours?” And he reminds anxious believers that “Jesus himself let people walk away from him.” The rich young ruler “went away grieved” (Mark 10:22), and Jesus did not chase him. When many disciples left, Jesus asked the twelve, “Will ye also go away?” (John 6:67). These are narratives, not commands, but they show a Lord who invited without coercion.
Matlock’s own story makes the point concrete. Seated beside a stranger on a flight he had not planned to take, he spent the conversation wondering how to close the deal. As they neared landing, the man thanked him: “Thank you for not trying to convert me.” Then the man asked what it would have looked like if Matlock had tried, and invited him to explain. Matlock’s lesson is that “the curious calls to curious.” He puts it this way: “So if I’m genuinely curious about another person, they will be curious about me.” In his experience, “I’m invited to share more than I am trying to figure out how to wiggle it into the conversation.”
That frees believers from a weight they were never meant to carry. As Matlock says, “I don’t have to land the plane every time I’m talking to somebody,” and you may be only one piece of someone’s journey. The Curious have already shown they are hungry. Your part is to know Jesus well enough that your interest in them is real, and to be secure enough to let their questions stay open until they ask you where your peace comes from.