Christine Hill grew up in a non-Christian home in Geelong, Australia. As a child, she attended the local Methodist church on her own—until one day when the church sent her home with a packet of tithing envelopes the pastor expected her family to fill.
“The money was very tight, so I stopped going,” Hill said.
It took more than half a century—when Hill was 75 years old—before she finally came to know and accept Jesus. She recalled miraculous dreams and the influence of her son’s conversion nudging her toward faith.
Late-in-life conversions like Hill’s are becoming more common in Australia, according to a new study on the country’s religious trends. While news headlines point to the decline of Christianity in Australia and the fact that Christians no longer constitute a majority, people over the age of 55 are increasingly converting to Christianity, and people ages 15 to 24 are more open to the faith.
Andrew Grills, pastor of City on a Hill Geelong, is seeing this swell of newcomers firsthand. He noted that in early May he attended a meeting with some other pastors in the City on a Hill network throughout Australia, and all of them mentioned seeing new faces in the pews each Sunday.
“I’ve been here for 13 years, and we’ve never seen anything like it,” Grills said. “It’s an uptick across demographics but especially young folks, and I would say a preponderance of young men.” Even though City on a Hill targets people under 30, a group in his congregation of older people, who call themselves the Experienced People in Christ’s Service, put together their own conference last month. “It was booming!” Grills said.
Nearly every week, people are coming into Grills’s church and telling him their stories about how they met Jesus. For instance, one family in crisis said they discovered a box in the attic with a letter from their grandfather to his children. In it, he shared how he became a Christian in Ireland in the 1920s. As a result of that letter, the whole family is now following Jesus, Grills said.
On a Sunday in May, Grills met a man who had recently converted from witchcraft. “He’d heard an audible voice calling his name, and it started a process where he said, ‘I think God is real.’” The same Sunday, a 19-year-old with no faith background showed up with a King James Bible. The man told Grills that he had also heard a voice calling him, but no one was there. “He thought he was going mad,” Grills recounted.
“The humbling thing is that it’s not that we’re getting better at communicating the gospel,” Grills said. “It’s that God is doing the kind of stuff you hear about in the Muslim world.”
For Hill, the encounter with Jesus began decades before her conversion. At night, she’d often dream she was driving a new car and couldn’t put on the brakes. After she and a friend got baptized at a New Age spiritualist church, she suddenly stopped having that dream.
“But then I started dreaming that I was lost,” said Hill, a registered nurse at the time. “I was trying to go to work, and I could never find how to get there. Or I might finally get there but couldn’t find the ward.”
Hill often visited fortunetellers and New Age practitioners then, looking for answers about the future of her youngest son as he struggled with mental health issues. Her son would drive an hour to Melbourne to visit a Daoist temple. When he didn’t come home after one of those trips in 2022, Hill remembers praying to God in desperation: “Lord, bring him home safe.”Hours later, she found him down the beach not far from home. He told her that he’d found the Lord but didn’t explain how.
That started her on a quest of her own. She began reading books written by Puritans and articles about Christianity. She bought a King James Bible. She stopped going to yoga and tai chi classes. She threw out her Christmas decorations and knickknacks and got rid of all her novels because she wanted to remove every non-Christian influence from her home. “There’s enough of my own sin around every day that I struggle with,” she said.
Since she didn’t attend church, she tried to baptize herself in the ocean. Twice. She says she nearly drowned both times. A nearby church agreed to baptize her after she prayed with them to accept Jesus as her Savior. After those baptizing her brought her out of the water, they asked if she wanted to speak in tongues. “No, I didn’t feel like speaking, but I just felt wonderful,” she recounts.
Months later, the thought occurred that she needed to attend church “to fellowship and go somewhere where others are praising the Lord.” She searched online for “reformed churches” and became a member at a local Christian Reformed Church.
Australia’s most recent census data reveals that for the first time since Australia became a country, Christians did not make up a majority of the population. Christians registered just 44 percent of residents, down 17 percentage points from a decade earlier. In addition, nearly 40 percent had marked “no religion,” an increase of 16 percentage points over the past decade.
While mainstream media reports aren’t wrong to say that thousands of people no longer identify as Christians, demographer and social analyst Mark McCrindle believes that those numbers don’t tell the whole story.
“It’s not just that Australians are less religious or less active in their faith,” McCrindle said. “It’s more that they’re reinterpreting the census question.”
His research-based advisory firm published a report this year examining the country’s religious trends using the Australian Census Longitudinal Dataset (ACLD) from the Census of Population and Housing and surveying nearly 3,000 Australians. The report found that respondents are moving away from cultural identification with Christianity and toward a measure of active practice.
“You go back 40 years, and we had almost 9 in 10 Australians saying their religion was Christianity,” McCrindle said. “But that’s all changed. People, unless they’re active in the practice, don’t tick the box.”
Yet the report found that in the past five years, more than 784,000 new people did tick the box. The trend toward Christianity has been consistent in the past two decades, McCrindle found. He believes the shift is meaningful because people are now giving more honest answers about what they practice and believe.
Hill’s conversion fits the trends McCrindle sees on paper, as nearly 195,000 Australians over the age of 55 moved from no religion to Christianity in the last five years, making up 25 percent of the country’s Christians converts. In the last decade, the proportion of Christian converts over 55 increased by 11 percentage points.
The other significant trend is among 15-to-24-year-olds. Even though they are the age group most likely to leave Christianity, more than half of them are open to conversations about views different from their own. And the ones who are Christians? They are more likely than any other age group to regularly attend church.
Australia’s post-Christian society is also post-secular, McCrindle said. “The ‘Aussie dream’ pathway has not delivered, and they want to know, ‘Where can I find meaning, substance, and truth?’” McCrindle noted. “For many, Christianity answers those questions.”
Stephen McAlpine, author of Being the Bad Guys, said young Australian men in particular feel left out of the culture.
“[A young man] has got to demonstrate that he’s not the toxic Andrew Tate guy,” McAlpine said. “The alternative is more a faux champion, the feminized man. If they don’t want that, what are they going to do?”
McAlpine said that what they need is transcendence, a meaningful interaction with God. So they end up visiting churches even though they grew up without faith backgrounds.
“Jordan Peterson was a gateway drug for many young men into the church because he was someone who stood up to some of the things that he saw [as] wrong in the culture and was brave,” McAlpine said.
That means the people showing up at church come from untidy backgrounds and live in complex situations. “They’re much more like the people on Crete that Paul writes about,” McAlpine said. “But they’re looking for community. And they’re going to make mistakes.”
McCrindle notes that churches shouldn’t be discouraged by news reports of the decline in Christianity in the country but rather be more aware of the opportunities: Young people are more open to exploring the faith, older people are searching for meaning and reengagement with Christianity, and immigrants are moving to Australia, bringing the world to its shores.
“There are undercurrents of opportunity, undercurrents of fruitfulness, and, I think, undercurrents of great hope for the church and the future of Christianity in Australia,” McCrindle said.
Grills is taking advantage of the new opportunities. Even as God uses supernatural means to draw people to Christ, the congregation is also engaging more in evangelism, such as running continuous Alpha courses.
“Seeing God do the supernatural stuff is actually helping us get better at the normal stuff,” Grills said. “The harvest is plentiful. It feels like a lot of time we’re sowing, sowing, sowing, and there’s very little fruit. And now suddenly there’s fruit, and that makes you more excited about more fruit.”
While Grills is hesitant to call it a revival, noting that the increase isn’t as pronounced as the growth of Christianity in the UK, “it’s definitely a change,” he said. The church has also seen an uptick in the number of people willing to leave their jobs and enter full-time ministry: “Often we’ve had one or two or three or four. But this year it’s twelve.”
Hill said Jesus has changed her. She said she’s a gentler, softer person. “I keep asking the Holy Spirit to make me more like Jesus,” she said. “I want to be changed—heart, mind, and soul.”
She recognizes that finding Jesus can take a lifetime. Now “I can look back and see he was with me the whole time, protecting me, directing me,” Hill said. “There was no way that he was letting the lost sheep off, because I was a little lost sheep.”
Her next-door neighbor is in his 80s and selling his house. Soon after she became a Christian, Hill gave him a Bible. A few weeks before he moved, he came to her house for a meal.
He asked, “Can you tell me how you go about it?” When she asked what he was referring to, he responded, “Speak to the Lord and give him your heart.”
Hill found the sinner’s prayer on the internet, and they prayed it together.
“I wasn’t evangelizing him,” she said. “I just asked him about the Bible and talked with him about the things of life.”
