Among under-35 respondents in the Netherlands and Belgium, social media is now a leading way to find Christian content. Among the over-55s it is far less common. That gap reorders what a communications team should resource.
The traditional path ran in one direction: someone hears about a community, attends, and over time comes to belong. Media supported that path but rarely started it.
Edition 1 suggests that for younger respondents the entry point has shifted. Social media now sits among the ways they reach Christian content, and it does so far more often than it does for older respondents.
What the figures show
Among respondents under 35, 49 per cent use social media as a channel for Christian content. Among the over-55s the figure is 23 per cent — less than half the rate. The same age gradient shows up on the platforms alongside it:
- YouTube: 63 per cent of under-35s, against 46 per cent of the over-55s.
- Podcasts: 44 per cent of under-35s, against 21 per cent of the over-55s.
The gap is the finding — not the absolute numbers, which will move between editions, but the distance between the age groups within a single population.
Read the full cross-section by age in the report, which sets these channels against denomination and market as well.
What it does not show
This is a survey of an engaged Christian audience, not a representative sample of the population, and it skews older than the country as a whole. So the point here is deliberately a within-age comparison: under-35s against over-55s in the same survey. It is not a claim about Dutch or Belgian young people at large.
It also does not show that community matters less. It shows that first contact arrives through a different door than it used to — which is a different claim, and has different consequences for where budget goes.
Placeholder analysis, kept as a draft while Edition 1 is finalised. The figures are real (ECMS 2026, mid-fieldwork snapshot); the framing is illustrative. Replace with the editor’s own piece before launch.
Source: ECMS 2026 — channels by age (bases: under 35 n=290 · 35–54 n=1.175 · 55+ n=1.786)