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CHAPTER 1

THE CORE VALUES AND BEHAVIORS OF EMERGING GENERATIONS

Depending on your perspective, you've either noticed a gradual evolution into what is commonly referred to as a post-Christian world or suddenly the changing landscape of the world has swiftly come upon you and you are just now waking up to the new realities. Either way, as you know, the world is changing and it is changing fast.

It is no longer assumed that the world is guided by the Christian worldview, and that is true for nearly every facet of life — politics, education, sociology, philosophy, and so forth.

In favor of other primary worldviews, such as naturalism or relativism, people have largely moved on, so to speak, from the Christian worldview and opted out of it in favor of a worldview that makes more sense in their minds and in their hearts. In my opinion, this is the most challenging issue facing the church today. Keep in mind, I believe the kingdom of God is never in trouble. However, I also believe that the church is responsible to participate with God to restore the world toward its intended wholeness and, therefore, is both privileged to and expected to faithfully and generously find ways to reach and engage non-Christians.

The new worldviews shaping culture in this post-Christian world, from my observation, typically generate one of two common reactions. First, some people — and I am thinking about church leaders specifically — fear the changes happening in culture and do everything they can to hold on to what they call "traditional values," even at the risk of becoming irrelevant. Often reactors of this persuasion will dig their heels deep into what they know, and usually only what they know and, as a result, often lose touch with the world around them. I speak to and visit dozens of churches that are so committed to the way that church has been or to their "traditional values" and, as a result, they are dying.

A few weeks ago, I was invited to speak to a church near Omaha, Nebraska. The people of this particular church were incredibly friendly and warm to my family and me. For hours we talked about ways that their church might connect with the growing number of young adults and young families with small children in the community. We shared ideas, we prayed together, we ate together, and we strategized together. I was feeling so encouraged by this church's passion to reach the emerging generations, until late in the day on Saturday when, after we had met for nearly five hours, the chairman of the church's leadership board said, "Well, this has been great. You have helped us immensely. I am, and I think I speak for all of us when I say this, ready to do whatever it takes as long as we do not have to change the way do worship."

Oh. My. Gosh. What did I just hear? Did he really just say that and speak on behalf of the whole church? I thought to myself. He sure did. To a person, they all agreed that they were willing to do anything, except change, to reach emerging generations. For this group, their way of doing church was more important than their commitment to reach new people in new ways. Needless to say, I left that warm and friendly church feeling like I had taken a punch to the gut.

Second, some church leaders have chosen to adapt and adjust to change, modifying their ministry model within the shifting landscape of culture. In doing so, they have decided to do whatever it takes to understand the culture around them and committed to developing new methods of reaching and engaging emerging generations.

A month or so after meeting with the church I referenced earlier that would do "whatever" it took, except change, I visited a church near St. Louis. I was in town speaking to a group of youth workers, and one of the youth workers asked if I would be willing to stay an extra few hours to meet with some members of their leadership board before driving back to Kansas City. I agreed to stay, so we met for a few hours over dinner and talked about ways that their church could reach and engage Millennials and Generation Z.

The executive pastor spoke at one point and she said, "Chris, we are willing to do whatever it takes. I mean it ... whatever it takes." With tears streaming down her face, she proceeded to tell me a story about her children who grew up in the church but were no longer actively attending church. She said, "This is not just about my kids. This is also about my kids' friends and their friends' coworkers. This is about every young person in our city who used to go to church or has never gone to church. What do we need to do to get young adults to pursue a life with Jesus?" I meet some people like that executive pastor who have personal experiences of life in a post-Christian world. Many have raised kids in the church only to have them drop out because many of them see a gap between what we say is important and the way we live. Unfortunately, in most of my conversations with dozens of church leaders like the executive pastor above, the former example of talking change but not really committed to making the necessary changes seems more typical, at least of late. I am hoping to change that, of course.

Most church leaders I know are fearful, choosing to dig further into only what they have come to know that "works" and, because of various forms of fear, are unwilling to explore new ideas and practices that will allow new paradigms of thinking and living to emerge. This reaction has left countless numbers of churches rapidly moving toward a steep decline — both a decline in attendance and a decline in lasting community impact. This means, in the end, choosing to simply "hold on to traditional values" can often result in fewer people being invited into exploring the gospel and experiencing the forgiveness that leads to a transformed life that leads to a world made new.

Several months ago, I was invited to speak at a local businesspersons luncheon on the topic of Millennials in the workplace. I revealed some statistics, research, and some anecdotal-based feelings I had on the subject. The group was deeply engaged throughout my short thirty-minute talk and had as many minutes worth of questions as I did presentation minutes. I spent thirty minutes answering one question after the other, sometimes hearing a question before I could even finish answering the previous question. I love those kinds of interactions!

As I was putting my iPad back in my backpack and clearing my materials from the lectern, I was approached by a man who said, "You are a smart guy, and your presentation was very professional. However, nearly everything you said was just not accurate." I extended my hand and said, "My name is Chris. What is your name?" The gentleman shook my hand firmly and said, "My name is Pastor Mark."

My first thought was, A pastor at a business luncheon ... cool! I asked Pastor Mark, "Why do you feel the content I presented was not accurate?" His response: "Generations are all the same. You don't have to study culture or be an expert on Millennials and Generation Z to know that without Jesus, these young people will die without a Savior and spend eternity in hell."

"Okay, well, I think I know where you are coming from," I said. "First, this presentation was to help business owners and employers understand Millennials. This presentation was not about emerging generations and Jesus as Savior. However, with that said, if we are not students of culture, how do you suppose we will reach and engage emerging generations with the gospel?" I asked. "The same way we always have — by making truth a priority in their lives," he sharply stated very matter of fact. My last question was simply, "What is truth to a Millennial in a post-Christian world, Pastor Mark?" Walking away, Pastor Mark said, "The gospel never changes, and as a minister you should know that."

I agree with Pastor Mark, I think. The gospel never changes in the sense that God's mission to restore the world is always at work in the world, and the gift of God's Son, Jesus Christ, offers unending forgiveness and transformation. However, sadly, the way people like Mark (and the many others like Mark that I meet) think of the gospel and, therefore, build their ministry models around the gospel doesn't often change or transform lives either, for that matter. For many, their approach to the gospel is small — meaning its message is individual, and about a transaction made once with God instead of a community of people learning how to live a transformed life with God. This typically shows itself in the ways some churches and church leaders elect to tell the gospel story — which is having more to do with avoiding hell than experiencing the abundant and new life Jesus came to give us.

This is the tragic reality of our day — churches, who can't seem to get past the way they have always done things to make the necessary and effective change, in order to reach and engage Millennials and Generation Z, stay steadily in decline. These churches remain in decline when it comes to both their attendance (growth) and their community-wide impact.

I never had the chance to ask Mark, but I did sense that, although he had what I would refer to as a very narrow view of the gospel, he did have a sincere desire to help people and see their lives transform. I want to think the best of Mark, I really do. Mark's narrow and small view of the gospel, however, is likely the very matter that keeps himself and his entire church from seeing transformation in the lives of the people in his community, especially emerging generations.

The gospel is very clearly that in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Messiah, there is salvation. With salvation comes regeneration, adoption, justification, reconciliation, and of course, redemption. Salvation, and all that comes with it, should bring about a people who live for justice, for the other. Jesus came to form a new kind of people that would, as a result of their trust in him and salvation, live lives marked by compassion and justice. More broadly said, then, the gospel is the story of God's will, way, and work of providing salvation and justice for all of creation through the gift of God's Son, Jesus Christ. This salvation and justice, in a very real and practical way, ushers in the kingdom of God, which is already here and at the same time yet to come or be fully realized.

God inaugurated the Kingdom with the incarnation of Jesus Christ and will consummate the Kingdom when all things are made new again and God again dwells with his people. The garden life God intended for this world, as displayed by Jesus, is possible on earth as it is in heaven. This is the hope of the Resurrection — that in the bodily resurrection of a fully dead Jesus, there is opportunity for creation to be made fully alive.

The gospel, then, is in essence God's desire for the world to be made whole (will); the possibility of wholeness through the birth, life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus (way); and the church's responsibility to submit to the Holy Spirit as it seeks to participate with God to restore the world toward its intended wholeness (work). The result of the gospel proclaimed, performed, and made present through words, deeds, and humble company with others points toward a robust Kingdom in which Jesus is the King and in which Jesus reigns in our hearts (spiritual) and in our world (physical).

Mark (from the story above) is accurate — the gospel doesn't change — insomuch as God's mission endures. However, how we communicate the gospel must constantly change in order for us to reach and engage emerging generations. We will talk more about this in a later chapter, but for now let me say that in a post-Christian, post-rationalistic world, we cannot simply present the gospel as a transaction between humankind and God. We must present the gospel as much bigger — as having to do with God, self, others, and the entire cosmos. This is why it is imperative that church leaders take the time to study Millennials and the subsequent generation we call Generation Z, and of course, any other future generations.

The church, at the same time it studies emerging generations, must also be careful not to make quick and thoughtless assumptions about culture. Instead, church leaders ought to become cultural liturgists who can understand and speak the language of the day and find creative and compelling ways to tell God's great good news that in Jesus Christ there is salvation and justice. This, in the end, is the work of a liturgist. To faithfully create moments of worship, we people return God's love back to God and bring glory to God.

THE MILLENNIAL WAY OF LIFE

I am the president of an organization called Burlap. Burlap exists to help churches reach and engage Millennials and Generation Z. We help churches by creating resources, leading workshops and training, by providing ongoing research, and through consulting. For the past two years, I have talked with hundreds of church leaders who tell me that their church struggles to connect with Millennials. For many churches, this struggle points to a bleak future of continued decline resulting in a picture of death. I have literally sat in boardrooms where lead pastors and board members have vehemently thrown up their hands and said, "We have no idea what to do to reach Millennials. We've tried absolutely everything."

Whenever anyone tells you they have tried "everything," do not believe them. Most often this means they have sat around, with good hearts and with great intentions, and merely talked about what they should do to reach Millennials.

Often these ideas are met with one or more of the following choices. First, carry on business as usual and pretend as if nothing is wrong and make the most of the life as a church they have left. Second, determine a pathway toward a more vibrant future that reaches and engages Millennials (and Generation Z), and yet choose to do nothing because the work is too difficult and it will mean that too much will have to change. Finally, a third common choice I often observe is church leaders creating more divergence and a wider gap of generations simply by emitting (both verbally and in their body language) the typical stereotypes that Millennials are lazy, shallow, narcissistic, entitled, cynical, restless, lack respect for authority, are perpetually taking selfies, and are only willing to commit to what benefits them personally. Nothing could be further from the truth, in my experience, except maybe for the bit on taking selfies.

As a church leader, don't say you've tried "everything" if you haven't. And please, for the love of God, don't sit there and deny that there is a problem or worse yet, build a case that Millennials are the problem. News flash: Millennials are not nor ever will be the problem and the reason why you can't reach and engage them. The problem is, most likely, that you as a church are exhibiting a narrow, unimaginative, small gospel that compels no one outside the church and barely those inside the church to listen. I am often asked, "How can we reach Millennials?" My response is typically, "The same way you reach any person from any generation or mindset — with a robust, all-inclusive, compelling, embodied, shared, mysterious narrative of the gospel story that points to possibility and away from pessimism and what is broken." The gospel is about a community of people living on mission for the sake of the world. This means that if God's mission is to restore the world toward its intended wholeness, then our gospel message must be bigger than "dying and going to hell." Our gospel, in order to be robust enough to capture the imagination of emerging generations, must be about the possibility of a world made whole, not the probability of a world remaining broken.

Millennials are the largest generation in the West. There are approximately eighty million Millennials in the US alone. In March of 2016, Millennials, those ages 18–34 or those born between 1983–2000, surpassed baby boomers and became America's largest generation. Millennials are diverse too. Roughly 56% of the Millennials in the US are white and by the year 2020, minorities will be the majority in the US.

Following are some other relevant facts about Millennials that church leaders should know:

• The average Millennial has $45,000 in debt.

• Six in ten Millennials have jobs.

• The median Millennial salary is roughly $40,000.

• Just over 80% have donated money, goods, or services.

• 61% percent of Millennials are worried about the state of the world and feel personally responsible to make a difference.

• 84% say that helping to make a positive difference in the world is more important than professional recognition.

• 75% see themselves as authentic and are not willing to compromise their family and personal values.

• More tolerant of races and groups than previous generations (47% vs. 19%), with 45% agreeing with favored treatment to improve the position of minorities.

• 41% satisfied with the way things are going in the country.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Garden Resonates"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Abingdon Press.
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