WIG was basically the ancestor of Google.
Practice 2
In a Complex and Anxious Age, Develop the Muscles of Cultural Discernment
Exercising cultural discernment means taking part in a robust learning community under the authority of the Bible in order to wisely navigate an accelerated, complex culture.
In the late 1990s, Mark’s organization, WisdomWorks, was given access to experimental artificial intelligence (AI) that could generate chatbots, computer programs that engage in text-based conversation. Mark and his team christened the chatbot WIG, short for Wise Intelligent Guide, and installed it on their youth website. While each chat was anonymous, with no identifying information required for teens to interact with WIG, the ministry team got regular reports on the content of the chats. It didn’t take long for a pattern to emerge.
WIG was basically the ancestor of Google.
David has a friend named Seth who is a remarkable guy—an effective leader and just an all-around great human being.
Seth had recently relocated to a new job, and since we hadn’t caught up for almost a year, we took an elevator to a rooftop terrace overlooking his newly adopted city where we could talk. He recounted how his kids were doing in the new context.
“We are doing pretty well as a family. We are settling into schools and life here. My teen daughter has taken it hardest. In fact, I recently discovered that her search feed on her phone was filled with YouTube videos about ‘How do I know if I am depressed?’ and ‘How do I deal with anxiety?’ I asked her about it, and she said she had found a lot of videos on the issues she was facing.”
He paused, looking out over the skyline. “I felt bad she didn’t talk to me first. And it made me realize how much mobile phones are giving our kids access to all sorts of ideas about life and how to live it.”
Complexity, Stress, and Anxiety
Young people are looking to their devices to make sense of the world around them. As we’ve pointed out, they are using the screens in their pockets as their counselors, their entertainers, their instructors, and even their sex educators, among many other digital-Sherpa roles. Why make the effort to talk to your parents or teachers when you can privately ask the smartphone in your hand?
The problem we want to identify in this chapter is the challenge of trying to find real, livable wisdom in an accelerated, complex culture. Instantaneous access to information does not equal wisdom. Young people in emerging generations, such as Seth’s daughter, are unclear about who to believe and where to turn for input and advice. It’s a good thing that the internet might provide some answers to mental health questions. But is it really the best and deepest and most godly place for finding the truest answers?
The undercurrent of all this might be best described as escalating anxiety.
It’s now been twenty years since Mark’s team first experimented with WIG. AI, algorithms, and machine learning are no longer quirky novelties. They are the hidden gatekeepers to and curators of information and communication “ungoverned by ethical or philosophical norms.”1 They are not anchored to moral and theological norms, either. Instead, math that only a handful of people understand is the cryptic law of the virtual land.
The result? Algorithms tell us how to feel about ourselves and what to think about the world.
As we have said already, and will say again, we are not anti-tech. We are not saying that abundant life and wholehearted discipleship in exile require a return to landlines or handwritten letters delivered by stagecoach. Our point, rather, is that the disruptive “move fast and break things” ethos of technological innovation is emblematic of digital Babylon’s complexity—and this often leads to anxiety.
Screens are profoundly changing the human experience and affect us in the following ways:
pushing the tyranny of now
framing and filtering reality
weaponizing humor by making snark cool
overloading our choices
filling our time and distracting our minds
making people even more image conscious
giving people a sense of interacting and participating
Earlier we described digital Babylon as accelerated (life moves faster) and complex (life is uncertain and difficult to predict). The reaction of many people to these facts of exile is a low-level anxiety that never really goes away and that occasionally ratchets up to high-level anxiety. Three out of five young adults tell us they are “stressed out”; seven out of ten say they are “concerned about the future.” And in Barna’s first comprehensive study of Gen Z, the generation coming up after Millennials, anxiety is a recurring theme, especially related to things like education, career, money, and relationships.
Apprehension infiltrates many aspects of modern life. Anxiety about looking your best and eating right. Pressure to perform your best in school and get ahead. Aching questions about calling, jobs, and finances. Frequent comparisons to others on social media. (Gen Z is the most likely generation to admit that seeing others’ lives on social media makes them feel insecure about themselves.) Fears about losing faith. Ironic worry about mental health and social wellness. Uncertainty about choosing the right spouse, the right career, the right anything, the right everything. So many alternatives at our fingertips can be exhausting rather than freeing. We experience paralysis by analysis, overchoice, and complexity.
Take relationships, which have always been a bittersweet domain of human life. In digital Babylon, relationships are more complicated. First, there’s social media, which doesn’t always (or even usually) make people more social. Second, the road to adulthood, including reaching the typical relational mileposts of marriage and child rearing, is a lot less predictable. Our research shows that young people are delaying marriage in part out of concern they will make the wrong choice in a spouse.
Many are debilitated by worry that their career will take a wrong turn, because there are so many good options to consider. (They’re not wrong; it’s smart today to prepare for a variety of careers over the course of life, a trend we call “multi-careering.”) This generation has been taught to expect and prepare for having it all, so actually making a choice—a choice that necessarily rules out other choices—can feel monumental, and not in a good way. When overwhelmed by all you could do, how do you decide what you should do without having a nervous breakdown?
In fact, the numbers show this generation is facing unprecedented challenges when it comes to issues of mental health, anxiety, and staying sane and safe. “Hospitals See Growing Numbers of Kids and Teens at Risk for Suicide,” reports NPR: “The number of kids who struggle with thoughts of suicide or who attempt to kill themselves is rising. New research . . . finds children ages 5 to 17 visited children’s hospitals for suicidal thoughts or attempts about twice as often in 2015 as in 2008.”2
Life is more complex in digital Babylon. It’s not just unlimited access to content. It’s the range of ideas and the fact that so many are untethered to orthodox ways of perceiving the world. There is more to think about, more to worry about, more to concern yourself with—and that’s just on your Facebook feed on Tuesday morning. Previously unimaginable complexity is creating an epidemic of anxiety in our homes and heads that is ratcheted up in the hearts of the next generation.
What’s the solution?
Cultural discernment, about technology and so much more, is an essential practice of following Jesus in the accelerated, anxiety-producing complexity of digital Babylon.
The second practice of disciple making in digital Babylon is cultural discernment. In order to live well and wisely in the complexity of digital Babylon—and thereby defuse anxiety—we must build our muscles of cultural discernment: the ability to compare the beliefs, values, customs, and creations of the world we live in (digital Babylon) to those of the world we belong to (the kingdom of God). And once we’ve made that comparison, to anchor our lives—including our use of technology—to the theological, moral, and ethical norms of God’s kingdom.
Look at the way resilient disciples—our exemplars of effective discipleship among young adults—describe their experiences at church (see table 3). Seven out of ten say they receive “wisdom for how to live faithfully in a secular world.” About half say they receive wisdom for living wisely in a pluralistic culture (“people who believe differently from me”) and in terms of sex, sexuality, and technology. More than two out of five say their churches provide tools for wisely managing money. In other words, resilient disciples still have room for growth in these areas, but they report far more wisdom-cultivating practices than do habitual churchgoers, nomads, or prodigals who have experience in church.
The evidence is quite clear: how a person thinks and believes makes a huge difference to their resilience. Digital Babylon exerts tremendous influence, but the profile of resilient disciples shows that forming patterns of discernment is one effective way of staying ahead of the curve.
Resilient disciples take part in robust learning communities; that is, they learn how to think in company with other Christians who are learning how to think. This leads to an important conclusion from the research: as exiles in digital Babylon, disciples need a richer, more resilient life of the mind.
Why Cultural Discernment?
In the previous chapter, we indicated that helping people answer the question Who am I, really? is one of the big opportunities open to the church. Another foundational quest for every human is to determine How should I live? How do I make sense of life? How do I respond well to life’s circumstances? This impulse, this longing, may go unacknowledged, but it won’t go away—even in digital Babylon, where colorful, hi-res screens make it easy to ignore.
Many young people (and, let’s be honest, older people too) are so dazzled and distracted by their devices that they aren’t looking for wisdom. How should I live? hasn’t crossed their minds because they’re bingeing Game of Thrones or 13 Reasons Why or Miraculous Ladybug fan videos, or trading Insta likes, or trying on Snapchat filters, or mainlining free porn straight into their prefrontal cortex.
This is foolishness.
In contrast, listening to wisdom’s voice over digital Babylon’s 24/7 racket is a top predictor of resilient faith among young adults. For example, we learned that resilients are two and a half times more likely than habitual churchgoers to say they regularly experience “help with living wisely when it comes to technology” in their churches. Why is this so central to following Jesus in exile?
Education by Search Engine
The first reason, as we’ve been saying, is that the internet has become the primary educator of emerging generations. This has some positives, as any parent who tries to help their high school student understand calculus will tell you. But it also has its downsides. Take, for instance, the cozy relationship this generation has with technology when it comes to sex. Millions of young people are learning about sex—what it is, how to do it, how to think about it—based on what content a search algorithm decides they should encounter online. These encounters happen both intentionally (young people searching for things they’d rather not ask a human being in real life) and unintentionally (young people exposed to pornography and hypersexualized content through mainstream entertainment, social media, and their peers).
Even “good church kids” have a hard time avoiding the complex wonders and wickedness of the wide world. Babylon, in the biblical record and in our culture now, is a leveling force. The allure of bowing down is almost too powerful to resist, even with the help of parental spy software, Christian school covenants, and youth group safety policies.
Way back in the pre-internet olden days, in the 1990s, a great deal of planning and subterfuge was required if a kid wanted to check out porn. What wisdom can older generations offer Millennials and teens who are bombarded with pornographic content whether or not they go looking for it? Porn is more accessible than ever before in human history, and it’s taking the sexual imaginations of young men (and, increasingly, young women) captive: a majority of teens believe it is more morally intolerable not to recycle than to view pornography.3
In digital Babylon, exposure to porn is but one example of something that is not if but when. We can count on the next generation being exposed to attitudes, values, perspectives, and behaviors antithetical to Christian formation.
How can we pass on deep, potent, lasting Christian faith to young people in an era of moral reversalism, when evil is called good? How can we learn habits that honor God, ourselves, and others with our bodies?
The Tyranny of Now
Porn is not the only potential pitfall in digital Babylon. Help to use tech wisely is also important for discipleship in exile because we are increasingly conditioned to believe that now is all that matters. We elevate the latest trend, the newest thing, the hottest take. And the tyranny of now exacerbates the anxiety of modern life.
Personal devices feed the part of our brains that loves instant gratification. They give us a jolt of digital dopamine dozens, if not hundreds, of times a day. We love our memes. Have a funny thought to share with a friend? Hoping you’ve gotten new Instagram or Facebook likes since the last time you checked? Worried about your grades? Wonder how your stocks are holding up? Digital Babylon invites you to live in the hyperpresent. Whatever your brain is thinking right now can appear on a screen near you.
Even some of those credited with creating the tools of digital Babylon are having second thoughts. The most recent book from tech pioneer Jaron Lanier, one of the inventors of virtual reality technology and currently a researcher at Microsoft, is Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. In an interview about what is going wrong in the tech sector, he revealed that one of his book’s ten arguments is spiritual: “[Social media is] continuous behavior modification on a mass basis, with everyone under surveillance by their devices and receiving calculated stimulus to modify them. . . . It’s a bad religion. It’s a nerdy, empty, sterile, ugly, useless religion that’s based on false ideas.”4
How can we instill a faith synchronized to the deep time of past, present, and eternal in a now-only world?
Passing the Time
Third, and speaking of time, let’s talk about how we spend it. Screens make it possible to cram every idle second with distraction. Birds that are angry. Doodles that jump. Clashing clans. Crushing candy. Zombies versus plants. Friends with words. And we haven’t even gotten to the bottomless scroll that is social media.
The two of us travel a lot, and we’ve noticed a big difference in air travel today compared to ten years ago. No matter how short or long the flight, nearly everyone on the plane is staring at a screen. Sometimes people are working on laptops or tablets. Occasionally, they’re reading an ebook. But most of the time, they’re using screens to watch entertainment. Or even stranger, when people aren’t watching their screens, they leave the flickering pixels flashing in front of them the entire flight. It is disturbingly reminiscent of that scene in Pixar’s Wall-E of future human beings floating around a spaceship on personal people movers in a permanent state of fixation on the screen hovering just inches from their noses.
Look, watching videos on a plane is a great way to pass the time. But shouldn’t the phrase “pass the time” raise at least a tiny red flag? Digital Babylon strip-mines human potential by making it absurdly easy to squander our most precious resource: time!
How can we help exiles consider their discretionary minutes each day—which tally up to their whole lives—as something to be redeemed, not merely passed?
Filtering Reality
Fourth, highly personalized digital environments frame and filter reality so that it’s hard to know what’s real. If one of the deep questions for human life is How should I live? we discover “answers” all the time in the content we consume.
The songs we listen to, the shows and movies we watch, the platforms we socialize on, the news we consume—all of these and more create a vision of what is real and how best to respond to that reality. Digital Babylon is constantly telling us, at a very deep, almost unconscious level, what to believe, how to think, what to feel, and how to live.
How can we live in a deeper, truer narrative about ourselves, about our world, about God’s nature and his design for flourishing human life?
These are some of the challenges that technology in digital Babylon lays at our door. And as we see in the lives of resilient young Christians, dealing well with them in a community of faith is critical to following Jesus in exile.
The Resilience of Wisdom
Far from being anti-tech, we are anti-foolishness. At the broadest level, the pursuit of wisdom—what we are calling cultural discernment—is the godly answer to rising complexity and its symptom, anxiety. Let’s say that again: we can ratchet anxiety down, and ratchet resilience up, by cultivating wisdom. Scripture provides many insights about the role of wisdom in the life of a disciple.
Moreover, exiles use wisdom effectively in their engagement with their times, that is, with the social, spiritual, and political pressures of their context. As you read through this list of biblical characters, think of the complexity and resulting anxiety these exiles must have experienced on their path to faithfulness.
As you review these exile stories, what do you notice? We think one of the most powerful themes is the power of discernment for producing faithfulness. We can draw inspiration by studying these scriptural examples of exiles who put wisdom into practice. Simply put, we can’t live in times of complexity without wisdom, the human capacity to understand life from God’s perspective—or, to put it another way, a practical understanding of how to live as God designed us.
In a complex and anxious age, we need to develop the muscles of wisdom and discernment. Like a good workout, the pressures of following Jesus in our current environment force us to get stronger—or else suffer the consequences. If we don’t put in the effort to swim upstream, our faith is going to wash out.5 In light of the coercive powers of our present age, resilience looks like developing what Jesus prays for us to be—in the world but not of the world.
In but not of.
We see this yearning in resilient disciples in their identification with the statement “I want to find a way to follow Jesus that connects with the world I live in” (87 percent say this is completely or mostly true of me). Resilient young Christians desire to connect their faith in Jesus with the world they inhabit. They don’t want their spiritual lives and their real lives to be separate things. They expect their faith to have a transforming impact on the world.
Exercising this kind of cultural engagement seems to make for better life outcomes. Correlation is not causation, but from our experience, it’s no coincidence that resilient disciples are much less likely than others to describe themselves as “stressed out.” Forty-four percent report feeling stressed, compared to half of habitual churchgoers (52 percent) and two-thirds of nomads (68 percent) and prodigals (64 percent). Resilients are likewise less likely than others to say they are “concerned about the future.”
So how do we turn these kinds of insights into action? Here are three starting points on the way to wisdom.
Don’t Hide under a Rock
One of the first principles we see in the lives of biblical exiles is that they don’t bury their heads in the sand. The same must be true of us today. We must develop the right mind-set of cultural engagement, the right posture. In digital Babylon, the question is not if but when—not if we will face doubts, questions, content, images, ideas, and worldviews that are antithetical to Christian faith but when. It’s better to face what’s coming. We must not hide under a rock.
We can’t simply shelter the next generation (or ourselves) and hope they don’t come into contact with the worst the world has to offer. We have to expect it. We have to prepare for it. We must carefully and intentionally develop a resilience that is in but not of the world. Making resilient disciples does not mean protecting young Christians but preparing them for life on mission.
Resilient disciples already embrace this mind-set. They want their lives to reflect Jesus in all they do. They expect their Sundays to invade their weekdays. They perceive Jesus to be at work outside the walls of the church.
Here are some of the questions we contemplate when we have the right mind-set:
Here’s how this mind-set might affect a huge problem: porn. Some try to ignore it, but those with wisdom won’t. For the first time in human history, explicit sexual images are floating through the air and available at the swipe of a finger. We can’t avoid the topic, and we can’t have just one conversation.
We can try to protect young Christians, and that’s a good step up from ignoring the problem. Setting solid expectations about screen use and monitoring Wi-Fi and cellular data are important. But just trying to close down access to porn isn’t sufficient.
What if we tried to help the next generation (and ourselves) think missionally about the problem? What if we prepared them to have a different mind-set and a different way of thinking and talking about the problem? We find in our research that most teens today think porn is positive or neutral. Few think it’s a bad thing. What if we taught our kids why porn is corrosive to our character and our souls, as well as to our families and coworkers, from a missional point of view? What if we helped them become capable of having helpful, healthy conversations with their peers, who are most likely to think porn is no big deal?
In our conversations with our kids, our talks about porn go something like this: “It’s very hard to grow up today because of online porn. And I am really sorry. Screens make it tougher than ever to keep our hearts and minds pure, but we can find grace and forgiveness in Jesus when we mess up and repent. Let’s also think about how you can help your friends—to represent the truth and grace of Jesus—because it’s very likely they struggle with this.”
Having the right mind-set helps us become resilient by helping us properly understand our priorities as Christians: we are on mission with Jesus, even in exile.
Anchor to the Bible
David’s family sometimes reads the book of Ecclesiastes at dinner. The Kinnamans are a family of achievers, and it’s good to be reminded of the vanity of self-driven, self-regulated effort. (Daughter Annika once reminded her basketball teammates that chasing stats on the court is no better than chasing the wind.)
We have both found ourselves wondering why churches don’t teach the Bible’s Wisdom Literature more often (Proverbs, Lamentations, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes), because this genre speaks so powerfully to the temptations of digital Babylon (ambition, sex, anxiety, and trauma).
A second insight we see in the biblical model of exiles is their submission to what God is telling them, especially through the Scriptures. They view God as living and active, desiring that his people seek his direction. As we noted above, Daniel reports that he was “reading the word of the LORD, as revealed to Jeremiah the prophet” (Dan. 9:2).
As Christians today, we too should aim to be an exilic community that seeks God’s direction under the authority of Scripture. This dovetails with the themes we discussed in the previous chapter—that we should orient ourselves toward the voice of Jesus in our lives. How? We acknowledge that the Bible is our authoritative source for wisdom. And wisdom is held up as a worthy but rarely traveled path.
Our research shows that resilient disciples hold a range of Bible-centered perceptions and practices far more than their Christian peers (see table 4). Reading the Bible makes them feel closer to God. Bible teaching at their churches is relevant and increases their love for the Bible. In short, the lived reality of resilients is that the Bible is authoritative and central to their faith.
Anchoring to the Bible helps us weather the ups, downs, and sideways of exile.
Don’t Just Engage; Prepare to Engage
A third pattern of biblical exiles is periods of preparation leading up to more public engagement with society. We can’t live life on mission if we haven’t been prepared for mission. The stories of Daniel, Joseph, and Esther show the importance of preparation. In fact, many biblical stories, including those of Abraham, Moses, Samuel, David, and Jesus, demonstrate this clear principle: God uses early experiences to shape the hearts and minds of his servants. There is no such thing as a wasted moment. David demonstrates this beautifully when he says that his death matches with lions and bears have given him confidence that God will help him defeat Goliath (1 Sam. 17:34–37). His preparation leads to faithful engagement.
This is especially true in the biblical record of Daniel. The entire first chapter of his story is a revelation on the importance of early years in shaping an in-but-not-of way of life in exile. Daniel’s story seems to demonstrate important faith formation at work before he’s taken into exile and also during his time in exile. He’s learning the language and customs of Babylon; he’s engaging his peers and mentors—people who don’t believe what he does—and learning to be faithful, not just in spite of but in the midst of incredible pressures.
Fast-forward to the present. Our research among resilient disciples shows that churches can meaningfully help to build cultural discernment in the lives of young people, but doing so is not easy. (Consider table 3 again.) A strong majority of resilients say their churches help them build wisdom for how to live faithfully in a secular world (70 percent), but the percentage drops off substantially when it comes to more specific topics. About half indicate that their churches aid their wisdom for living with people who believe differently (56 percent), help with living wisely when it comes to sex and sexuality (52 percent), and guide them when it comes to living wisely with technology (50 percent). Nearly half say their churches provide tools for wisely managing money (43 percent). (This is important because the Bible makes a big deal about faithful stewardship of finances, and teens in Gen Z, especially, are strongly motivated by financial attainment.)
One of the strongest predictors of being a resilient exile is saying that their church helps them live wisely when it comes to technology. This is still something many resilients need help with, but when it happens, it has a powerful effect.
In some ways, the church is not preparing young disciples for the world as it is. Cultural discernment is about teaching them not just what to think but also how to live. We must prepare them for the world as it truly is, not as we wish it to be. Exiles in the Bible are a good reminder that God finds leaders, prophets, and change makers in order to help lead his people during times of upheaval. In ancient times and today, exiles change our “how” thinking and reorient our “why”—they help people find faithfulness in a strange land so that the witness to God can intersect with the world as it is.
Here’s an example. Daniel advocated for the lives of his philosophical and spiritual adversaries. As recorded in Daniel 2, Daniel tells the commander of the king’s guard, who is trying to pacify the raving-mad king, not to kill the pagan philosophers and wise men of Babylon. Instead, Daniel risks his very life to enter the king’s throne room and attempt the impossible: interpret the man’s dream. This is an example of changing “how” and “why”: Daniel shows how to express empathy and solidarity with people who are our enemies, because that’s the experience of living faithfully with others within a pluralistic society.
Our friend Jim Henderson told us recently about a young man who works on his production team. The young man is more theologically and socially conservative than Jim himself, but, as Jim reports, “I’m honored he’s willing to work with a seventy-year-old guy. He is creative, opinionated, and thoughtful, and we talk openly about our differences. As a mentor, I want him to become comfortable engaging with people who hold vastly different opinions.” Jim is helping his team member prepare to engage—and that will help him become resilient.
Mark remembers seeing the course list for his daughter Skye as she was registering for fashion design school in New York City. Most classes had titles like “Space and Materiality,” “Sustainable Systems,” and “Time.” But the course that caught his attention was called “Fake.” It was a seminar and a studio in which students made things based on the content from the course. His first thought was, What exactly am I paying for here? But his conversations with Skye over the duration of the semester were most frequently about this class.
In the class, students were assigned the task of creating fake memories and posting them alongside real memories to see if their classmates could determine real from fake. It was interesting to Skye to see fellow students thinking and reflecting, shaping the way they discern the world. When you stop to think about it, if you are going into a creative field, when does something you create become real? Is it possible to make something that is, in fact, fake? In fashion, a designer can make something that is considered real, while a knockoff made of nearly identical materials is a fake. Why?
As you can imagine, it didn’t take long for someone in the class to bring up the topic of an experience with God. How does one know whether it is real or fake? That set of questions led Skye and her classmates to some memorable conversations.
What if we did these kinds of exercises in our churches and families? What if we gave young people the tools and the language to discern between concepts such as real and fake—and so much more? Doing so would be useful in helping them learn to act with wisdom. If this is the kind of training young artists receive, we ought to use the same rigor to develop disciplines of cultural discernment for exiles navigating between their faith and the culture.
To do so, however, will require some major changes in the way we think about learning.
Digital Babylon is a radically new environment, and it requires a commitment to learning, to the search for truth and beauty, in brand-new ways. Having studied this topic for a decade and spoken to hundreds of thousands of teens, we firmly believe this:
To instill and transmit cultural discernment in digital Babylon, faith communities and households must become robust learning communities.
This is not just about training smart or gifted kids, although they are certainly important (and often ignored by ministry efforts). Instead, this is about training all young people, of all capabilities and callings, to learn, to think, to understand, to comprehend, to act.
We need to teach critical thinking, how to evaluate and understand propaganda, fake and real, truth and post-truth, worldview and theology, and so much more. We should offer classes and courses and seminars on all sorts of topics—tailored to the pressures and questions young Christians are actually experiencing. We should buy young people books and send them links to helpful videos and be prepared to discuss good content. We must expose them to ideas and concepts from people with different skin colors and genders. (We should do this not only because we find it so easy to assume that “people like me” must be right but also because Gen Z and Millennials have come to expect diversity—rightly so—and believe they have much to learn from people different from themselves.)
We once heard historian Molly Worthen talk about the importance of teaching young people about their own theological traditions. In our research among resilient disciples, we found evidence of this (mostly untapped) appetite. Exposing young disciples to a greater range of information and insight about where they come from is one crucial aspect of forming a coherent identity.
This may sound like really hard work. That’s because it is! But what could be more important? We absolutely must expose them to the deep, rigorous thinking of other Christians, especially those in careers and areas of study they care about.
Brett McCracken, a friend of David’s, and his wife, Kira, took six twentysomethings to Europe a few years back. “It was part discipleship, part church history, part ministry to churches in different parts of England. We saw so much growth in these young people during this time and in the years that followed.” European mission trips may not be accessible to all, but taking time to invest relationally, intellectually, and historically can help the young grow in faith.
Brett also hosts movie screenings at his house with young adults from church. They view the movie together, then discuss it afterward, exploring both the artistic merits and the theological themes. Brett says, “Young adults are eager to ‘go deep’ in talking about a movie and exploring the theological issues raised in films.”
Learning in Action
Our research supports the contention that learning matters. Young resilient disciples report nearly double the spiritual intake in a typical year compared to habitual churchgoers and about six times the number of hours of Christian content compared to nomads and prodigals. Over the course of years, this adds up. The habits of learning, of steeping ourselves in a Christian way of thinking and seeing the world, matter.
We also found evidence that resilients experience less overall screen time than other segments of young Christians and former Christians. It’s still a lot of screen time, but it’s less compared to their peers. This fact, along with their increased hours of participating in Christian events and taking in Christian content, is strong ballast against the unpredictable waves of digital Babylon. Their cultural discernment muscles are getting a better workout.
How can we commit ourselves to putting in more time together to learn, to pursue knowledge and beauty, in our current context? How can we meaningfully increase the number of hours we devote to following our Lord in these trying and confusing times?
We must commit ourselves to higher quality and quantity of hours devoted to the life of discipleship.
The Learning Reformation
A reformation of learning is already under way all around us, and it represents an incredible opportunity for the church as we think about raising disciples in digital Babylon. Here are some of the factors combining to fire the reformation.
First, God wired human beings to learn. The basic impulses for the learning revolution are hardwired into our DNA. We want to grow. We aspire to gain new skills and perspectives.
Second, in the larger context for learning in today’s digital commons, people can learn what they want, when they want, at a price they want (usually for free), and how they want (thanks, YouTube). Much of what passes for learning is actually just infotainment. But at the same time, there has never been a better time in human history to learn something. We can access free learning content on sites such as Khan Academy. We can take master classes online. We can earn a degree through online programs. All of this is on top of other traditional, nondigital learning opportunities.
Third, most young Christians want to learn. In one recent study, we discovered that millions of practicing Christians want to learn in all sorts of ways—sometimes for personal enrichment, sometimes for a degree program. David recently met Megan, a mother of young kids, who is attending seminary “because I want to be better prepared to help my kids navigate theology and today’s culture.” How cool is that?
The idea that we need a new approach to learning is something researchers at Barna have been seeing since our work on You Lost Me. Our pedagogical structures assume that the bigger the youth group, the bigger the church, the more learning that’s happening—because, I mean, look at all those people! But the things one can learn in a large group setting, for all its merits, are different from what one can learn in a smaller classroom or living room.
So what is the solution to this dilemma?
Preach, but Don’t Only Preach
Effective preaching is as important as ever, but it’s not sufficient for bringing about whole-life transformation. What do we mean?
Churches play a foundational role in forming a culturally discerning mind-set among resilient disciples. All of the evidence points to the fact that sermons are an important part of that equation. However, the data also indicates that an hour (or less) a week—or, more likely, an hour or so every few weeks, when a young Christian shows up for church—is simply not a sufficient amount of “weight” to tone a heart bloated with hundreds of hours of content from digital Babylon.
Churches need more than good sermons to disciple in digital Babylon; we also need other structures of learning: courses, programs, mentoring, field-based experiences, mission trips, and more.
Take, for example, the subject of human sexuality and a theology of the body. Even if we were to hear an incredible sermon series—and we must have deep, thoughtful, biblical sermons on this subject—that handful of sermons couldn’t possibly be enough to adequately engage the depth, texture, and richness of Christian teaching on this topic. We need something like Human Sexuality 101 and 201 courses, ways to engage thoughtful, smart, connected, curious, and cynical minds with sturdy Christian content.
And while we’re at it, let’s talk about the mantras we ministry leaders repeat to ourselves about effectiveness. This is mostly about the size of the crowd or the rave reviews we get for our teaching series. The two of us have actually heard comments like, “It’s a sin to bore a young person at church.” This is well-meaning, of course; we get the heart behind statements like this. But the idea is wrong. Sometimes teaching rich, robust truths is, let’s admit it, hard work and can lead to boredom in an age of short attention spans. But in our efforts to keep things from becoming boring, we’ve put the cookies on the bottom shelf for the next generation. We’ve oversimplified things. We give Brand Jesus pep talks that inspire in the moment but melt into the digital ether as soon as young people walk out of church. This is the problem with entertaining-but-shallow Christian experiences for youth and young adults. What’s worse, young people who are ready to grow, who want to push past the boredom, are disappointed. This is how we end up losing some of the brightest young minds and talents, particularly creatives, entrepreneurs, and science-minded students.
We have to do better. Good preaching alone won’t cut it.
Teach the Whole Gospel
We define the whole gospel, based on thinking from many others, as a four-chapter Christian story: creation-fall-redemption-restoration. In too many places, we teach an abbreviated and insufficient two-part story: fall and redemption. You are a sinner and you need Jesus.
Those two elements are the truth of the human condition and the center of the gospel. But to be whole, they need to be set in the context of the opening chapter (God created human beings in his image, with desire and potential for goodness, truth, and beauty) and understood in light of the closing chapter (God’s ultimate plan for the world is to set things right and renew all things).
Most resilient disciples embrace these four elements, though their belief in the fall sags. Only 60 percent strongly agree with the idea that “all human beings are essentially broken and flawed because they have rebelled against God” (see table 5).
The point is that we should be regularly involved in clearly, compellingly conveying the entire scope of God’s truth about the world in both sermons and other learning structures. Only the fullness of God’s story can help young disciples make sense of their world in exile.
Experiment with Learning and Thinking Structures
No matter how we slice it, we consistently find that the next generation of Christians lacks sufficient thinking structures to engage the world. For example, we found that only 4 percent—just one out of every twenty-five teenagers today—has what we might call a biblical worldview. This points to the need for deeper patterns of faith engagement, more and better ways of teaching and learning.
As Gabe Lyons and David wrote about in Good Faith, this could include preparing young people to ask and answer four questions: What’s right? What’s wrong? What’s missing? What’s confused? Giving young people tools to address these four questions allows them a wider range of biblical—in-but-not-of—responses to their world. Things that are “right” should be celebrated. We should identify “wrong” things and fix them, or find a better way. “Missing” things should be found or created. And “confused” elements of our culture should be clarified. These simple questions can help us exiles engage our world more faithfully.
This might look like what our friends Brooke and Christian do. They spend at least thirty minutes during mealtime after church each week talking with their young kids about what they learned and experienced in church and how it connects to their world. We can imagine a web-based platform of videos, readings, and assessments that help young people discover God-shaped truth about their calling. We can picture a church creating comprehensive courses on topics that matter to adolescents and young adults. We can envision a group of Christians in our city creating a “seminary program” for high schoolers, asking them to learn rich theological truths that they can apply throughout the rest of their lives.
We believe the church can and will rise to the learning reformation that is under way. We need to return to our historic roots and build up the muscles of young Christians. We need to encourage young people to read more, watch more, learn more—content suffused with a Christian understanding of the world. We must become and be a part of a robust learning community if we are to thrive as exiles in digital Babylon.
We see green shoots of learning sprouting up all over the place. We just have to water this budding movement!
One night at the dinner table, the Kinnaman family was talking about cynicism in entertainment and cynical characters in movies and shows we had seen.
My teenage daughter Annika brought up Good Luck Charlie, a fun and humorous show that aired for seven seasons on the Disney Channel. We all agreed that one of the characters, Gabe, was the most cynical person in the fictional family.
“You know, I remember trying to be like Gabe sometimes,” Anni exclaimed as she noticed the blurry line between screens and real life. “I tried to make jokes like the family on Good Luck Charlie. Like Gabe. And it was weird because I totally remember that no one in our real family laughed. And when I said those things out loud, they didn’t really seem very funny. They just seemed kind of mean.”
“Anni, that’s so observant!” I cheered. “I’m so proud of you for thinking it through and noticing that. The more we use wisdom in what we watch and how it affects us, the more we can live differently, like Jesus wants us to.”