2: Access, Alienation, Authority
Last year I met with Bob Buford, the cable television entrepreneur who made a significant midlife reorientation of his work priorities and then told his story in a popular book called Half Time. A few of my peers were discussing generational change, and Bob jumped in with this: “I think this next generation is not just slightly different from the past. I believe they are discontinuously different than anything we have seen before.”
As proof, Bob turned to his files and pulled out a copy of a recent research report on Mosaics, or Millennials. He flipped to a page that showed the prevailing self-identities of each of the four primary generations in American culture and began to read the top five words or phrases each generation had used to describe itself: “Elders used words like these: ‘World War II and Depression,’ ‘smarter,’ ‘honest,’ ‘work ethic,’ and ‘values and morals,’ ” Bob half-read, half-recited from memory. “Boomers describe their generation with terms like ‘work ethic,’ ‘respectful,’ ‘values and morals,’ and ‘smarter.’ Busters use these terms: ‘technology use,’ ‘work ethic,’ ‘conservative/traditional,’ ‘smarter,’ and ‘respectful.’ ” He chuckled. “Everybody thinks they’re smarter.”
“But now, look at this,” Bob continued. “The Millennials use these five phrases to describe their generation: ‘technology use,’ ‘music and pop culture,’ ‘liberal/tolerant,’ ‘smarter,’ and ‘clothes.’[11] Where has respectful gone? Where is work ethic? To me, this shows that the next generation is not just sort of different; they are discontinuously different. I am trying to get a handle on this group because I believe God wants me to invest in this generation. But I don’t know where to start.”
In this chapter I argue that the next generation is so different because our culture is discontinuously different. That is, the cultural setting in which young people have come of age is significantly changed from what was experienced during the formative years of previous generations. In fact I believe a reasonable argument can be made that no generation of Christians has lived through a set of cultural changes so profound and lightning fast. Other generations of Christ-followers have endured much greater persecution. Others have had to sacrifice more to flourish or even survive. But I doubt many previous generations have lived through as compounded and complicated a set of cultural changes as have today’s Christians in the West. The last fifty years have been a real-time experiment on the next generation, using free markets, media, advertising, technology, politics, sexuality, and so on as our lab tools. The experiment continues, but we can already observe some of the results:
Fluidity
Diversity
Complexity
Uncertainty
Today’s Mosaics are being formed under the direct influence of these fast-paced changes. Their expectations, values, behaviors, attitudes, and aspirations are being shaped in and by this context. The truth is, of course, that we all are under the influence of this major set of shifts, regardless of our age or generation—or our willingness (or unwillingness) to embrace them. Today’s sixtysomethings are living in the same discontinuously different culture as are today’s twentysomethings. Much of the social, technological, and spiritual changes we are experiencing today began to take shape during the 1960s (more on that later). The difference is that Seniors, Boomers, and even Busters, to some extent, came of age before these momentous changes had reached maximum velocity and critical mass.
Let’s return to the way teens and young adults express their disconnection from the Christian community: you lost me. When someone uses this idiom, they are suggesting that something hasn’t translated, that the message has not been received. Wait, I don’t understand. You lost me. This is what many Mosaics are saying to the church. As we’ll see in this chapter, it’s not that they’re not listening; it’s that they can’t understand what we are saying.
The transmission of faith from one generation to the next relies on the messy and sometimes flawed process of young people finding meaning for themselves in the traditions of their parents. Prodigals, nomads, and exiles all have to make sense of the faith conveyed to them through relationships and wisdom. But what happens when the process of relationships and the sources of wisdom change? What happens to the transference of faith when the world we know slips out from under our collective feet? We have to find new processes—a new mind—that make sense of faith in our new reality.
We may take comfort in the fact that God is at work in the spiritual journeys of teens and young adults even as we are trying to figure out what to say and how to say it. Faith, ultimately, comes from God. And we can be confident that he cares more than even we do for today’s young people. Nevertheless, regardless of our age, we also must commit ourselves to understanding our culture today to be effective translators of faith to the next generation. We must come to grips with the challenges and with the opportunities for the gospel to advance.
The next generation is living in a new technological, social, and spiritual reality; this reality can be summed up in three words: access, alienation, and authority.
ACCESS
Let’s take a quick trip back in time to the year of my birth, 1973. Before the end of that illustrious decade, the sci-fi adventure that defined a generation of young geeks, Star Wars, had hit theaters. My dad, doing his duty to shape the imagination of his young son, took me to the Cine Capri, the largest screen in Phoenix, Arizona, to see the film.
I can still remember sitting there in the darkened, air-conditioned room, mesmerized by the opening cinematic sequence: a blockade runner attempting to evade the imperial cruiser; droids shuffling about the pearl-white interior of the spacecraft; menacing Darth Vader, suffocating an officer with the power of The Force. “What have you done with the plans?” he demanded, striking fear in the heart of a small kid in a galaxy far, far away.
Recently a friend of mine, Gary Stratton, reminded me of something else that defined the success of Star Wars. It became a blockbuster in part because millions of people went to the theater over and over and over to see it. In what may have been a cultural first, sci-fi geeks began showing up to theaters within just a few weeks of the movie’s release fully decked out in handmade versions of the character costumes.
“Okay, cool,” I said. “Aside from geek-cred, why is that significant?”
“Because during the 1970s there was no guarantee we would ever be able to see the film again,” Gary pointed out. “There was no such thing as a home video market or DVDs or downloadable films or Netflix. I guess we might have hoped the film would show up on network TV someday. But even stuff like HBO and cable was all pretty new at the time, and hardly something that an average guy like me expected would change our lives.”
“Wow, I get it. People saw Star Wars multiple times at the theater because they didn’t know they would eventually be able to watch pretty much any movie ever produced anywhere.”
He laughed, “No, we did not. It literally felt like a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”
“So how many times did you see it during the year it came out?”
“Um, probably ten. Maybe more.”
“Did you dress up like Chewbacca?”
The Challenge of Access
The first and perhaps most obvious change relates to emerging digital tools and technologies—the methods and means by which young adults connect with each other and obtain information about the world.
Hardware such as personal computers, tablets, mobile devices, and smart phones, as well as soft technologies like Web pages, apps, and software, are providing the next generation (and the rest of us) with nearly unlimited access to other people and their ideas and worldviews—at the instantaneous click of a mouse or swipe of a finger. The heightened level of access provided by these tools is changing the way young adults think about and relate to the world. For better and worse, they are sensing, perceiving, and interpreting the world—and their faith and spirituality—through screens. Among other things, access means the current generation can expect to enjoy nearly unlimited access to any movie at any time long after its theatrical release—and they can access so much more than movies.
One of the interviews we conducted was with a young man who described how access to the Internet as a fifteen-year-old gave him unfettered sexual opportunities, eventually leading him beyond pornography and into real-life hookups. The Internet became his portal to sexual liberty. This began a period of spiritual nomadism for him and brought him close to giving up his faith entirely as he wrestled with the notion, Maybe I am just one of the people destined to live in this kind of sin my whole life.
In my presentations to and work with various faith communities, the next generation’s prodigious use of technology, entertainment, and media—their access—comes up again and again. Not long ago I presented on this topic at a church in southeastern Missouri. After my talks, many parents and pastors wanted to know how they should respond to the nearly symbiotic relationship they see between young adults and digital media.
Consider this episode. My son, Zack, is a talkative seven-year-old. During a discussion about some arcane subject the other day, he asked me a question. I didn’t know the answer.
“Dad, give me your iPhone,” he said. “Tell me how to spell it and I’ll just Google it.” Zack can barely spell but he knows that Google has answers. Similarly, the expectation of constant and unlimited access among those ten to fifteen years older than he is influencing who they are becoming and what they want out of life.
Simply put, technology is fueling the rapid pace of change and the disconnection between the past and the future. The Internet and digital tools are at the root of a massive disruption between how previous generations relate, work, think, and worship and how Mosaics (and, to some extent, Busters) do these activities. Mosaics and Busters, as Bob Buford described, understand technology as part of their generational self-identity.
Young people are some of the earliest adopters of technology, of course. Some have described the emerging generation as “digital natives,” especially compared to their predecessors—who, for the most part, are latecomers to the technological revolution. Older adults use digital tools, but they are much less comfortable, much less conversant—as if they are learning and then speaking a second language. Mosaics, on the other hand, are native to the digital world, even compared to their tech-savvy Buster predecessors.
Busters learned to use technology as an ally against the Boomers’ influence and control; if they could master technology, they had a strategic advantage. Mosaics, however, have been raised with these technologies in full supply, and that reality is facilitating new patterns of learning, relating, and influencing the world, as well as changing the way they think about church and Christianity. Technological access allows them to experience and examine content originating from nonbiblical worldviews, giving them ample reasons to question the nature of truth. It generates extraordinary distractions and invites them to be less linear and logical in their thought processes. It empowers them to think as participants, not just as consumers, of media. And it makes them both more connected and more isolated than generations before them.
The Opportunity of Access
Access is not all negative. Thousands of young Christians are creating new venues for the gospel via new media, the Internet, podcasting, blogging, and tweeting, among many others. There is something embedded in their digital DNA that seeks a platform for influence and advocacy. Recently I met a twentysomething Christian who was keeping his blog followers informed about the protests in the Middle East and asking them to pray that this social upheaval would cultivate opportunities for the gospel in predominantly Muslim countries.
No one can begin to fully understand or accurately predict how our culture’s digitization will shape our collective lives, much less how it will affect the next generation. Some have compared the proliferation of these new technologies to the invention of the printing press, which democratized access to ideas and, in many ways, enabled the rise of science, capitalism, modern political theory, and so much more. One of the catalysts of the Reformation, Martin Luther, even described the printing press as “God’s highest and extremist act of grace, whereby the business of the gospel is driven forward.”
Table note 2[12] . . . Table note 3[13]
Hundreds of years from now, when believers look back on the early twenty-first century, will today’s unprecedented technologies of access—the digitization of virtually all human knowledge, media, and relationships—be seen as an act of God’s grace, driving the gospel forward? What kind of evangelists will these young digital natives be?
It is safe to say that Mosaics’ affinity for technology contributes to the sense of disconnection between generations. Literally, they live in a different world than the one in which I was born a scant thirty-seven years ago, not long before my friend Gary imagined he might never see Star Wars again.
In sum, the changing means and methods of communicating and finding information—the digital tools of access—are one of the reasons the next generation’s context is discontinuously different from the past.
ALIENATION
The second seismic cultural shift is how alienated today’s teens and young adults feel from the structures that undergird our society. We might think of alienation as very high levels of isolation from family, community, and institutions.
I had the chance to interview Ashley, a Christian twentysomething and young mother. She told me about finding herself on a cross-country plane trip seated next to a twelve-year-old girl whose mom had put her on the plane, in the custody of the airline, to visit her father. The young lady told Ashley that her parents were divorced and her dad had a job in Georgia. “So I visit him a few times a year. This is my second trip alone on the plane.”
The two struck up a conversation that day, which turned into a “digitally aided” relationship, including cell phone calls, email, and texting. About a year later, the young girl committed her life to Christ.
That’s a great ending to the story, but Ashley told me something else I still can’t shake: “After we got off the plane that first day, the girl said something to me that just broke my heart. She said, ‘Ashley, I think you know me better than anyone else in the world.’ ”
Perhaps this seems like an extreme example, but relational alienation is one of the defining features of this emerging context.
The Challenge of Alienation
Alienation is rooted in the massive social changes that began in the 1960s; the drama of dislocation unfolding in the Mosaic generation is taking place on a stage set by the Baby Boomers.
If ever there was a decade when the earth seemed to tilt on its axis, the 1960s certainly qualifies, with all that happened during those years: the civil rights movement, student riots and unrest, Vietnam war, hippie culture, rock ’n’ roll, women’s liberation, birth control and the sexual revolution, new mainframe computer technologies, the moon landing, Watergate, FM radio, Woodstock, the Cold War, the burgeoning charismatic and Pentecostal movement, the Catholic transition to the English Mass. In many ways, what we now know as “youth culture” was born during that era, as young people embraced new forms of music and art, unprecedented lifestyles, and anti-establishment thinking; the phrase “generation gap” was first used during this period. When it comes to the church and Christianity, the Boomer generation must have seemed the most ominous of threats. John Lennon, one of the central icons of cultural change during that era, famously remarked, “Christianity will end. It will disappear.”
The generation gap is bigger today than ever but it is also a continuation, a deepening of the rifts introduced by the youth culture of the 1960s. Essentially the Boomers popularized the church dropout phenomenon. Research from the Gallup organization that stretches back to the 1930s and ’40s shows that young adults first began to look much different religiously from their parents during the 1960s. The data suggest that, prior to then, reported church attendance levels were very similar across age groups. In other words, during pre-1960s years, twenty-five-year-olds were just as likely to report weekly church attendance as were sixty-five-year-olds. In the 1960s, however, the trends diverged and young adults began to show significant disengagement compared to older adults—a trend that has continued to this day. The implication is that the dynamic of church disengagement during young adulthood was crafted by the Baby Boomers. Now their kids and their children’s kids are taking a similarly circuitous route through faith and young adulthood.
What’s different now compared to the 1960s? Let’s explore three ways that young adults are alienated in a distinct manner.
Family
Father absence is an example of profound social change introduced during the 1960s but much more common today. In the 1960s, 5 percent of live births were to unmarried women; currently, the percentage is 42 percent. In other words, today’s kids are eight times more likely to have come into this world without married parents than were Boomers.
We will address the implications of these social changes throughout this book, but one of the most obvious is that this generation of Mosaics has grown up in a culture that affirms a multiplicity of family types—traditional, blended, nontraditional, and same-sex partnerships. This has influenced their understanding of what it means to be a family, how healthy families should function, what it means to have a good heavenly Father in their lives, and how they can find meaning, trust, and intimacy in peers, family, and romantic relationships.
A related set of changes includes alienation from the institution of marriage. Young adults are pushing marriage and childbearing to later in life (if ever). In 1970 more than four out of every five adults ages twenty-five to twenty-nine were married; in 2010 less than half this age group were married. The average age of marriage has steadily increased, moving from the early twenties to the mid-twenties over the last three decades.[14]
Adulthood
Each generation since the Boomers has taken a longer, more circuitous path to adulthood. For many reasons, some of their choosing and others not, many young adults are postponing the complete transition to adulthood. This transition, according to research reported by one prominent sociologist, is characterized by five key developmental tasks: leaving home, finishing school, becoming financially independent, getting married, and having a child. In 1960, 77 percent of women and 65 percent of men had completed all of these tasks—had become adults—by age thirty. In the most recent estimate, just 46 percent of women and 31 percent of men had completed the transition by the time they reached thirty years of age.[15] Think about that. “Settled by thirty” used to be the normative, typical pattern for young adults in the 1960s. Now that path represents a minority of today’s young adults.
As much as anything, this cultural change bares the gap between church and the lives of today’s next generation. Most churches and parishes are simply not prepared to minister or disciple those taking a nontraditional path to adulthood. They are most capable of guiding and helping the traditional marriage-and-career–stabilized young adult.
My friend JR Kerr, who teaches in a young congregation in Chicago, told me: “Most of the young adults who don’t fit the normal Christian married mold are lovingly called ‘pagans’ by others and sent my way. But I love ’em and work hard to disciple them in new ways. I think they are the ‘new normal’ Christians.”
Institutions
A third mark of alienating cultural change launched by the Boomers and amplified in the Mosaics is skepticism about institutions. Many young adults feel “lost” from our systems of education, economics, government, and culture.
College graduates face a dismal employment outlook that is only gradually improving. USA Today reported in 2010 that there were “more than five job seekers for every opening,”[16] highlighting the fact that recent grads are competing for jobs against more experienced workers, many of whom have been unemployed during the recession. BusinessWeek published a recent cover story on “The Lost Generation,” and the subtitle says it all: “The continuing job crisis is hitting young people especially hard—damaging both their future and the economy.”[17] According to the story, U.S. employers are having a difficult time finding jobs for young workers, a problem that obviously hurts the young adults themselves but which also threatens to strip their energy and creativity from the nation’s economic equation.
Table note 8[18]
Imagine how it must feel to have invested four or five years of your life in earning an education from an established institution, only to find that the piece of paper you received on graduation day is not a ticket to future success. You might be disillusioned about both the education system and the workplace. Making a living and making a difference with your life—not to mention getting married and raising a family—tend to require a paycheck.
Generational shifts are reinventing many sectors of our society, arenas that have until recently been dominated by institutions. Take media, for example. Newspapers and other forms of traditional media—“the fourth estate” of a democratic society—are hemorrhaging readers and advertising dollars. Replacing these institutions is a hyperconnected, eyes-on-the-scene social network that skips the middleman and reports “news” to each other. A decade ago, who could have predicted Facebook, let alone its social influence, continent-sized user base, and enormous market capitalization?
The music industry has been forever changed by the digitization of audio and video, which can be easily shared online. Remember Tower Records or the Virgin Megastore? Young adults don’t.
Even when it’s not purely due to generational changes, new technologies are changing the game for content providers like the church. Who would have guessed that one of the largest, most influential and well-funded technology companies (Microsoft) would mothball Encarta, losing the race with Wikipedia to create a comprehensive online encyclopedia to thousands of unpaid volunteer contributors, many of whom are Mosaics? It’s not a one-to-one comparison, but think about which model the church most resembles—the established monolith or the grassroots network—and what that might mean for its relevance in the lives of a collaborative, can-do generation that feels alienated from hierarchical institutions.
The Mosaic generation is skeptical, even cynical, about the institutions that have shaped our society, and while they retain an undiminished optimism about the future, they see themselves creating that future mostly disengaged from (or at least reinventing) the institutions that have defined our culture thus far. Few institutions in our culture are immune to the impact of the next generation—from music to media, from the workplace to education, from politics to the church. The generational churn at play within the religious establishment is, in many ways, part and parcel of the alienation affecting every segment of our society.
The Opportunity of Alienation
Today’s young adults did not grow up in a vacuum. Like all generations, they were raised in a culture deeply influenced by its predecessors; in this case, the most significant shaping generation was the Boomers. The choices Baby Boomers made with regard to family, church, politics, business, and other institutions have had a domino effect into the emerging generation. Whatever the intent of Boomers’ changing relationship with institutions, the Mosaic generation is putting their own stamp on their connections with family, adulthood, and institutions.
There is both good news and bad news for the church with regard to young adults’ alienation from what used to be normative in our society. The bad news is that, where congregations and parishes are structured to meet the needs of the “old normal,” it will be difficult for young people to find a meaningful place. The good news, however, is that the church is uniquely called to be the community of God—and true, authentic community banishes isolation, loneliness, and alienation and replaces them with love. What will have to change about how we “do ministry” to meet the needs of the “new normal”?
AUTHORITY
The changing spiritual narrative in North America is the third factor in our culture’s discontinuity from previous eras. Let’s call this skepticism of authority—new questions about who to believe and why. Some have described the United States as a post-Christian nation, though that label misses the enormous size and scope of Christianity, active or not, in America. About two out of every five adults in the United States is a practicing Christian (by which we mean they attend church at least monthly and say their faith is very important to them). Moreover, nearly eight out of ten adults identify as Christian.
However, there is a new spiritual narrative on the rise that says Christianity is no longer the “default setting” of American society. The Christian faith exerted significant influence on our culture in previous generations, but much of that public role has dissipated during the past 130-plus years[19]—the acceleration of those secularizing effects has been felt strongly in the last fifty.
In the book Will Our Children Have Faith? John Westerhoff describes how six different arenas of culture once contributed to the socialization of faith: community, church, religious programming (such as Sunday school), public schools (which had prayer and Bible reading), popular entertainment (which was based, at least somewhat, on a biblical worldview), and stable family structures. In other words, while far from perfect, Christianity was the culture’s autopilot.
Many of those socializing forces have eroded or at least significantly changed. The cultural structures that carved deep channels for the faith formation of young people are no longer available to the church. Even though they may bear the Christian label, many families don’t embody faith. The culture doesn’t model or esteem it. Pop entertainment rails against faith in general and Christianity in particular. The education system does its best to be neutral religiously and to instill “values” but not biblical morality.
The next generation is growing up in a culture in which the authority of the Christian community and obedience to Scripture are much less present in their developmental experiences. Mosaic Christians face an environment in which Christianity’s authority has been greatly diminished in both obvious and subtle ways.
The Challenge of Authority
Take the following example. In the early months of the music downloading explosion—the illegal “pirating” of songs digitally—the Christian music industry asked Barna Group to explore the attitudes of young Christians. Did they think that music downloading and “ripping” CDs for their friends was wrong? If not, what might be said to convince them otherwise?
I am not often floored by our data, but the study we completed qualified as a shocker. By large margins, most Christian teenagers did not see illegal music downloading as a moral issue—or if it was, they considered it a matter of fairness and loyalty to their friends rather than of right and wrong. Many of the young Christians we interviewed felt it was more important to be fair and loyal to their peers than to be loyal to the industry. Sound like alienation to you?
It was also a matter of—here’s the other word—access. One young man in our research echoed a common sentiment: “If it is wrong, why would they make it so easy to do on our computers?”
The story of music piracy was also an issue of skepticism of authority—whom to trust and why. The students we interviewed had nothing negative to say about their parents or the Bible but they also saw little connection between these sources of authority and their attitudes or behaviors. This finding suggested that many young people maintain split selves—they are capable of holding contradictory beliefs and behaviors in multiple, even conflicting, categories. One part of them genuinely loves their parents and respects the Bible; the other truly sees no moral qualms with experiencing and sharing music as part of their natural network of relationships.
There are several observations we could make about the emerging generation’s relationship to authority. Let’s take a look at three arenas impacted by their skepticism.
Scripture
The Bible’s influence on this next generation is up in the air. There are certainly pockets of good news about the Good News. Millions of young people believe the Bible is the inspired Word of God, and those families who hold the highest view of Scripture seem to have the best rates of faith transference to their children. We also find that many young adults express an authentic hunger to learn from the Bible and to understand more clearly its meaning and import for their lives.
But when we examine the generation as a whole, we see challenges. Young people are skeptical about the reliability of the original biblical manuscripts; they tend to read the Bible through a lens of pluralism; their changing media behaviors and vanishing attention spans make a physical medium of Scripture less viable; and they seem less likely than previous generations to believe the Scriptures have a claim on human obedience. As we described in chapter 1, the theological foundations of even the most faithful young believers seem, in some crucial ways, shaky or unreliable.
Christianity and Culture
A second area of skepticism involves the role Christianity should play in public life and the broader culture. Young Christians seem to sense (accurately, I might add) that secular society makes little room for religious commitments. Questions about the proper role of faith in politics, sexuality, science, media, technology, and so on are simply being reframed to avoid debate—making people of faith irrelevant to the conversation (and, to the next generation, the only thing worse than being wrong is being irrelevant). There is a sense, across the board, of benign apathy toward Christianity. How will the next generation of believers respond to the growing hostility of our culture toward people of faith? Will they find new and meaningful ways to speak with prophetic authority, or will they grow cold to religious and spiritual conviction, like many of their peers in Western Europe?
Christian Influencers
There are significant changes in the reach and influence of Christian infrastructure in North America, particularly in evangelicalism where Barna Group has focused many of our resources. Our studies show major drops in awareness and positive perceptions of foremost evangelical influencers, from Billy Graham to James Dobson. The nation’s most prominent pastors, like Rick Warren and Bill Hybels, are virtually unknown to younger Americans. Contrast that with the relatively consistent levels of positive regard that mainstream personalities, like Denzel Washington, Oprah Winfrey, George Clooney, or Faith Hill, enjoy. Compare Mosaics’ positive perceptions of Billy Graham with their positive perceptions of Paris Hilton. The elder Christian is less favorably viewed than Paris Hilton among today’s Mosaics.
In other words, the guardians of evangelical Christianity in the public sphere are facing significantly diminished influence within the next generation. Where will the next generation of leaders come from? Will there be any? Who will young Christians, especially evangelicals, look to as their voices of Christian persuasion?
The Opportunity of Authority
Here is the silver lining. A culture of skepticism is a culture of questions, and questions can lead to conversations, relationships, and truth. For instance, the next generation’s questions about the Bible are an opportunity to talk about the Bible—and that’s great! Tensions between faith and culture can give rise to new forms of cultural and social engagement, and the decline of the celebrity-driven Christian subculture creates space for local, real-life relationships with genuine Christ-followers.
Some Christian communities continue to monitor tightly and shape the six factors that have traditionally socialized young people into the faith: community, church, religious programming, schools, entertainment, and stable family structures. The Amish, for instance, continue a way of life very similar to that of the broader culture one hundred years ago. Some Orthodox communities maintain a similar all-encompassing approach to Christian living. They are still able to socialize their teens and young adults into their way of faith and life through traditional means.
For most faith communities, however, there is no going back. The changing spiritual narrative, and the questions of authority it raises, are akin to the difficulties immigrant cultures have between generations. The first generation speaks only the language of the country of origin. The second generation is fluent in both languages. The third generation speaks only the new language and has little esteem for the cultural traditions that have been lost in translation.
Many Mosaics are no longer interested in the authority structures that have animated Christianity. We in the Christian community need to consider our allegiance to these authorities; we must be honest enough with ourselves to determine where our allegiance is merely cultural (like first-generation immigrants) rather than biblical. We need a new mind in our approach to faith formation in a changing spiritual narrative.
LIVING IN THE TENSION
The digital revolution, endemic social change, and a shifting narrative of faith in our culture have deeply affected the cognitive and emotional process of “encoding” faith. Because of access, alienation, and authority, the ability of one generation to convey the message and meaning of faith to the next generation—in thought forms, ideas, and practices they can readily understand and incorporate into their lives—has been disrupted.
This generation is, in some unprecedented ways, having to answer in-but-not-of questions. Where is the line between cultural accommodation and cultural influence? What is appropriate for Christians to participate in and what is not? Yes, these are age-old pressures; there is nothing new under the sun. But we cannot imagine that the loss of faith experienced during the 1960s occurred against the same cultural backdrop. Today an information revolution akin to the printing press—the easily accessible digitization of everything—is afoot. Fatherlessness is nearly eight times more common today than it was fifty years ago, and young adults are far less likely to attain full “adulthood” by their thirtieth birthday. And our hyperindividualized, consumer-driven, pluralistic culture invites young people to become their own king or queen, the absolute authority in their kingdom of one. How could these changes not affect the faith journeys of young adults?
Let’s summarize the challenges and opportunities created by each of these new cultural factors:
Access. Few would debate that we live in a knowledge economy, in a creative age, powered by science-fiction–like technologies. Will the Christian community connect meaningfully with the generation growing up in this context?
Alienation. We are conducting a real-time experiment with relationships, family bonds, and institutional reinventions. Will the Christian community cultivate a presence-centered approach to developing young people, bringing us out of our isolation and alienating pragmatism?
Authority. The spiritual narrative of our culture has shifted—slowly in places, quickly in others—toward secularism and away from the Bible and Christianity. Will the Christian community see skepticism of authority as an opportunity or as a threat?
Teens and twentysomethings and the church are living in the tension of deep cultural change. What a privilege we have to experience these times! Ultimately, because I trust the work of God in every generation, I believe the church can and will respond to the accelerated pace of change. Yet while I am hopeful and encouraged by some of what I see, the outcome is not a foregone conclusion. The transmission of vibrant faith from one generation to the next is still to be determined.
Now that we recognize the cultural backdrop of the next generation’s faith journeys, let’s meet two groups of dropouts: nomads and prodigals.