If I were asked to identify the central crisis faced by 21st century Christianity, I would not say that it is a crisis of evangelism, of doctrine, or of ethics. The great crisis that we must address in order for Christianity to survive the 21st century is generational in nature.
The Great Generational Exodus
If you’ve attended a high school graduation ceremony over the past couple weeks, you’ve no doubt experienced the joy of witnessing a loved one finish a thirteen-year race. Yet, there is not so much joy in facing the statistical fact that if you were to sit down with all of the new graduates who are church attenders, 60% of them would tell you that they have not only graduated from high school, but that they have graduated from church as well.
That’s right. Over the past few weekends we have lost 60% of an entire generation of young people. And the statistics have continued to rise each year since the early 1970s. And of the other 40% who remain in church through their college years, only 3% remain in church after graduating from College.
The reason for any kind of exodus can be determined simply by examining the nature of that exodus. If all of the African Americans move out of a particular region, you can rest assured that the conditions there were not friendly for African Americans. If all of the birds fly out of a particular region, the problem is some condition that is non-bird-friendly. And if all of the youth move out of a particular institution, we can rest assured that the problem is not doctrinal, the problem is not evangelistic, the problem is a generational breakdown.
The Great Generational Divide
What we need more than ever before is a vibrant vision for generational discipleship. The psalmist provides us with such a vision in 144:5: One generation commends your works to another. It seems that we are not doing a very good job of commending his works to the next generation, and the results are staggering and alarming.
It seems that as a general rule, discipleship is a generationally homogenous activity in the western world. Generations do not, for the most part, commend God’s works to one another. Instead, each generation commends his works to itself. This is, in essence, the great generational crisis of our day.
The prevailing model of discipleship in the west is a transient model. The cycle begins in the nursery, where mothers care for their children while watching the service on a screen. Then they are moved to children’s church at some point . . . perhaps a toddlers ministry first, then an elementary school environment, then Jr High, then High School, then College . . . At each stage the children are handed off to the next leader. The leaders of these departments are representatives of their generation who have been appointed to bear the entire burden of discipleship on behalf of their generation. And these leaders frequently burn out, resign, and move on to the next ministry. This compounds the problem; in addition to being handed off from one leader to the next every couple of years, our youth have to deal with feeling frequently abandoned by those who have supposedly embraced the spiritual responsibility for their spiritual maturity. A young person who grows up in this type of system can very easily go through 7-10 pastors/leaders before graduating high school.
From this perspective, it is not so hard to understand why a young person might feel that their high school and church graduations should converge upon the same day. By and large young people in the local church have not felt that anyone at church has taken a personal, long-term interest in their spiritual health and development, and so they see no reason to take a long-term interest in going to church.
The Great Generational Promise
From my perspective, God has already begun to solution this dilemma. In Malachi 4:5 God promised to send the spirit of Elijah before the coming of the great and notable day of the Lord. The spirit of Elijah has one primary function: to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children and the hearts of the children to the fathers. In other words, the spirit of Elijah is coming to heal the generational divide in the body of Christ. Before we begin to try to solution this problem with creative models and elaborate plans we must stop and acknowledge that God saw this coming 2500 years ago and sent his word ahead of it. There will be a revival in the land!
However, we will need new models that can enable us to participate with God in this work. I use ‘models’ in the plural because there will be many viable methods for embracing and executing the work of the Spirit in this regard.
My challenge is simply that we face the problem and acknowledge the extent of it. And as we celebrate with our youth who are graduating from High School, let’s have some talks with them as well to find out what their plans are for their spiritual future. And let us pray for the accelerated outbreak of the Elijah spirit that we may see multitudes of fathers forge covenant bonds with multitudes of sons and daughters.
We can overcome this great crisis if we are willing to acknowledge it, believe for God’s intervention, and take intentional steps toward the demolition of generational walls that have cut off generations of sons from the wisdom of generations of fathers.
No generation can come to maturity in Christ without having received the wisdom of the prior generation and embraced the responsibility for the next. You cannot continue to disciple and be discipled only by your generational peers and think you can grow to full maturity in Christ. And it’s going to take more than a larger coalition of youth ministry teams . . . it’s going to take an entire generation of young adults to disciple the next generation of youth, and an entire generation of middle aged adults to disciple the next generation of young adults.
We need a new reformational emphasis upon the priesthood of all believers more than we ever have before! We say that we believe that every Christian is a full-time minister, but yet we only encourage would-be pastors to get any real training or education for ministry. If every believer is a full-time minister, then every believer needs to take their calling to the ministry seriously if we are going to overcome this generational divide.
This means that we also need viable educational resources for the average Christian who possesses neither the time nor the resources to go to Seminary. In response to this problem, I’ve created a series of courses called The Story of the Bible, which is designed to provide, not a theology of Scripture or a series of interpretations of Scripture, but simply a more exhaustive knowledge of the story from beginning to end. An intimate knowledge of Scripture from beginning to end is the basic, entry-level requirement for both evangelism and discipleship. I can’t tell you how many powerful encounters I’ve had with people simply by relating some component of the story of the bible to their lives, both believers and non-believers alike.
A deeper knowledge of the story of the bible is enough to enable us to begin to commend the words of the Lord to the next generation. You may not have a powerful leadership gift or a powerful preaching gift or a powerful administrative gift, but you can sit down with someone younger than you and tell the story. And you can deepen your ability to tell the story by taking a class such as mine.
We may have many different ideas about what the solutions are, but one thing we can agree on: we must begin to attack this problem with vigor. We must equip entire generations, not just generational representatives. We must live out the content of Psalm 144:5 or we will not out live the context of the 21st century world.
