Thus, spiritual conversations revolved around being honest. To reach this generation, Christian speakers would share about the darkest, most hurtful, most shameful things that have happened to them, and then speak authentically about how Jesus saved them from that dark pit. The more honest you were, the more we listened. If you dropped the masks, we’d trust you.
In the ’80s and ’90s, when xers were young adults, the critique against Christianity also revolved around being real. Televangelists and other Christian leaders fell into disgrace from very public moral failures, leading to accusations of hypocrisy. What we preached did not match the way we lived, and people couldn’t stand how fake we seemed.
But xers can be empowered. They will follow leaders they trust to be real and authentic. For them, it’s less important to know the ins and outs of the biblical text, and so much more important to live the kind of life that is authentically filled with the Spirit. And when they finally trust someone, they are loyal and can contribute immensely to the kingdom.
In the same vein, they are often unwilling to become leaders in the organizations older generations have set up because they don’t seem real enough. Megachurches, perhaps unfairly, feel more like a marketing machine than authentic community. If you want them to take the reins of leadership, they have to know if the community can be real. If not, they’ll choose another path, often starting their own intimate, authentic and often smaller, communities.
Millennials: What Is Good?
Though both xers and millennials are fully postmodern generations, they have major differences.
I’ve been in college ministries over the past 19 years, ministering to both xers and millennials. In ministry to xers, I often found myself in a coffee shop, spending lots of time so that one day, they would trust me enough to let me speak into their lives. But when the millennials arrived on campus, the first-years immediately asked if I would mentor them. Being so inundated with requests, I told people that I no longer mentored people one-on-one, but only in community. So if they wanted mentoring, they would need to recruit three other people to join leadership and meet with me once a week.
They didn’t even hesitate.
Where xers learned to survive as latchkey kids, millenials grew up cherished in child-centered homes. Where xers wanted to go “where everybody knows your name,” millennials want to achieve something through teams. So, they’re more willing to seek out mentors, be more upbeat and optimistic, and are more willing to engage the world around them than the previous generation.
As another postmodern generation, though, millennials don’t seem to be asking the question What is true? But they don’t seem to have the same distaste for marketing, the same mistrust of older generations or the same need to just “be.” So they’re not even asking What is real? They want to do something. They think they may actually be able to change the world. They don’t want to learn to live like Jesus by sitting on a chair sipping over-caffeinated drinks. They’ll want to get into the world and see if faith actually works out there.
Millennials are asking this Spiritual Question of the Day: What is good?
They’re a connected generation that cares about issues like global poverty, the AIDS pandemic, terrorism, climate change, human trafficking and other world issues. They want to know if the Christian faith can help solve these problems, offer any good? If you offer a faith where the primary benefits are enjoyed in the life-after, you’ll quickly become irrelevant. They want to know how faith is practically lived out in the real world, and how it will make a difference throughout the globe. They want to be a part of something that can actually change the world today, in the here and now, for better.
That question lines up with the critique of the day, where bestselling titles claim that God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Barna learned that a majority of Americans believe that radical Christianity is just as threatening to America as radical Islam. The cultural narrative? If people would stop being so religious, perhaps we would have a shot at tolerance and world peace. Our differences divide us, so stop being so aggressively religious and just start doing your part for the good of the world.
To empower a generation of millennials for the kingdom, you need to connect their faith to their social concerns. Help them see how faith strengthens and sustains their work and ideals. Show them a faith that isn’t just concerned about preserving the faithful about the after-life, but one that calls them deeply into the mission-life of the kingdom of God.
They’ll also need your mentoring. Growing up, millennials have been told that they’re special all their lives. (So special, in fact, they’re been accused of a technologically enhanced narcissism. Perhaps their motto could be “Watch me change the world!”) But their optimism quickly fades as they hit early adulthood because they haven’t changed the world before the age of 25. They find out that it takes sustained hard, disciplined work to do something significant. It is, to quote a Eugene Peterson book title, the “long obedience in the same direction.” A wise hand that gives them practical ways to mature will be welcomed.
In their book Millennials Rising, Strauss and Howe write: “Millennials can heed moral exemplars, and respond to principled leaders, far better than most of today’s adults could when young. That’s the opportunity side. Yet these new youths might decisively oppose nominal leaders who fail to provide real direction, and they might be inclined to support misguided leaders if better alternatives aren’t available. That’s the danger side.”
Millennials are in need of mentors who can help them connect their faith to the world around the church, and could be released to be a generation that might change the world for his name’s sake.
These generational insights are merely front doors. They will still have to learn a few things through the back door: some xers will still need to learn what is true about our faith, and some millennials will need to learn to be real with their faith. But if you create a discipleship process that at least starts from the Spiritual Question of the Day—one example of many is in my latest book, Real Life—you will be connecting with their sense of meaning and passion which will help you empower rising generations of kingdom world-changers.
James Choung, the national director of evangelism for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, teaches evangelism and missional leadership at Bethel Seminary San Diego. He helped plant the Cambridge Community Fellowship Church, an urban multiethnic church in Cambridge, Mass., and is currently planting a missional community called the Vineyard Underground in Torrance, Calif. He holds an undergraduate degree in management science from MIT, an M.Div. from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and a D.Min. in postmodern leadership from Fuller Theological Seminary. Choung is the author of True Story: A Christianity Worth Believing In and Real Life: A Christianity Worth Living Out, both published by InterVarsity Press.