Talkin’ ’bout my generation (Part One)
This will be one of two posts on this topic. Originally, this was a post on a web forum, which was aimed more at the theological/ecclesiological facet of my generation. I’ve recently seen something which makes me want to hit on the socioeconomic facet as well. Consider this a primer.
I’m seeing a lot of talk lately about generations X, Y, and Z, all of which were recently lumped into a group called the ‘Millenials’ in a recent 60 Minutes story. A couple of years ago, they had a similar story on the so called ‘Echo Boomers,’ who are basically the children of the Baby Boomer generation.
Much of the talk has looked at the phychological outworkings of many of the new thinking of society, parents, and schools. There are a lot of interesting things.
John Piper’s Taste and See this week discusses another author who labels many of this generation, now becoming adults, graduating HS and college, and entering the work force, ‘adultolescents,’ much due to their increased focus on safety and security, often to the point of being coddled and incessantly praised, and their reliance on their parents to the point of absurdity.
Ultimately, Piper suggests 15 ways which the modern church should seek to respond to this generation:
How Should the Church Respond?
How might the church respond to this phenomenon in our culture? Here are my suggestions.
1. The church will encourage maturity, not the opposite. “Do not be children in your thinking. Be infants in evil, but in your thinking be mature” (1 Corinthians 4:20).
2. The church will press the fact that maturity is not a function of being out of school but is possible to develop while in school.
3. While celebrating the call to life long singleness, the church will not encourage those who don’t have the cal to wait till late in their twenties or thirties to marry, even if it means marrying while in school.
4. The church will foster flexibility in life through living by faith and resist the notion that learning to be professionally flexible must happen through a decade of experimentation.
5. The church will help parents prepare their youth for independent financial living by age 22 or sooner, where disabilities do not prevent.
6. The church will provide a stability and steadiness in life for young adults who find a significant identity there.
7. The church will provide inspiring, worldview-forming teaching week in and week out that will deepen the mature mind.
8. The church will provide a web of serious, maturing relationships.
9. The church will be a corporate communion of believers with God in his word and his ordinances that provide a regular experience of universal significance.
10. The church will be a beacon of truth that helps young adults keep their bearings in the uncertainties of cultural fog and riptides.
11. The church will regularly sound the trumpet for young adults that Christ is Lord of their lives and that they are not dependent on mom and dad for ultimate guidance.
12. The church will provide leadership and service roles that call for the responsibility of maturity in the young adults who fill them.
13. The church will continually clarify and encourage a God-centered perspective on college and grad school and career development.
14. The church will lift up the incentives and values of chaste and holy singleness, as well as faithful and holy marriage.
15. The church will relentlessly extol the maturing and strengthening effects of the only infallible life charter for young adults, the Bible.
Theologically, I think that a lot of the stuff we’ve seen in the last decade or so regarding postmodernism, moral relativism, and the emerging church (not necessarily linking all of those three) has been due to this generation’s praise-heavy and no-wrong-answers attitude.
This is also a generation raised by daycare. Both parents working is the norm, which leaves children, at an early age, starved for affection, and needing to be constantly entertained and spoonfed, as well as developing relationships that are shallow and unmeaningful. But at the same time, we are trained by the internet to have huge amounts of interaction with complete strangers. It’s like we’ve traded quality for quantity.
Thoughts?














