Attention! Calling all church leaders! Did you, in good Rip Van Winkle fashion, sleep through your wake-up call? Has the reality of what’s happening in the world passed you by? What are you doing that convinces you that you are God’s person at God’s designed moment right now? Are you convinced that you are a part of a Christian community (church) that is making a difference through its ministry in the world around you? What are you doing as a Christian within the context of the Christian community that convinces you that you have not simply withdrawn yourself into some privatized ghetto where everyone thinks alike on every issue, and no one dares challenge the tradition or status quo, or colors outside the lines?

Can we be intentionally serious for a moment and really deal with an important issue that impacts your church? If so, the issue focuses around this: Does your church’s ministry operate on a paradigm that communicates Christianity to today’s world, or does your church operate on yesterday’s paradigm? "How do I answer that question?" you ask. Begin by asking yourself these questions: Is my church a place where people congregate for worship in a traditional fashion, claiming that visitors are welcome, but making no attempt to draw them in? Is it a place where the preaching and teaching are highly sophisticated, using the best of rhetoric, logic, and reason? Is my church a place where the people are content to allow the professional staff to "do the work of ministry?" Or…Does my church deliberately reach out to the community around it? Does it provide good participative worship that neither dumbs down my people nor loses them in liturgy? Is my church simply a homogeneous group of people, or is there good heterogeneity? Are our people actively engaged in the "the work of ministry?" Is the preaching and teaching faithful to sound doctrine but set forth winsomely, practically, and relationally? Does my church simply represent continuity with the past (that’s the way we’ve always done it), or does it show a willingness to break out of a mold for the sake of reaching out to people?

Church leaders should be concerned with serving God’s purpose in this generation as David modeled for us, according to Paul in Acts 13:36. Does that mean that we must sacrifice, alter, or ignore the biblical truth of the Gospel and the Christian life? I think not! But it does mean that we need to understand this generation and our accountability before God to be stewards of the resources, gifts, and people that He has given us.

Leaders set direction. People follow leaders who know where they are going. God has placed us on planet earth at this time to serve Him. That requires knowledge of Him, His Word, His world, ourselves and our role. I fear that we are trying to follow God and serve Him with a model of ministry that doesn’t neatly fit today’s world. As I mention in the editorial introduction and in my review of his latest book, George Barna wrote that we have five years or less to turn this ship (the church) around, or we will merely slip away into utter insignificance. As image bearers of God we are significant people, and significant people do significant things. Are you reflecting your significance by serving God’s purpose today? What about your church?

Enter Postmodernism

Whether we like it or not, for better or worse, we live in a postmodern age. So what? Though there are similarities throughout history, there is no age exactly like this one, because while history does reflect a cyclical pattern, it simply does not repeat itself. The late Francis Schaeffer said that we must resist the spirit of the age, but at the same time we must give honest answers to the real questions that are being asked. He concluded that we were giving our young people answers that did not fit their questions. Not that they always ask the right questions, but when they do, or when we have opportunity to help them ask the right questions, we must be prepared.

Postmodernism is a term that resembles jell-o—it is hard to get a good grip on it. The stage for postmodernism has been being set for the last 100-150 years. Now we are in the midst of the first postmodern generation, and we cannot afford to ignore it if we are to serve God’s purpose in this generation. Look around if you doubt its presence. Walk through a shopping mall or drive through a metropolitan area. Everything has a different look—buildings, stores, styles. Everything is "throw-away"—watches, clothes, apartments, even relationships. Cyberspace has created the virtual-reality illusion that you can have and experience relationships without relating to a single soul. It’s all on the internet. Congregating in chat rooms! Cybercommunity!

Everything traditional, especially religion, the metaphysical, propositions, and absolutes, has no real place. Truth, if there is any, is either subjectively determined or merely group choice. Ethics has no foundation because all is relative and truth is whatever you want it to be. Postmodernism is definitely characterized by a "whatever is the most meaningful to me" or "whatever feels the best to me" approach to life. Knowledge is no longer objective. Postmodernism has rejected the transcendent and does not adhere to propositional truth. It has embraced the idea that time deals only with the present moment; hence experiencing the now is the key.

We live a very contingent age, a time that reflects the statement made by Karl Marx (also reflective of Neitzshe), "all that is solid melts into air." But it also a time when religion and the metaphysical have been discarded with a consequence. It is a time when the first postmodern generation, which we call the millennial or bridger generation, hungers for relationships—meaningful, substantial relationships. This generation is reaching out but often grasping the wrong things.

Come the Generations

There have been four generations during the 20^th century: the builders, born prior to 1945; the boomers 1946-1965; the busters, 1966-1976; and the millennials or bridgers, approximately 1977-1998. A cultural transition has taken place between each generation that is having dramatic effects on how we understand and do things, and how we relate to one another and ourselves.

Last fall in Equip for Ministry we featured the first three of those generations, the builders, the boomers and the busters. Now we want to share with you a great concern, burden, and desire to reach the millennials generation. Our prayer is that through CE/P’s leadership, God will sensitize our churches to the urgent challenge of examining, evaluating, and, if necessary, altering our paradigm in order to reach millennials for Christ.

Enter the Millennials or Bridgers

Who are the millennials, and why should we make them the focal point of ministry? Their generation began in the late 1970’s. Their grandparents are the builders, their parents are the boomers, and their older brothers and sisters are the busters. They represent one-fourth of our population. According to Strauss and Howe, the millennial generation is the 18^th in the history of our country, and it is the second largest with 72-73 million people. (The largest was the post World War II boomers with 76 million.) It has been called the millennial or bridger generation because its members will bridge into the new millennium, but also because we need to bridge into their lives. Some authors also refer to it as the echo or mosaic generation.

It is the most formally educated of all the generations and the most "spiritual," although we see a huge exodus of teenagers from the church. Experts tell us this generation will make decisions about things that will carry us through the 21^st century. People are watching carefully to see what the millennials will decide about cigarettes, drugs, sex, family and other value-oriented issues. While they are more responsive to authority than their generation-X (buster) older brothers and sisters, that authority must be placed in a very special context for them to respond. For example, they respond favorably to positive pop-culture role models.

They belong to the first postmodern generation. They have followed their buster brothers and sisters as part of the latchkey generation. You do not ask a bridger, "What does your dad do?" You ask, "Do you have a dad?" or "Do you know him?" or "How many dads do you have?" That’s why experts in the church and society say that the key to impacting this millennial generation is their builder grandparents as well as their boomer parents.

With all of their experiences of broken marriages, dysfunctional institutions, and empty houses, bridgers are reflecting a need for family. However their definition of family is not so much the traditional family as it is their circle of friends. Notice how street gangs refer to one another as family! One major survey has shown that millennials want a relationship with their grandparents and parents. Ten to eleven percent more of the millennials are more family oriented than were their boomer parents. This is also the most racially mixed, hence the most multicultural of all the generations. This is reflected in things like their music and styles of clothing.

So What? You Ask

What’s the big deal about this generation? For one thing, the older the bridgers get, the less they attend church. Let’s put this in perspective! Of their builder grandparents, 61% were Christians; 39% of their boomer parents are Christians; around 25% of their buster siblings are Christians. According to Thom Rainer, only 4% or 2.5 million of the 72 million bridgers are projected to be Christians. Yet, they will be the leaders, setting policies and making decisions that will shape our civilization in the 21^st century. If they are not Christians, not oriented to a Christian world and life view, what will that mean for America entering into the new millennium? (Remember from the welcome editorial that Barna’s statistics show that only about 10% of the present Christians have a biblical worldview.)

How does this tie together with our introductory questions and postmodernism? What difference does this make for you and your church? It makes a great deal of difference if you and your church are going to help turn the ship around. The millennials are burned out on what I call "fluff and stuff." They want to be challenged intellectually and spiritually. That’s why so many are turning either to the New Age Movement and its neo-paganistic illusions, or to Islam and its rigid, structured religion. The millennials want authority, they want substantive truth, and they want meaningful relationships that last.

It is not easy to discover what all of these facts mean for our ministry paradigm. Some things we can know and others have to be discovered and applied as we reach out to this generation. There are no easy formulas, but there are concepts that guide us. For example: millenials do not want to be preached at, lectured, or talked down to. You cannot win them with arguments or logic or simply by being rational. They do not process propositional truth that easily, because it doesn’t fit the postmodern paradigm. They tend to approach things relationally. Hence we have to learn to preach, teach, and model from a genuine, relational standpoint. We must understand that they do not want to be thought of as "potential" people but as "actual" people, here and now. We have to demonstrate that Christianity is not merely an individualistic plan of salvation, but one that involves relationships, family, and the covenant family of God. Community is vital to this generation because, as John Nasbitt reminded us in Megatrends, the more automated and technical we become, the more we long for relationships, human touch, and someone to listen and care.

John Frame talks about being "person variable," emphasizing the need to deal with people according to their special needs, concerns, interests, and problems. That’s the kind of ministry that is required to reach the millennials. Christianity is a relational religion. Actually, "it is the religion of truth fleshed out in relationships, vertically and horizontally." But unfortunately, the church has tended to follow the Enlightenment paradigm with its systems and traditional, logical, rational approach to Christianity. While some of those things are important, they are not always set in a relational context, which causes the millennials, and even the busters, to say, "So what?" Yet, Christianity is a relational religion and our covenant paradigm deals with relationships.

Is God sounding the alarm to the church and calling us to wake-up to the challenge to return to biblical Christianity? To a biblical world and life view? To a relational experience of God’s truth within the context of community?

We must be willing to examine and rethink our pattern of ministry, including our styles of preaching, teaching, worship, and demonstrations of compassion. My vision and prayer for the PCA are that we will rise to the challenges and opportunities to co-partner with God to influence that 4% projection number among the millennials, to mobilize older Christians to realize how very important they are in bridging into this generation, and to reach out to millenials intentionally and relationally with the Gospel of truth. Paul set the pattern: older men, older women, disciple and mentor the younger men and women. Our challenge is to show this younger generation that our religion of truth really works intellectually and relationally in life, and that truth does exist and that it touches our lives in the most wonderful, profound, and meaningful way.