Chapter One
The Millennial Child and BeyondOne morning several years ago I had a short but
memorable conversation with the Missions pastor of the
church where I was employed as the Director of Children's
Ministries. We were discussing how people understand the
concept of truth. My friend made the point that the purpose
of evangelism is to convince people that the Good
News of Jesus is true. But, he said, the time would come
when the response to our attempts to convince will be,
"Okay, it's true. So what?"
I was intrigued by his words, and in the intervening
years they have come back to me over and over again. I
believe that Western culture and those that the North
American church hopes to speak to are in this "so what?"
era. With this change comes a host of new challenges to
the church's mission of evangelism and discipleship, such
as battling relativism, searching for new paradigms of
gospel proclamation, and rethinking our understanding of
the Bible.
Those of us who've made careers out of children's and
family ministry have had a lot of success and recognition
over the last 25 years. We've become professionals. We have
academic degrees in Christian Education or Spiritual
Formation. We have heightened awareness of the importance
of specializing in ministries to children and their families.
We've helped proliferate a multimillion-dollar curriculum-and-resource-publishing
industry. And we've helped
seminaries and Christian colleges grudgingly admit that
what we do is a legitimate educational discipline, that it
involves more than providing cut-and-paste activities for
children in the church basement while the adults get on
with God's real business. Web sites and nonprofit organizations
dedicated to helping us do our jobs better are growing
and providing more and more resources. Children's ministry
has its own national conferences, and we have our own
celebrities. Megachurches hold large events to pass on the
secrets of their success in children's ministry. And I'm sure
somewhere in all this we've seen God work among the children
and families we've been privileged to know. Children's
ministry has come a long way since Henrietta Mears, the
founder of Gospel Light Publications, mimeographed
Sunday-school curriculum in her garage. We've moved out
of the shadows and into the limelight of church ministry.
Yet continuing on this track will not meet the needs of
the current generation and the generation to come. If we
hope to have any effect on the spiritual formation of the
children and families that come to our churches in the next
50 years, children's ministry cannot continue as we know
it. We need to be thinking about new paradigms, new ways
of doing what we're doing, and we need to be thinking
about it right now. If we don't, we'll soon find that we've
become irrelevant to the families who live in the changing
culture. We'll be scrambling to figure out what happened to
everything that looked so shiny and unstoppable at the end
of the 20th century.
I began to see this need for a revisioning of children's
ministry as I grew to understand the formidable cultural
change swirling around us. I heard a speech by a New
Testament professor from a prominent midwestern seminary
who was speaking to educational ministry professors
and teachers. He addressed the subject of postmodernism
and the church's response to it. I remember two things
from what he said that day. First, he said that those holding
a postmodern worldview do not believe in the existence
of absolute truth. This statement reminded me immediately
of the conversation I'd had years before with that
Missions Pastor: I realized that the belief in absolute truth
was foundational to so much of Christianity that the post-modern
resistance to the idea of absolute truth could be a
rather significant problem for the church-we would need
to figure out how to answer the "so what" question.
Second, he described a weekly Bible study for business
executives that he led in downtown Chicago. He explained
that he never went into these sessions armed with formulas
and arguments to convince the people of the truth. Instead
he simply shared stories of God with them and guided their
discussion of these stories. He introduced God to the people
and let them decide for themselves. I couldn't help but
believe he was on to something. He was proposing a way
of bringing people to faith that didn't have anything to do
with cut-and-dried teaching methodology. The idea struck
a chord in me that day and sent me on the path to where I
am today.
The Modern Era
For the last several years, the term postmodern has floated
around academic and theological circles. (The term is also
used in many other disciplines-art, literature, architecture-but
it means different things in each context.) Now it is
part of the popular vernacular, and yet most of us don't
really understand what it means. I'm no philosopher and
don't have a philosopher's understanding of the abstract
thinking behind the term, but I can tell you how I've come
to understand it as a layperson.
In order to understand how something can be postmodern,
first we need to understand how something can be
modern. Think back to the European history and philosophy
classes you had in college or graduate school. Most
likely you studied something called the Enlightenment or
the Age of Reason that came around 1700 A.D. This era is
commonly thought to be the beginning of the modern era.
(In light of the church's resistance to postmodernism, it
strikes me as quite ironic that my Christian college had no
qualms about requiring a course on the Enlightenment.)
Your professors may have talked about how philosophies of
modernity came about as a reaction to the more superstitious,
mystical, and religious thought of the Middle Ages.
During the Enlightenment, men and women (though
mostly men) began to discover they could exert some kind
of control over their world and conquer parts of it. Life, it
was discovered, was not just a serendipitous journey where
everyone was at the mercy of circumstances outside of personal
control. Machines were invented that could do some
tasks better than human beings. And people were discovering
that the human ability to reason and solve problems
was a useful tool for taming and mastering the external
world. Perhaps, the philosophers mused, humans could be
the masters of their own destinies. The only things human
beings needed to make the world better was men and
women who learned how to think and use their innate talents
and skills more effectively. If humans could uncover
the mysteries of the world, then perhaps it was no longer
necessary to believe in that all-knowing, all-seeing God of
the Middle Ages.
Philosophers believed human beings could discover the
absolute truth about reality within themselves and that if
they thought long enough and hard enough about it, they
could solve any problem the world had to offer, eventually
perfecting the world and themselves. Many of the thinkers
of the Age of Reason had little use for the God of the Bible.
Moderns believe in absolute truth and that all truth is
objective. They believe that the final word on all things, the
understanding of objective reality, is out there somewhere
and humans can find it through our capacity for reason.
This objective, absolute truth is not subject to the whims or
perceptions of kings, rulers, priests, or cultures. An assertion
is true if it accurately and objectively represents the independent,
external world. All this knowledge is accessible for
all humans; there is nothing we human beings can't know
if we just put our minds to it and analyze the problem or
the situation. There is nothing humans can't do or understand
eventually. Modern thinking holds absolute faith in
the rational capabilities of the human mind.
Modernity is scientific. The sciences with their
hypotheses, theories, seeming objectivity, and ability to
experiment and test for truth are held up as one of the best
pathways to absolute knowledge and truth. Modernity
prizes analysis. If we can just look at a problem from all
sides and use all of our brainpower to figure out the causes
and effects, we'll eventually be able to find a solution. The
best way to think, then, is logically, linearly, analytically,
and unemotionally. Because the world is making progress
in a straight line toward something better, moderns are
extremely positive and optimistic about the future.
In addition, modern thinking emphasizes the work and
well-being of the individual over and against group and
community life. Men and women are on their own in what
they accomplish. Each individual is responsible for herself
and has the right to make her own decisions and mistakes.
Pulling ourselves up or making something of ourselves is
more important than the needs or abilities of the greater
community. So modernity has great faith in the individuals
to grasp and understand the absolute truth about the way
things are. Once that truth is applied to individual lives
and societal problems in a logical and analytical way, the
world will be on its way to perfection. We can think our
way to a better life and a better world.
Over the last 300 years, this modern way of thinking
has infiltrated our culture-Western culture in particular-so
completely that few people have ever considered that it is
not necessarily the only way of understanding the world.
As the minds of each generation have been formed by this
modern way of thinking, so too were the institutions of
those generations, including the church. The modern
church, therefore, holds to some of these same ideas: the
belief that we must defend our faith with solid arguments
and spiritual truths, the insistence on personal acts of faith,
the idea that the only secure faith is one built on a foundation
of absolute, unshakable truth.
The Postmodern Era
Postmodern literally means "after modern." So when we say
we've moved into an age of postmodernity, we're saying
that the modern age has passed and we've moved into a
new paradigm, a new overall worldview.
But these kinds of cultural shifts are never easy-or
quick. When the world was moving from the Middle Ages
to the Age of Reason, not everyone got there at the same
time. People didn't wake up on January 1, 1700, look at
their calendars, and say, "Goodness! Look at that! We've
moved into the Age of Modernity." These cultural changes,
while tumultuous and significant, are gradual.
And that's where we are now. We find ourselves in a
world slowly leaning toward postmodern but still populated
by a lot of people who hold a modern worldview. This
leads to conflict and to at least one popular misconception
about postmodernism. Lots of speakers and writers like to
use the word postmodern and generational monikers likeGeneration X or millennial interchangeably. They treat the
postmodern worldview as a life stage that one will likely
outgrow as maturity settles in.
While it's true that many people under 30 tend to think
in postmodern ways, viewing the world through postmodern
glasses cannot be chalked up exclusively to life stage
analysis. Research shows that about 30 percent of Baby
Boomers, 50 percent of Baby Busters (or Xers), and 60 percent
of millennials have postmodern sensibilities. And
although I am squarely part of the Baby Boom generation,
I have carried around postmodern sensibilities my entire
life. I just didn't know what to call them. I've never felt
like I fit in with most Baby Boomers. I've thought and felt
differently from most of my peers all my life-and now I
know why.
But let's go back to those percentages for a minute.
While I strongly believe this is not primarily a generational
issue, it's worth noting that those with the strongest tendency
toward a postmodern worldview are those currently
labeled the Millennial Generation or Generation Y. These
are the children we see currently in our churches. The
Millennial Generation has been described as those children
born between 1980 or 1982 (social science makes no claims
to being an exact science) and 2001. Some generational
specialists believe the Millennial Generation ended on
September 11, 2001.
So, sitting in your preschool classrooms every Sunday
morning are a bunch of cute, curly headed postmoderns!
Whether you agree with the postmodern way of thinking or
not, ministering to these children demands that you understand
their worldview.
Our world's new cultural and intellectual paradigm is
truly a shift in the way human beings process information
and in the way we view the external world. We're seeing a
world where all the old certainties are dissolving. It's no
wonder moderns are scared. Everything they've always
hung onto as absolute truth, from our safety as a country
to the way life is created, is being challenged and questioned.
But it's happening. It's here. The church must
understand it. And the church must deal with it.
Just as moderns believe there is discernable and knowable
absolute truth and objective reality, postmoderns
believe there is no overarching truth or ultimate ideal that
explains and undergirds all of human existence.
Postmoderns believe that reality or truth is always subjective.
One's reality or truth grows out of one's perspective
and life experiences. It is not imposed from the outside.
Therefore, the modern idea of a metanarrative or a grand
story that explains everything about the world is greeted
with incredulity. J. Richard Middleton and Brian J. Walsh,
authors of the book Truth Is Stranger Than It Used to Be,
explain it this way:
But if metanarratives are social construction, then
like abstract ethical systems, they are simply particular
moral visions dressed up in the guise of
universality. And in falsely claiming universality
while being blind to their own constructed character, metanarratives inevitably privilege unity, homogeneity, and closure over differences, heterogeneity, otherness, and openness. The result is that
all kinds of events and people end up being
excluded from the way in which the story gets
told. No metanarrative, it appears, is large enough
and open enough genuinely to include the experiences
and realities of all peoples.
Okay, that's a mouthful. Let's talk about it some. Big
stories whose intent is to explain truth or the meaning of
life all had to come from somewhere. That "somewhere" is
other human beings. All humans live in some sort of place,
country, community, or tribe. All humans live in a subjective
context. No one can stand outside of her own reality.
Therefore, no big story can ever claim to be objective
because it cannot help but be colored by the prejudices,
beliefs, customs, and stories of the context from whence it
came. (Interestingly, missionaries have understood this for
years.) So postmoderns instead acknowledge that one's
beliefs and stories are local.
Continues.
