Equipping the Next Generations to Speak Their Faith Aloud

Abstract

Mike is a thirty-one-year-old father of two, a priests son who grew up in the and a quiet but faithful Episcopalian who helps out each week in the toddler class in the Sunday school of his parish church. For several years, this was the limit of his engagement; after all, life in a growing family is demanding and time-consuming, and too often church can feel like one more burden in an overburdened life.But then Mike participated in a five-week series of sacred conversations with other members of his church who were under age forty, and he arrived at a growing awareness that his generation is responsible for the future of the church. We the people under forty gathered in that room, we are the next generation of leadership and evangelism and potential for the church, he said. church is constantly renewing itself with each generation, and we are either part of that renewal or part of standing back and letting it fall. So it almost feels like a trust fall exercise for the church. The church is constantly falling into the arms of the next generation of people who are catching it.The church is taking its trust fall into the arms of that next generation, and the numbers of arms extended to catch it are dwindling. The rapidly changing American religious landscape is one of increasing ignorance of and indifference to Christianity, and all the research points to post-Boomers1 as the primary contributors to the numbers of the ignorant and indifferent, the rising core in the so-called rise of the ?nones'.But there are Generation Xers and Millennial who are faithful church members, and it is to these generations we must turn to discover and equip evangelists who can speak about their faith to their peers. Post-Boomers-the majority of whom are not nones and do believe in God-might be the ideal evangelists to people in their own age group. However, neither the generational literature nor the evangelism literature speaks about specifically empowering and equipping members of this age cohort to evangelize their peers. Because these generations are tinkerers, as Robert Wuthnow observes, piecing together ideas about spirituality from many sources, especially through conversations with friends,2 I have been testing the power of guided conversations about faith as a means of helping small groups of post-Boomers to talk about what they do and do not believe, helping them to find words and language for their faith, and offering them the opportunity to practice these kinds of conversations in a safe space. What I have learned from these groups will not prove to be a magic bullet to solve all the evangelical problems of the twenty-firstcentury mainline churches; however, these guided conversations on faith with small groups of post-Boomers have helped to surface both challenges and opportunities for proclaiming faith into the future, as that future now falls into the arms of those Xers and Millennials who do believe.Challenges in Developing a Post-Boomer EvangelismChallenges that face the post-Boomers of faith (particularly in the more liberal, mainline denominations like the Episcopal Church) as they learn the spiritual practice of evangelism are both cultural and internal. The conversations I have had with these older Millennials and younger Gen Xers revealed that the taboos against publically speaking about faith are strong, emphasized by both the wider secular culture and also by denominations that have neglected to foster and teach evangelism. The growth of the Evangelical movement over the last thirty years-with its cable television networks, high-profile preachers, conservative political activism, and megachurches-only serves to crush any desire among mainline, liberal Protestants to evangelize, because they fear becoming identified with that aspect of Christianity. The influences of the secular, postmodern, multifaith culture also deter evangelistic speech in post-Boomers. The forces affecting post-Boomer faith that have been noted by Richard Flory and Donald Miller-including skepticism of institutions, tolerance of other faiths, rapid global access to a variety of ideas and truths, and a postmodern sense that all truth is relative3-all were actively in play in the group participants' faith lives, and the research on these generations indicates that they are typical among their peers. …