What are the Current Living Generations Like?

What are the Current Living Generations Like?

Note: I am in San Diego this week working in SPAWAR.

"21" is a book about Blackjack. It is a best seller and will soon be a movie. The story is that a bunch of MIT students in the mid-1990s start a BlackJack club and over time, they assault the large casino BlackJack tables and come away with millions of dollars. These college kids are brilliant; their math skills translate into the ability to simultaneously track 6 to 8 hands of blackjack cards at one table and count cards within a shoe down to the mathematically most optimal time to place the largest bets.

As a boomer, I started reading the book and finally tossed it aside unfinished… I love mysteries and “WhoDunits” but My thought was – who cares about the millions, what a pointless waste of intellect, ability, and time.

I asked a bunch of High School Millennials from High Tech High School in San Diego who were in line at “In & Out Burgers” (my wife will shoot me for eating a burger). I told them the basic plot of the book and they shrugged. One commented that while the accomplishment was sort of cool, those guys really weren’t Heros for anything beyond their wallets. They likewise saw the MIT BlackJack gang as a pointless endeavor but for a different reason… I was looking for the vision and they were looking for the relationship.

Only the hard-nosed realist Gen-Xers back in the office thought it was so cool to go to Vegas and take the place for a substantial sum. In their minds, it was not about the big picture boomer vision or the Millennial relationship shared greater purpose. It was about a process where they came out on top.

As a nation, we have seen this constellation of generations before. On the eve of World War II in the tough days of depression, the Idealist Missionary generation of FDR and George Marshall saw a world at war and struggled to put in place the vision and processes that would carry the nation to victory. It is critical to note; one result is that even in those budget strapped times, by mid 1940 before war was even declared by the United States, the keels of two thirds of all the Navy ships that would see combat in the Pacific and Atlantic were already laid in ship yards and construction docks. Hard-nosed realists like George Patton and Dwight Eisenhower literally took apart and put back together the early tanks and vehicles in the garages of their Base housing sub standard living quarters and studied the books of Liddell Hart and Erwin Rommel. Cheerful hero kids from the GI generation marched off to Conservation Corps camps and began helping FDR rebuild from the ravages of Depression and responded as almost a single man and woman by stepping forward to serve the day after December 7, 1941.

History lessons and analysis of the present can march on and on but here is the most important question: How do we proclaim the Gospel to Boom, Gen-X, and Millennial? Looking around churches, I note that there are not many people my age – late forties to mid 50s. We are the tail end of the boom generation. Boomers make up a large percentage of the population but not in Church and ministry. There are a lot of Gen-X folks at church – mostly with kids. They are fiercely protective of their children and very involved in how their Millennial kids are taught. Step into just about any AWANA event and Millennial kids overflow game circles, class rooms, and have building managers grimacing over max occupancy codes (my boomer brain says, “What a cool problem to have!...” and the practical Gen-Xer says, “Pass the collection plate so we can fix it…” and the Millennial says, “When is it OUR turn on the game circle?”…)

Boomers somehow need to be brought face to face with the certainty of a creator who also saves us. For me, the concept that “In the Beginning, God created Information” is such a foundational concept. It reaches from the Hebrew wedding ceremony to the Last Supper to the Second Coming... And is something I take to every podium and teaching opportunity.

Gen-Xers need to visualize the nuts and bolts practicality of a Sovereign God who pays the price of our sins, by grace gives us a positive balance, and wants to sit with us at the wedding feast of the Lamb.

Millennials need to be empowered and brought on board through challenging tasks that build teams and relationships within the Kingdom of God.

For all of us of faith, the Gospel is the one rock solid constant that does not change. Method changes but not the content.