The Gospel for Generation X - Christianity Today

Perhaps no other generation has needed the church so much, yet sought it so little.

In “Life after God,” Douglas Coupland describes this generation: “Life was charmed but without politics or religion. It was the life of the children of the pioneers–life after God. A life of earthly salvation on the edge of heaven.”

Coupland is writing about baby busters–those now in their teens, twenties, and early thirties. The surge in births following World War II gave us the “baby boom” and the huge, well-known generation dubbed baby boomers. From about 1965 through 1980, the number of births went “bust,” giving a name to a new generation with a substantially different mindset. Sometimes called Generation X, this group has been much maligned and badly stereotyped in the media.

I began working with busters while coaching the Pomona College soccer team. I invited the players to church. They shook their heads. “I don’t want to go ’cause it’s boring, irrelevant, and there’s no one there like me.”

I’d say, “Well, they’ve got this great singles thing.” They’d say, “I’m not into a singles thing, either.” That puzzled me; when I was single, I would have been drawn to a singles group. But this generation was saying, “Look, if it’s not for me, I’m not interested.” I learned that busters don’t want to be a boomer subset, waiting to become “legitimate.”

What came out of those conversations was a wild idea of starting a church, and in 1986, I helped launch New Song, a church for busters. When I left last year, to create a buster ministry at Willow Creek Community Church, the average age of New Song members was 26. Seventy percent of the church was single. Of the fourteen staff members, ten were under age 30.

I love with passion this generation, and one of my missions in life is to reach busters for Christ and inspire others to do the same. Here is what I’ve discovered in trying to connect with busters.

BUSTER CHARACTERISTICS

Technically, everyone born between 1965 and 1980 is a baby buster. Being a buster, however, is more attitude than age. One important demarcation is whether you want to, or believe you can, achieve the traditional American dream. This dream includes a house in the ‘burbs, corporate success, and financial rewards. As a whole, baby boomers pursued this dream, and many achieved it.

Most busters, though, believe that the traditional American dream is beyond their grasp. Plus, they have watched boomers destroy their families and relationships while climbing the corporate ladder. To busters, owning expensive cars and homes doesn’t matter as much as the feeling of being loved and accepted.

Busters are fashioning a new American dream: to be whole, and to live in harmony with others and their surroundings. They would rather work to live than live to work. A career is a means to an end–a way to pursue the deeper things in life; it’s not the end in itself.

It is all too easy to generalize about busters, but here are several additional parts of their story:

Pain. On the surface, busters can seem positive, even bubbly. But below the surface often lies pain. Close to 50 percent come from divorced and blended families. Many were latchkey kids, who came home from school each day to an empty house and fended for themselves. One effect is that many lacked role models necessary for success in life. Some busters I know still lack basic skills in communicating, resolving conflict, keeping a job, balancing a checkbook.

This pain in family life created an alone-ness, which is different from just being lonely. Alone-ness is an experience of the soul: you are surrounded by people but unable to connect with them. The search for intimacy is a driving force in their lives. As a result, many busters are searching for the family they never had.

For busters, family is more frequently defined as those who will love them, not those who produced them. Often, friends are more “family” than are parents or siblings. Thus, community–open, safe, inclusive relationships in which people help each other rather than compete–is the highest value of this generation.

Postmodern mindset. Busters don’t believe in absolute truth. To them, everything is relative, and everything could be true. They are the first generation to reflect the postmodern ideas circulating in French and American universities since the 1970s. (For an explanation of the postmodern mindset, see “Star Trek and the Next Generation: Postmodernism and the Future of Evangelical Theology” by Stanley Grenz. Originally published in the March 1994 issue of Crux, the journal of Regent College.)

[READ IT online by clicking Startrek from this issue’s menu.]

Busters can live with two contradictory ideas. They can be pro-choice in regard to abortion, for example, and pro-life in regard to whales and trees. They will also say they want a meaningful and lasting relationship with a lover, but if someone better comes along, they’d rather have him or her.

Fear. Many busters fear the future. Everything out there seems broken. The economy seems beyond repair. The environment is ruined. Sex isn’t fun anymore because of AIDS, and marriage is a risky venture likely to fail. Busters know they’ll have to pay for the national debt and the social security of the generation that handed it to them, and they feel angry about that. The world holds little hope. Even the label “buster” reinforces this feeling. “Boomer” sounds positive, as if something is about to break out and happen. But “buster” sounds like something broken, something that needs to be thrown away.

Paradoxically, in the midst of this nearly hopeless outlook, busters are trying to create hope on a local scale. They want to put their lives into something that will make a difference.

Grassroots orientation. Like the Dutch boy in the fable, busters want to plug the hole in the dam, even though it seems inevitable that the dam will break anyway. This feeling of inevitability comes from the fact that busters have never really had a chance to win big. Most of the soldiers who served in the Persian Gulf War, for example, were busters, but they weren’t allowed to put Saddam Hussein out of business for good.

Busters graduated from college, only to find the tightest job market in two decades, because boomers were holding all the jobs.

Since they feel they can’t win on a large scale, some busters look to win on a small scale–in relationships, or local causes, or personal contributions to global needs. U.S. News and World Report called them “the fix-it generation,” and many seem to resonate with that.

For example, the gift of recycling is not found on any spiritual-gifts list in the Bible, but at New Song, we had a recycling ministry. There was a consensus that God created the earth and that he gave us the responsibility of taking care of it; therefore recycling is a legitimate ministry. We began to make sure we printed on recyclable paper and provided recycling bins. We even found recyclable plastic cups for Communion.

Spiritual hunger. Finally, busters are looking for transcendent meaning, and in this sense, they are a spiritual generation. Again, with their postmodern mindset, they don’t believe that science alone–the empirical method–can solve our problems. They believe that something is wrong with the world, and that there must be something beyond what they can see, feel, touch, taste, and smell.

This makes them as open to Christian revival as is any generation, but it also opens them to cult activity. Many toy with various forms of New Age and Eastern religion, including the pantheistic idea of connecting with God through nature.

BUSTER EVANGELISM

One young woman was still living with her single mother when she started attending our church. She participated for a long time. Then she became a Christian. The primary thing that drew her to Christ was the church as the family of God. She became a Christian because she found a place in which love was being expressed.

In years past, becoming a Christian preceded becoming a church attender. That sequence is no longer valid with busters. Incredibly, they may be part of a fellowship for months or years before taking that first step of faith. Churches effective at reaching busters for Christ encourage nonbelieving busters to participate in small groups or other ministries.

Obviously, we’re not going to ask nonbelieving attenders to be leaders in the church, but to reach busters, we must increase their contact with Christians. Busters are attracted to Christ by being attracted to what’s happening in the lives of Christians. We need to find ways to make non-believing busters feel welcome and participate–even before they provide evidence of commitment to Christ.

Large-group meetings can build credibility with busters, but if relationships aren’t built outside those settings, busters will not respond. At New Song, evangelism efforts were never a big rally and a big-name speaker. A raise-your-hand, stand-up-and-come-forward presentation didn’t work.

Nor will busters respond to a book that is handed to them. Many will read a book and say, “That’s fine. That’s true in that book, but I don’t believe it’s true for me.” Busters process truth better relationally than propositionally. Evangelism at New Song happened through bicycle trips, hikes, and mountain climbs.

To reach busters means someone will need to spend time with them, someone who feels comfortable sharing why he or she became a Christian, someone willing to expose the work of Christ in his or her life. This approach is labor-intensive, so it’s more important than ever for pastors to empower people on the front lines. It is the church members who will help their friends cross that line of commitment to Christ.

Of course, to win busters, we must overcome the negative caricature of Christianity that many of them hold. To the unbelieving buster, Christians are whacked-out extremists. In “Life after God,” Douglas Coupland writes that religious types “take things too literally and miss too many points because of this literalism. … Now the radio stations all seem to be talking about Jesus nonstop. And it seemed to be this crazy orgy of projection with everyone projecting onto Jesus the antidotes to the things that had gone wrong in their own lives. … I was cut off from their experience in a way that was never connectable.”

To present a picture of Christ that busters can relate to, we need to rely on the power of story. Busters have never read the Bible, and unlike boomers, they don’t care what Time magazine or other experts have to say. But they will listen to your story, especially if it honestly describes the difficult as well as the good aspects of following Christ. They will listen to the story of someone who hasn’t necessarily been successful but has been faithful.

Story telling is the most effective way to reach this generation, because busters won’t argue with a person’s story. In fact, it may be their only absolute: everyone’s story is worth listening to and learning from. Here’s what needs to be communicated: “God’s story intersected with my story; now I can share it with you so that you can consider making it a part of your story.”

BUSTER COMMUNICATION

Jay Leno’s show is (or used to be) boomer style–predictable, news-based, a sequence you can set your watch by. David Letterman’s show, on the other hand, is a stream of consciousness–radical, unpredictable, messy. It’s buster style.

You may not be ready to retool your service to look like Letterman’s show, but what’s most important is the way we communicate to busters. Here are several principles I keep in mind when I’m “communicating” (a term I prefer to “preaching”).

Be real. I’m more boomer in age, and in trying to speak to busters, I tried to be busterish. Some close friends pulled me aside and said, “Dieter, what are you doing? This isn’t you. You be you, and we’ll be us. We love you the way you are.” While busters want to be accepted as they are, they’re also willing to accept you as you are, provided you’re real. That’s freeing.

You don’t have to change the way you dress–just be willing to accept the way they dress. Real means being vulnerable and honest. Busters don’t believe that in the course of an hour a problem can be solved with an acronym.

Periodically, I would say, “Folks, I don’t want you to think that I’ve got this together, because we’re all wrestling with this,” or “You’re probably sitting there thinking, I could never do that. Well, you can.”

With so much in life image-based, the busters hunger for reality.

Be rousing. The term rousing is a hunting term for flushing an animal out of hiding. To reach busters, fresh methods are needed–videos, music, drama, personal stories. But an axiom every baby-boomer pastor ought to note is that busters do not want just to be entertained. A slick presentation that avoids the tough, honest, and sometimes unanswerable questions will not impress.

When we addressed homosexuality, I talked about what the Bible said and also had an actor perform a monologue, reading a letter written by a buster who struggled with homosexuality. In the letter, this young man had written about what it felt like to come to church as a homosexual and about his fear of God. That was rousing for our people; it allowed me to speak clearly the Bible’s guidelines on sexual activity while also emphasizing compassion.

At New Song, our goal was not that people would say “Wow!” We wanted people to say “Hmmm”–to have a thoughtful experience.

Be relevant. Busters are crying out for practical sermons. At New Song, we did a teaching series on sex, and I talked about the fact that God is the inventor of sex. While it may sound elementary, the concept was radical for our busters, who had viewed Christianity as a litany of don’ts.

In this series, we talked about why God doesn’t want us to be involved sexually outside of marriage; we said God’s rules were God’s ways of protecting us. And we incorporated people’s stories into the services. One young woman told about a sexual relationship in which she contracted AIDS; later, when she became pregnant, she unknowingly passed it to her daughter. Another couple talked about how when they became Christians, they made a concerted effort not to be sexually active until marriage, and how that had positively affected their relationship.

At New Song, we tried not to make sex a bigger issue than it is. For many busters, sex is the only language of love they know. We helped them to see that this is a knee-jerk reaction and then held them accountable to developing good habits to replace the old ones. But we tried to do it in a way that stressed grace–“Even if you’ve failed, there’s hope. We’re not going to judge you. We’re here to help you. We’re not doing this because we have a hidden agenda but because you’re valuable.”

But does “relevance” mean talking only about sex, or other thinly disguised psychological topics? No, for busters what is most relevant is the core of the gospel–redemption and reconciliation. To be reclaimed and made beautiful again, and to be brought back into relationship with God and others, are two truths that penetrate busters’ broken hearts. Busters have been trashed, so they feel like trash.

When we explain that God is saying, “You’re not trash,” they’ll listen.

Be relational. With busters, avoiding “us-versus-them” dichotomies is essential. We tried to emphasize “talking with” rather than “talking to” in an environment akin to sitting around tables, as opposed to sitting in rows. I attempted to downplay my lead-person-up-front role and even provided a question-and-answer time.

For many busters, the Christian message itself is divisive. Since community and relationships are their ultimate values, divisiveness is the ultimate evil. They think the Christian message divides people into the haves and the have-nots (which in an ultimate sense, it does).

One of the most powerful pictures for a buster is the global community within the body of Christ. At New Song, we had every ethnic variation imaginable in the service and on the stage. This painted a picture of redemption and reconciliation that cuts across socio-economic and ethnic lines; it’s a compelling picture for a relationship-oriented buster.

BUSTER DISCIPLESHIP

Busters will have a style of ministry different from that of boomers. To release them into ministry requires different strategies.

Emphasize compassion ministries. Busters don’t want to talk; they want to respond. This is their great strength. They will avoid discussing the evils of abortion, for example; they’d rather contribute to the alternatives–crisis-pregnancy counseling or adoption work.

Downplay the institution. Busters react negatively to the notion their church is an institution or organization. At New Song, we never implied, “We need you to keep the institution going.” Instead they need to feel ownership for the ministry and that they have a voice in where the ministry is going.

Busters tend to have a lot of disposable income (especially since many are living at home). They’re willing to part with it, but they need to believe in what they give to and they need to see results from it. They won’t just give to the institution. But they will give to particular projects (through the institution), especially if they feel emotionally drawn to those projects.

Busters demand honesty about what’s going on in the church. They want their leaders to be straight with them. If the church communicates, “You’re supposed to be giving,” most busters will turn a deaf ear. But they will listen if the church says, “It costs $17 every week per chair to advance the kind of ministries you are benefiting from. If you’re sitting in that chair and you’re not able to contribute, that means someone else is paying for your chance to receive all of this. That’s fine if you can’t give, but if you can and you’re not, then you need to rethink your giving habits.”

Adapt what it means to be a leader. The term leader can be frightening to busters. They have a natural suspicion of anyone trying to lead them somewhere. At New Song, we even avoided the word committees; instead we used the word teams. Busters tend to be the “we” generation: working together is important. We used a team approach even for teaching in worship services. Within a service we might use two or three different communicators–one giving a seven- minute presentation, someone else coming up with a twelve-minute presentation, and so on. Everyone would talk about the same thing, but from different perspectives.

Let them fail. Busters tend to be paranoid about failing, but they need to have freedom to fail (and succeed) in ministry. And they will fail you. While busters want relationships, it may take six months or a year for them to trust you. They may test you by stopping coming to church or to activities just to see if you’ll follow up on them.

Busters need you to tell stories of your failures; they need to know that God uses imperfect people. At staff meetings, I was honest about my failings. This communicated that I didn’t have it all together–just as they didn’t have it all together–but God could still use me and them.

Let them lead. I wondered how New Song would do after my departure, given the relational nature of busters. The church mourned our leaving; my family and I mourned the end of our years there.

After we left, the staff and elders formed a pastoral team that now fulfills the role of senior pastor. Under its leadership, New Song has thrived, continuing to maintain its distinctives, continuing to grow, and making plans to plant a daughter church.

Busters can lead and pastor. They will do so, however, with their values of teamwork, relationship, and community. I am confident that churches like New Song, led by busters, will teach us how to fashion a ministry approach that will reach their generation.

Busters have paid a high price for their “life after God.”

“My secret is that I need God,” confesses Coupland’s “Life after God.” “That I am sick and can no longer make it alone. I need God to help me give because I no longer seem to be capable of giving. To help me be kind, as I no longer seem capable of kindness. To help me love, as I seem beyond being able to love.”

We must move beyond seeing busters as a scourge, as slackers and losers. It’s my prayer that God would help us understand, accept, and value this generation.

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Would you like to talk more about ministry to busters? Dieter Zander will be leading a live, online discussion on Monday, May 15, at 8:00 p.m. In America Online, type the key word “Christianity” and click on “Fellowship Hall.” To enroll in Christianity Online, call 1-800-413-9747, ext. 174021.

Dieter Zander is teaching pastor at Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois, where he is creating a ministry for busters.

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