The Gospel for Generation X

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 twenties and 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 mind-set. Sometimes called Generation X, this group has been much maligned and badly stereotyped in the media.

I love with passion this generation, and one of my missions in life is to reach busters for Christ and to 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 fifty 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.

This pain in family life created an aloneness, which is different from just being lonely. Aloneness 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 mind-set. Busters don’t believe in absolute truth. To them, everything is relative, and everything could be true. 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 are angry because they know they’ll have to pay for the national debt and the social security of the generation that handed it to them. 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. As with 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. 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 & World Report called them “the fix-it generation,” a label with which many seem to resonate.

Spiritual hunger. Finally, busters are looking for transcendent meaning, and in this sense they are a spiritual generation. Again, with their postmodern mind-set, 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 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

In years past, becoming a Christian preceded becoming a church attendee. 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 nonbelievers to participate in small groups or other ministries.

Obviously, we’re not going to ask nonbelieving attendees to be leaders in the church, but to reach busters, we must increase their contact with Christians. We need to find ways to make nonbelieving 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. 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.

Also 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. 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.

Buster Communication

Jay Leno’s Tonight Show began boomer style—predictable, news-based, a sequence you can set your watch by. David Letterman’s show, on the other hand, started as 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.

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 just want to be entertained. A slick presentation that avoids the tough, honest, and sometimes unanswerable questions will not impress.

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.

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.

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 socioeconomic 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 of crisis-pregnancy counseling or adoption work.

Downplay the institution. Busters react negatively to the notion their church is an institution or organization. Instead they need to feel ownership of the ministry and that they have a voice in where the ministry is going.

Busters tend to have a lot of disposable income (largely because 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.

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.

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

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.