EMQ » October–December 2022 » Volume 58 Issue 4
Generational Theory
Generational theory helps us understand generations as distinct cultures. This demystifies how we can effectively engage Generation Z in the gospel and mission.
By James Choung with Mary Tindall
As people who’ve answered God’s call to missions, we embrace tools that help us relate to our colleagues, partners, and those we’re reaching with the gospel. Generational theory can help us do exactly that. By understanding each generation’s common traits, beliefs, and values, we can build stronger relationships and better discern God’s calling on our lives. As Generation Z grows into adulthood, this is an ideal moment to reflect on how God wants us to minister to those coming after us – and how to invite them into missions.
Generational Theory
I first heard about generational theory while I was working in campus ministry. At the time, I was also doing a Doctor of Ministry at Fuller Theological Seminary, and my dissertation was on postmodern leadership development. During this time, the cultural limelight was shifting from Generation X to Millennials. As an X-er, I had already lived through the shift from Boomer to X-er. I was fascinated by both shifts and how they reflected the philosophical shift from modernism to postmodernism.
I stumbled on the work of William Strauss and Neil Howe, who wrote the books Generations (1991) and The Fourth Turning (1997). Strauss and Howe studied history to track how generational characteristics shift over a lifetime: from childhood to young adulthood, mid-life, and old age. They also developed a theory that helps us anticipate a generation’s future characteristics and understand the dynamics between age-based cohorts.
Strauss and Howe outlined a revolving four-generation cycle in American history, later extending their findings to Western Europe. My travels abroad and other observations suggest that these generational shifts have also occurred in other parts of the world, although I haven’t researched it extensively. Those with an immigrant or refugee background may also experience these generational shifts differently, but the themes are more similar than disparate.
Strauss and Howe identified each generation’s characteristics in areas such as parenting style, religious openness, and views of gender. They developed an archetype for each generation and noted that each group tends to offer unique endowments. These endowments can translate into callings, as people lean into areas they’re good at.
Building on Strauss and Howe’s work – which examines each generation’s characteristics, callings, and endowments – led me to ask if there were spiritual implications. In this way, we attempted to identify each generation’s unique spiritual question.
Table 1.1 – Spiritual Questions by Generation
| Archetype | Calling | Endowments | Spiritual Question |
| Prophet (Baby Boomers) | Preachers, writers, radicals, publishers, teachers | Vision, values, religion | What is true? |
| Nomad (Generation X) | Entrepreneurs, brigands, industrialists, generals, salesmen | Liberty, survival, honor | What is real? |
| Hero (Millennials) | Statesmen, scientists, economists, diplomats, builders | Community, technology, influence | What is good? |
| Artist (Generation Z, also known as iGens) | Artists, lawyers, therapists, legislators, statisticians | Pluralism, expertise, due process | What is beautiful? |
Answering the Spiritual Questions
All four spiritual questions are crucial – in fact, they’re the questions Greek philosophers asked to get to what is essential. However, if you don’t answer each generation’s first question, they won’t hear your answers to the other questions. Therefore, we need a different approach for inviting each generation into God’s community:
Prophets: When Boomers had the cultural limelight in the ’60s and ’70s, the critique of Christianity was around creation and evolution – in other words, was Christianity a myth, a superstition, or a crutch? With that in mind, appealing to Boomers is about the search for truth, using apologetics or other convincing arguments. (Think of authors like C.S. Lewis, Josh McDowell, or Lee Strobel.) Boomers need to understand that Christianity is true – and therefore, they should change their lives around it.
Nomads: The way to reach Gen X isn’t through argument. Their mantra is: “Your truth is your truth. My truth is my truth.” They ask a different question: What is real? During Gen X’s cultural heyday, televangelists were falling from grace. The critique during the ’80s and ’90s was that Christians don’t walk their talk. If you aren’t being real, Gen X-ers don’t want to hear about your truth. To reach them, you must be vulnerable and authentic, showing how Jesus meets you in the hardest places.
Heroes: The critique of the 2000s and 2010s was that God is not good, that religion is a poison, and if we were less religious, we’d all get along. Some of that period’s bestsellers were by authors known as the New Atheists. Millennials ask: How does faith contribute to what is good? We need to share a gospel that goes beyond the benefits you get when you die.
Instead, we elicit spiritual curiosity about how the kingdom of God has come near, and how that impacts our everyday lives. After Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, we took hundreds of students to volunteer in the city for successive years during their spring break. Half of them didn’t follow Jesus. We studied the scriptures and connected them to our mission. Many people gave their lives to Jesus as they served in this community.
Artists: As Gen Z reaches young adulthood, we’re trying to figure out their message. However, we know that transcendence, wonder, and ideals are important to them. In their world, good design is the norm, and a good aesthetic has its own credibility.
Gen Z’s critique against Christian faith now – as it was in the 1920s and into the ’30s – is that Christianity is not beautiful. Their communities are ugly, intolerant, and bigoted. Providing a picture of another world beyond the material one – a sense of beauty and wonder, amazement – speaks loudly to Gen Z. They highly value sacramental spaces that are imbued with mystery and wonder. And a beautiful community is just and inclusive.
Inviting Gen Z into God’s mission
For Millennials, the invitation to God’s mission was enough: “Hey, we’re reaching out to impoverished communities in Bangkok. Join us and you can change the world.” They’d respond, “Yes, I can! Give me a camcorder. I’ll make a film.” Or, “I’m gonna drill wells and make a difference.” For a lot of mission agencies, that was a high point.
Inviting Gen Z to mission is very different. A vision for the mission isn’t enough. They are more risk-averse and less trusting. They want to know more before jumping in. Gen Z wonders: “What’s your plan? What are my benefits? If I do this for 10 years, where will I be afterward? How does this help my career?”
These concerns show up in a strong unease about commitment. If previous generations had FOMO (the fear of missing out), Gen Z has, quoting Mark Sayers, FOBO: the fear of better options. As we try to engage folks for mission, we often find reluctance: “The summer? That’s a year away. I don’t know. I’m trying to live my best life now.”
When approaching Gen Z as a mission organization, they want to get a sense that your team has thoughtfully considered these questions, that you have a high-quality presentation for your plan, and that you’re open to improving your plan. Gen Z are improvers at heart, and they appreciate an invitation to co-create and make things better.
While we need to ensure that Gen Z has a voice, we also must bring an apologetic for commitment. We need to make the call to die in order to live. Yet, in a Gen Z way, we should explain why committing is better than not. I often quote a medieval dictum, quoted by Ronald Rolheiser, that says one choice is a thousand renunciations. You can be friends with everyone – but in committing to one person, you find the intimacy, power, support, and rootedness of marriage.
This generation deeply values freedom. But it’s in the commitment, the lowering of your freedoms, that you find meaning and purpose. Our apologetics should appeal to Gen Z’s sense of their best life: “You need something transcendent, beyond what you see, to ground you.”
With Millennials, our invitation was much more about the mission: “This is what God’s doing. This is the kingdom of God. You can be a part of it.” With Gen Z, we’re shifting to: “God is making everything new. We know the story ends with a new earth, a new heaven. It’ll be exactly how it’s supposed to be, even better than the way it started. God, the expert in this, is taking us that way, and we get to join for a minute.” The idea that God is with us, and He’s calling us to be faithful to it, is more compelling to Gen Z than the mission on its own.
Working with Colleagues across Generations
As we invite Gen Z into God’s mission, we’ll find ourselves working alongside them as teammates, so it’s helpful to understand the strengths they bring to the table.Gen Z colleagues are supportive and polite, and they have an excellent sense of the other. They have a refreshing sensitivity, like those from the Silent Generation (people born between 1928 and 1945). They are interested in due process, so they care about justice and including the marginalized.
Gen Z are also the most secularizing generation of the four categories, like the Silent Generation who came before the Boomers. Many civil rights leaders came out of the Silent Generation. Yet others of them were the brazen, hedonistic, suit-wearing, white-collar businessmen known as Mad Men from the 1950s and 1960s. Then the Prophet generation (the Boomers) came along and said, “You’re a bunch of sellouts. There’s something deeper to chase.” In response, we saw the hippies and the Jesus Movement during that season.
The Prophet generation is the most spiritual, perhaps not in terms of Christianity, but in their craving for truth. You can hear it already in culture, where truth has been so eroded that we can expect a backlash, where people want truth again. I’m wondering whether my seven-year-old, who’s at the younger end of the generation after Gen Z, will ask what is true, again.
As we welcome Gen Z into ministry, we should always be sensitive to God’s leading to engage with culture. We’re seeing a shift in the moral tone today. When I was in college, discussing my convictions about sexuality with secular friends, they’d hear me out and respond: “Man, I could never do that. But I respect you for it.” Christians had the moral high ground. Now it’s the other way: “You believe what? You’re out of touch. You’re on the wrong side of history.”
Realizing the shift in the moral high ground is key in Christian ministry to young people today. Because of this shift, not only are we trying to evangelize culture, but culture is aggressively evangelizing us. Twenty years ago, the push was to be relevant. If we sent Christians out, we had confidence that they’d keep the faith and perhaps influence the places they were being sent. Now if we send students, we don’t know if they’re coming back. If they’re not grounded and resilient, secular values may sound better than the values they carry.
Practicing Cross-Cultural Engagement
For missionaries and mission agencies to minister to and mobilize Gen Z, we should think of generations like cultures. As missionaries, we’re skilled at doing this. When we enter a culture, we bring an open heart to learn from the community and contextualize what we’re doing. We can think of generations the same way.
When we don’t see other generations as a different culture, we can come with critique. But if we desire to understand the culture of that generation, we can be more effective as a mission organization. When we’re open-hearted to learn, we’re better poised to serve.
James Choung (james.choung@intervarsity.org) is the vice president of strategy and innovation for Intervarsity Christian Fellowship. Involved in campus ministry for over 25 years, he is ordained with Vineyard USA and has served on the pastoral staff of a Boston-area urban church plant, a megachurch in Seoul, and a Los Angeles house church. He is the author of three books, and lives near Los Angeles.
Mary Tindall (mary@marytindallwrites.com) is a freelance writer and editor.
EMQ, Volume 58, Issue 2. Copyright © 2022 by Missio Nexus. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced or copied in any form without written permission from Missio Nexus. Email: EMQ@MissioNexus.org.
