(I had the opportunity to teach at St. Michael’s Church, Charleston a few months ago. This is the rest of what I shared there)
2. A postmodern and post Christian culture has emerged.
In the late 1990’s, anyone doing ministry was hearing the experts warn of this idea of postmodernism. It was described as a rejection of the intellectual ideals of modernism. We learned about relativism and the rejection of absolute truth; Moral relativism and the rejection of moral norms; deconstruction and the rejection of a meta-narrative. Postmodernism was nothing new at the time, it had been kicking around the halls of academia for a few decades at least. Many of us got tired of hearing about ideas that we could never envision being embraced in society. They were irrational and absurd. I heard a lot about pomo because my vicar was a sought after speaker on the subject.
At that time I was doing youth ministry in England. I often encountered students who rejected logic and reason. They preferred relativism when it came to truth or morality. So, they rejected the gospel as my truth and not theirs. This was my first glimpse of postmodernism. However, I moved to England knowing I would be immersed in a post Christian culture and was excited by that challenge. Part of my ministry there was speaking in schools (public & private) where I had the freedom to share my beliefs. Have you ever thought about how to share the gospel with someone who knows nothing about Jesus or the God of the bible? The majority of teens in the country had no religion at all. Very few had ever been in a church building. Most kids of any age thought that church was for grandparents because those were the only people they knew that went to church. According to the census, during the years I lived in England, the fastest growing religion was Jedi and it was not even on the census form.
When I moved to SC, it was clear that this was a heavily churched culture. Nearly everyone identified as Christian… unless they were Jewish or something. So, it shocked people when I told them about how most in my youth group in England were afraid to let their school friends know about their faith. They knew that they would lose friendships over it. Even more, I lost students from youth group because they got bullied and, in some cases, beat up for professing faith. Fast forward 2 decades… this year for the first time I have heard several instances of our teens saying that it’s not safe to profess Christ at school. I’ve heard a few stories of people being bullied for being Christians. This is here in what is probably still the most churched region in America.
Now, how does postmodernity and post Christianity impact families? I think it goes back to the gap between generations getting wider. When grandma and grandpa grew up in an almost entirely Christian culture and mom and dad grew up in a mostly Christian culture, it’s very difficult to understand the challenges of growing up in a post Christian culture. Gen Z is the least reached generation to date. Only 4% of them hold a biblical worldview. That means 96% of the people around them don’t think like they do. More and more they know peers who used to go to church. Covid caused at least a 20% drop out from youth groups across the country. That is a higher percentage than the departures of any other generation.
So, we have a bigger gap in generations, postmodernity and post Christianity have emerged, and…
3. Postmodernity has stimulated our cultural change into hyperdrive.
I mentioned that for the last few years I have been studying the research on GenZ and other cultural changes in general as well. I became aware that words and ideas I grew up with were no longer meaning the same thing. In the summer of 2020, I did a deep dive to understand racism, social justice, equity, intersectionality, privilege, whiteness, fragility, and more. I came to realize that people obsessing over these issues had redefined terms. The words carried new meanings. A prime characteristic of postmodernism is giving new meanings to words. I also became aware that a lot of our high school and college students were being taught ideas like intersectionality and privilege in school. I followed down that trail long enough to see the divisive nature of critical theories.
Our current culture is using justice issues to drive a wedge between father and son, mother and daughter, grandparents and grandkids. Imagine being taught in school that because you are white, you are responsible for slavery and that you are part of the oppressive people. Imagine being taught that if you are black, you are oppressed, a victim, and the system is stacked against you. Now, imagine going home to parents who worked hard for the benefit of a better society and grandparents who marched in the civil rights movement and telling your family what you learned at school. Or imagine being taught these ideas and going home to a black mother and white father. I went on the website of a major organization seeking racial justice in America and read in their statement of beliefs that they “seek to dismantle the nuclear family”. No matter where you stand on issues of racial justice, know that the very nature of the conversation is dividing our families, communities, and churches.
Our current culture is using climate to drive a wedge in families. Many years ago, I listened to Al Gore talking to a group of children and telling them that global warming was going to cause catastrophic events in the next 20+ years and that their generation needed to be the ones to end the use of fossil fuels. He then told them that their parents would not understand this. They were ignorant and would refuse to listen, but they were wrong, and he was speaking the truth to them. I was shocked at the time. What is more shocking is knowing that teachers all over America have followed Al Gore’s lead on this for years …and taught kids that they know something their parents will never understand. Now, let me say I know climate change is real and needs to be addressed. My point in bringing this up is to show the wedge being driven between parent and child. This is also a subject that is driving the anxiety crisis among kids because so many of them have been told that we have less than ten years now to end fossil fuels or we will see mass extinction events taking place. If that sounds too wild to be true, search Greta Thunberg on the internet.
Our current culture is using LGBTQ issues to drive a wedge in families. About 5 years ago now I led a seminar at St. Christopher during the summer camp senior session on the subject of how the first few chapters of Genesis form our basic worldview. I talked about God as creator and us His creation and the implications of that. We explored what it means to be made in his image, etc. One thing did not sit with some of the students. I suggested that God made us male and female. God does not make mistakes, and would it not be an insult to our creator to change that? It ruffled a few campers so much that some of the staff questioned whether or not I should be invited back.
We have moved a long way in the past few years on these issues. The push to view gender as fluid and reject biological sex is not only irrational, it blows apart the notion of family and demands that we reject God. It’s hard to get our heads around how we went from a culture that embraced male and female, marriage and family, etc to an anything goes sexuality and gender fluidity. And we did this in less than a generation. Carl Trueman has probably been quoted in this course and he seems to get at the core of the issue. His book “The Rise & Triumph of the modern self” explores the idea of Expressive individualism that “particularly refers to the idea that in order to be fulfilled, in order to be an authentic person, in order to be genuinely me, I need to be able to express outwardly or perform publicly that which I feel I am inside. So expressive individualism in some ways overturns a lot of the notions of the self that previous generations may have held to.” “Expressive Individualism requires that society recognize the individual as supreme value.”
All of this ties into how we see the self, what is our identity, who am I, etc and youth today think very differently about these things than adults do. We don’t connect our identity to our sexuality. I don’t go around introducing myself as a cis gendered heterosexual male.
My wife is a middle school PE teacher. That means two things. One, she teaches all the kids in the school at some point. The other is she has to teach sex ed. She used to enjoy the challenge of correcting kids often funny misconceptions about sex and reproduction. Now she fields more questions about same sex interaction than boy girl interaction. She sees clearly that kids are being educated by porn more than by parents. And (this is the real tough one) she sees gender dysphoria every day in her classes. Over the past decade it went from boys and girls interests to same gender interests to what gender am I.
What do we do? I’ve been long on the diagnosis and will be brief on the direction forward. We need to:
– View ourselves (identity) through the idea of husband, wife, sons, & daughters and teach that to our kids and grandkids. It’s secondary only to our relationship to God as his created beings in his image, saved by grace through faith. Put God at the center of our families and view ourselves as His ambassadors in this foreign world.
– Model a thriving faith based family and be connected enough to your neighbors and others for them to see it. Be the neighbors you wish you had. Do hospitality as a ministry to friends, neighbors, and people you work with. Open your homes and connect with other families both Christian and not.
– Embrace the church as your extended family as Jesus redefined it and lean into it. I did not explore this aspect of family at the beginning but in the culture of bible times, family meant lots of extended family. Jesus when confronted in the temple about his mother and brothers looking for him expanded the definition of family to be all his followers. Embrace the church as your wider family. Those grand relatives, cousins, etc that don’t live nearby can be found relationally in your congregation. (Gladys)
– Be intentional about teaching at home and church about morality, sexuality, identity, and all the subjects that have been relativized. I think a lot of parents need to consider Christian schools or home schooling because it’s one thing to prepare your kids to face peer pressure, it’s another thing to help a young kid not swallow the agenda of some of their teachers.
– Provide care and community for kids who struggle with sexual formation. Make the church and family safe places to discuss issues with grace, mercy and truth.
– View your community and the children in it as sheep without a shepherd. Be intentional about sharing the love of Jesus with them. Let them see that following Jesus is a good thing.
– Be intentional about intergenerational relationships. Kids need to grow up with the church as their extended family. When you see kids at church that you have watched grow up, you feel as though you know them. When they see you, they just see adults they don’t really know. I read a great quote that I think is probably a great place to land. David W. Augsburger said “Being heard is so close to being loved that for the average person, they are almost indistinguishable.”
Let’s love others well in our families, churches, and communities!
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