Confessions of a Millennial Pastor

Yesterday, I turned 40.

I minister among university students, so it’s easy to fool myself into thinking I’m younger than I am. But the arrival of the big 40 exposed this delusion for the folly that it is (along with the hopes I still harbour of an Ashes call-up and making it as a rock-star).

Perhaps more troubling though is what it signals for everyone else.

It means that my generation - Gen Y or the ‘millennials’ – are hitting middle age.

No longer can we just blame the Boomers for the world's problems; nor can we rely on Gen X to fix them. No, Gen Y has hit middle-age, which means it's time for us avocado-loving, latte-sipping, endlessly whining snowflakes to start taking some responsibility for ourselves.

What might this mean for the church?

What impact will the millennial generation have as we grow older and step into more significant areas of Christian leadership?

While not every millennial is exactly the same, and yes I'm dealing with stereotypes, I wonder if there are some particular things - good and bad - that we’ll bring to the table.

We’re Post-Christian

One is that we’re the first genuinely post-Christian generation.

While the Boomers and Gen-X largely rejected Christianity; both were still raised within a predominantly Christian society. Most people believed in God, attending church was not unusual and Christian values were widely affirmed (if not always practiced).

Not so Gen-Y!

No, millennial believers have known nothing other than a post-Christian Australia. It was weird to attend church as a kid (even at a Christian school) and we came of age amidst the rise of post-modernism, political-correctness, multi-culturalism and secularism which together sidelined the Christian worldview as irrelevant and offensive.

What's good about this, is that millennial Christians are often less fazed by the shifts in our culture. It doesn't surprise us when Christian values are rejected and even legislated against for we’ve never known any different.

It also means things like the LGBTIQ+ movement are less threatening. Our TV-shows through the 90’s (i.e. Dawsons Creek, the OC) normalised these things so that as we encounter them we're rarely bothered.

We see Nuance as a Virtue

Perhaps because of this we also love nuance.

That is, we're hyper-aware of diversity and context and so our favourite colour to deal in is ‘grey’.

In practice, this means we have distaste for culture wars and a penchant to defend minority views (whether we agree with them or not). This is true both in and outside the church.

In a post-Christian world this enables us to gain a hearing with those who we disagree with. It also aides Christian unity as we're more inclined to work through theological difference and embrace a diversity of backgrounds. The weakness, of course, is that we can easily sell-out. In our desire to see every side of the story; we can end up just caught in the middle believing and accepting everything. As Christian leaders we find it hard to draw definitive doctrinal lines and make difficult ethical calls.

We’re a bit Soft

A more negative feature of my generation is that on the whole we’re soft.

You might be inclined to protest at such a gross stereotype – but it’s hard to escape the stats and anecdotes.

Before Gen Y there was no such thing as a 'mental health day', 'silent quitting' or 'smashed avocado' but nowadays these are part of the mainstream. In fact - alongside our morning coffee and zoloft prescription (I've one myself) - my generation wears these things as badges of honour

My suspicion is some of our softness is the consequence of living in an age of immense prosperity and the fact that we’ve never really faced much suffering. What we have endured (i.e. September 11, Global Financial Crisis, COVID-19) has tended to be via our newsfeeds than any personal experience. As a result we’ve neither built the resilience nor the perspective to deal well with difficulty.

This presents an obvious danger for future gospel leaders. Will we hang in there as the cultural-tide continues to turn against Christianity? Will our ministers have the resilience to persevere fighting the good fight to the end?

These are genuine questions and things the wider church must be mindful of in the years ahead.

We’re Hyper-Connected

Millennials grew-up at the intersection between the analog and digital world.

The defining sounds of our adolescence were our dial-up internet connection and MSN notifications. As young adults, we mindlessly played snake on our Nokia 3310's and predictive text became second nature.

And while many of us lack the digital fluency our children might have, we are no less bought into the digital world and all that comes with it.

In many ways this a blessing. It allows us to communicate and maintain wide networks of relationships.

But it also comes at a cost. We're rarely "offline" and as a result always on-call. We crave constant approval and find it difficult to disconnect for fear of missing out. This hyper-connectivity takes it's toll on our mental health and our Christian heart.

As believers this shows itself in our struggle to connect deeply with others and our lack of spiritual discipline. Prayer and meditation on the scriptures is so easily neglected as we are carried off by other more pressing distractions.

We’re Recovering Porn Addicts

Alongside our hyper-connecting is our relationship with internet pornography.

It's not true that every millennial in ministry is a recovering porn-addict but you’d be alarmed by how many are. As a consequence, many Gen Y gospel workers carry around shame and secrecy in this area. This impacts our ministry, causing us to downplay others sin others or avoid accountability.

The upside, is we do understand the temptation that those younger than us face. We're able to empathise and help knowing the danger, struggle and capacity of God to forgive and heal.

We're not sure who our Heroes are

An interesting feature of millennial Christian leaders is we don’t really know who our heroes are.

Think about it...

The Boomers had Lloyd Jones and John Stott.

Gen X have Tim Keller, John Piper, Rick Warren and Philip Jensen.

For Gen Y the pickings feel a little slimmer.

Perhaps over time more will emerge. But I wonder if the lack is also due to the number who have let us down. So many of the leaders we once looked too and imitated have since fallen in spectacular ways.

None more so than Mark Driscoll. Love him or not his influence on my generation of leaders was profound. At the time, his preaching, aesthetic and read of the culture felt groundbreaking and seemed to promise that our generation could be reached for Christ. Even from afar, his fall has left his mark. It's also left us vulnerable; devoid of faithful models of service to follow and learn from.

We're not that Special

For all our idiosyncracies, the most significant feature of my generation is that we're not that special.

No, our most important quality is the one that we share with every generation of Christian leaders that's gone before. And that is, just like the Boomers, Gen X and all before them, we follow the Lord Jesus.

The same Lord- who the writer of Hebrews reminds us never changes but rather:

"...is the same yesterday and today and forever" (Hebrews 13:8)

This is important for the temptation is to think we're unique (I mean that's what our parents told us!!).

That we've got this special set of challenges and opportunities, that no one else has faced which we alone have to navigate for the cause of Christ.

But the reality is that in the end, our generation of ministry rests on the same truths every generation before us has rested on. The unchanging grace of our unchanging Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

It's His same cross that offers us and our world forgiveness.

It's His same resurrection that guarantees our hope.

And it's His same indwelling Spirit that works within us enabling us to trust and live for him.

Be sure to pray that whether Gen Y or not, you'd continue to hold fast to Him all your days.