I'm on the tail end of the Baby Boomer generation (1945-1964) and I am proud of my generation and the Builder generation of my parents. More recently my life, through family and leadership, has centered on the Millennials and Generations Z and Alpha. I've been grateful for Dr. George Barna through the decades and his work on Biblical worldview; recently Dr. Barna has been working with my good friends Len & Tracy Munsel at the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University (ACU). Though I am deeply proud of many accomplishments of the Boomer generation, I am also humbled and repentant for the failings we have experienced in leadership, culture, family, and ministry. Large and growing churches have not been able to stem the cultural tide of devastation for the emerging generations. I wrote about these subjects in an earlier book chapter (Helping Millennials Thrive, ACU 2023) but I believe these subjects are worthy of revisiting in the present hour.

The original Barna research report released in 2023 provided some pain-filled statistics about Millennials, most of which have been further accelerated in Gen Z.

• Nearly three-fourths of Millennials describe their lives as having no purpose
• Millennials have the highest suicide rate of any generation previously studied
• Millennials highly value relationships but fewer than four out of ten believe they have quality intimate relationships
• 80% of Millennials do not believe that life is sacred and do not practice the Golden Rule ("do unto others as you would have them do unto you.")
• Over half of Millennials frequently struggle with anxiety, depression, and fear
• 40% of Millennials do not believe God exists
• 4% of Millennials (and only 2% of the youngest Millennials) have a Biblical worldview

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Do these statistics shock you? They should. And yet they are not surprising for those who have been watching. These last decades have demonstrated an almost complete and systematic, brutal, and effective attack upon the institution of the family in American culture. I am heartbroken about the incidence of fatherless households (increasing every year), childless households by choice (increasing every year), and the incidence of divorce and cohabitation in our nation. In the middle of all this, where have we been as the Church? And yes, I pastored and led churches and a denominational unit from the late 1980's through the early 2010's and led a Christ-centered University from 2011-2025 and I bear specific responsibility for failures in my own leadership. To the extent that my own leadership was deficient, I humbly repent and find rest in the goodness of God (Romans 2:4).

In my former leadership role as a Christian College President, I saw the increasing pressure of Millennials and Gen Z to adopt the forceful false narratives that are pervasive in social and traditional media. Sadly, the core institutions of family, church, and school have been the subject of these attacks and have been unable to counter the cultural weight of the narratives. In my view, we simply must rebuild the foundations of clear and compelling Biblical worldview (I commend the work of The American Council as well as others in this regard) and equip families, churches, and schools to rebuild and restore our hope for the future.

For many years I have strongly urged parents (and grandparents!) to protect their families from the education systems that presume to educate their offspring. Many parents assume, having understood at least in general terms the destructive pathway of the typical higher education system, that they can protect their student by sending them to a faith-based university. Sadly, many historically faith-based universities have more in common with their public counterparts than their faith history, and students in these schools often leave their faith and family with similar brokenness upon graduation. Parents and students must educate themselves BEFORE they enter their college experience (a number of excellent resources exist, including my short book, The Right Choice, Len Munsel's Transforming Culture with Truth, and Everett Piper's Not a Day Care). Assuming the alignment of values between family, church, and school is a dangerous practice in our day.

I believe that the attacks on marriage, family, sexuality, and gender identity are a highly weaponized tool of the enemy of our soul. Pain and sorrow are the inheritance of a society that walks away from the Biblical building blocks of any successful civilization. I am committed to Biblical views of gender, sexuality, marriage, and family where parents have the right and responsibility to protect children from harmful decisions and inputs. Often when Christians advocate for these positions, they are seen as longing for a return to a hazy version of the 1950's. That is unequivocally not true. Christians are advocating for what God has designed as best. I'm praying with some specific targets in my heart:

I believe in and am staking the rest of my life on this planet on the belief that Jesus' people can be discipled and equipped by the five-fold ministry and that they can then become reproducing disciple makers who live in society for the glory of God.

I see a church engaged, with redemptive love and full of grace and truth, in society contending for what heaven on earth looks like in the critical issues of our day.

I see assemblies of believers in all 3,000 counties of the United States living for the glory of God and following Jesus with radical love, radical truth, and radical grace.

I see the church living fully armored up and recognizing that we are not in a country club, we are not called to survive the prison camp until we get rescued, but we are called to defeat the enemy in a very real war (Ephesians 6).

I see the church that Jesus loves loving the world that Jesus died for and living for the Kingdom that Jesus ushered onto our planet.

I see the Savior, His Bride, His Kingdom and His will being done "on earth, as it is in heaven."

That is the church I see and the world I am called to contend for…

What have we done to build strong families? Are we equipping children to grow up as sons and daughters and become fathers and mothers who raise up more children and sons and daughters and fathers and mothers (1 John 2)? Many families today have never experienced the love of a healthy father or mother. The opportunity to create healthy families by modeling and mentoring is singularly one of the greatest opportunities for the church today. If every church community were to build strong family units, I believe the health of the church and culture in America would be vastly different than what we are now experiencing. I am likewise convinced that much of what we have done in the church these past few decades has been accommodating to the culture rather than redemptively affecting the culture as "salt and light" (see Matthew 5). Sadly, I know of far too many contexts in which we have not been very salty and have not shed very much light.

One more generation of "convenience Christianity" will sow more destructive seeds for Millennials, Gen Z and Gen Alpha as well. We must live redemptively, connecting salvation and sanctification in an organic and life-giving fashion that is full of the Word and full of the Spirit. Living in such a way that our personal encounter with Jesus is a vibrant and animating daily reality equips us to then engage the culture around us in personal relationships, our workplace, and in the public square. Our engagement in the public square must be about righteousness and redemption with the "agenda of the Lamb and not the donkey or the elephant" (my friend Sam Rodriguez's quote). Engagement in the public square is fundamentally about the Great Commission and not about "politics." The American Council was established for and is serving to address this very need of equipping God's people to engage in the public square.

Os Guinness is prescient on these matters as always:

"In short, the decisive power is always God's, through his Word and Spirit. But on her side the church contributes three distinct human factors to the equation: engagement, discernment and refusal. First, the church is called to engage and to stay engaged, to be faithful and obedient in that it puts aside all other preferences of its own and engages purposefully with the world as its Lord commands. Second, the church is called to discern, to exercise its spiritual and cultural discernment of the best and worst of the world of its day, in order to see clearly where it is to be "in" and where it is to be 'not of' that world. And third, the church is called to refuse, a grand refusal to conform to or comply with anything and everything in the world that is against the way of Jesus and his kingdom." (Renaissance, Os Guinness)

Want some good news? Seventy-five percent of Millennials are looking for purpose in life! What a historic opportunity, what an amazing opportunity.

Millennials are looking for meaning and purpose, to be sure. But it is equally clear that they are famished for nourishing relationships of depth and connection. If the Body of Christ is to see this as our redemptive moment, we must develop relationships with Millennials with lots of truth in love. And my experience in the church and my experience in my own life, lots of times I love to give truth, but there's not much love with it. So, we need a lot of truth in love; we need to create safe places (not these safety zones where people cannot talk about differences without being "harmed"), but we need to keep safe places where Millennials know they are loved, and we can encourage them to ask questions. For those of us who are Boomers, we simply must find a Millennial leader or two or three, invest in them, love them, support them, and strengthen them.

Leaders traffic in hope. We have an amazing opportunity to sow seeds of hope and peace and joy into the coming generations. Millennials, Gen Z, and Gen Alpha, along with every other generation now present, desperately need the eternal to intersect with the everyday. I believe we do that when we live out the hope of Jesus, grounded in a Biblical worldview and lived out in the community of a healthy family and church. I've been praying Romans 15:13 for a few years and I consider it a theme for our times and for these concerns:

"May the God of hope fill you with all peace and joy as you trust in Him so that you overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit"