This is a sample article featured in the September 2001 issue of Quadrant
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GENERATIONS Y AND Z AND THE CHURCH
In July 2001, Quadrant looked at the so-called Generation X, those people aged 18 to 36 in the year 2001, who were born between 1965 and 1983. What about their children? These are the young people in our church today, though some churches find it desperately difficult to attract any in this age group. In fact 41%, two churches in every five in England, have NO young people in their congregation (or Sunday School) at all. And what will their children be like? The graph below shows the school years of the children attending the 13 churches of one Anglican Deanery in south-east England:
How typical this is of all churches is not yet known (some research is going on to find out). With Year 6 being 10-11 year olds it is readily seen that the drop out comes as young people enter their teenage years. So how can we not only understand them but help them spiritually, so that there will still be children in the church in the future?
GENERATION Y
Age
Under 17, born in 1984 or later
Alternative name: Mosaic
A Roman mosaic was created by fitting tessellated tiles into a picture. When the tiles are found in an archeological dig they are normally scattered in the earth and have to be put together correctly to re form the picture. The Mosaic generation are used to taking pieces of information from a wide variety of sources and putting them together into a single worldview.
Main characteristic
Focussing on a part without any sense of the underlying time frame. Mosaic children, therefore, might try to understand Queen Victoria's grief when Prince Albert died while being unaware of the significance of that event in 1861 - events are pieces of a historical mosaic but are divorced from the 'worldview', or 'metanarrative' as it is sometimes called, that goes with it.
Information gathering
This generation gleans information from the Internet by choosing button 3 on this screen, button 5 on that one and opting for the second box here. All is in bits and pieces, just like a mosaic, with no underlying concept of the story that holds it all together. This is how the Mosaic Generation is being taught. In Christian terms, Jesus is just another piece of the mosaic, alongside Buddha or someone else.
Features of Generation Y
They are the first generation:
* To use the Internet to search for information.
* To use a computer more naturally than their parents (and they are good at it too).
* To learn in a mosaic way without the background or time frame into which the various pieces fit.
* To keep in touch through a mobile phone and text messaging.
* To have parents more remote from their offspring than previous generations, 25% of whom are not their natural parents.
* To tolerate violence, destruction and muggings just for the sheer hell of it.
* To be bombarded with sexual images and knowledge while their age is still in single digits, and to have a myriad of sexy magazines designed just for them when they enter double figures.
* To have and expect to have sexual experience with several partners as the norm while still at school.
* To have many teachers despairing of how to control them, let alone teach them.
* To either themselves, or have friends who start a family when under the legal age of intercourse! Britain has the highest teenage pregnancy rate in Europe.
* To have little sense of the 'spiritual' as Christian, and thus leave the church in large numbers finding it totally irrelevant to their way of life.
* To be taught right and wrong but not good and evil, the consequence of the previous generation's abandonment of absolute truth.
* To be subject to intense peer pressure to conform in terms of clothes, music, leisure activities, attitudes and relationships.
There are of course many, many children today for whom this description is only partly true, some of them from Christian homes. But whether they come from Christian homes or not, they are opting out of church.
Making church relevant
How can churches best prepare their youth for the challenges ahead? There are no easy answers, but here are some suggestions.
1. Having someone outside the family (such as a youth leader) whom they have learned to trust is important. Some churches have had weekends when a child has stayed with another church couple, and have found this not only immensely helpful but very popular! It allows the child to ask a mature Christian questions such as "What do I do when Dad loses his top?" or "Mum is so tired when she gets in from work she never has time to talk; who else can I talk to?"
2. Tell children stories. They usually love them! It helps them to understand not just the immediate tale but to prepare them for the concept that there is a big story underlying the world (what older generations called His-Story).
3. Explain your spirituality. Don't just live it out, but indicate why it is important to help the poor, worship God, read the Bible. Making disciples is never easy, but bringing up the Mosaic children and helping them come to a strong unwavering faith may be the toughest job facing the Christian church in the 21st century.
GENERATION Z
Age
Born in 2003 and beyond.
Alternative name: Kaleidoscope
When you turn the bottom of a kaleidoscope the same pieces of coloured glass make more than one pattern, which is continually changing. Kaleidoscopes will have the ability to take an even wider variety of information and begin to make more than one worldview, which they will be able to hold simultaneously.
Information gathering
There is already evidence that this is happening, so it will not be confined to children yet to be born. One of the complaints received about the recent population census was that you could choose only one option for the religion question. In a survey of social workers in the UK, an American professor found 6% claiming they belonged to two religions!
Features of Generation Z
* Their knowledge of the Internet will be vast, and they will use it to satisfy their emotional needs, physical requirements for shopping and services, and intellectual stimulus. Turning such knowledge into wisdom and worldview(s) may prove difficult, however.
* They will be used to communicating via a thin screen multi-purpose computer-cum-TV screen, with the more wealthy using a mobile video phone as their laptop.
* More than half of them will be born to unmarried parents, one of whom (usually the father) will be replaced by another before they are 15 years old in at least half these households.
* Perhaps a fifth or a quarter will be baptised in a church, and a similar proportion will marry in a church. But for the majority, the inside of a church will be as unknown as a castle dungeon.
* Friendship and relationships will continue to be the crucial human stimulus, and it is in that context that Christian lifestyle can excite and challenge. The church will not die out, but groups of worshippers gathering in homes, offices or shops will become much more common.
* This generation is likely to have a greater concern for the poor and disadvantaged, willingly supporting community programmes, church-run or otherwise.
* 'Right' will be defined as "what is right for me" (or perhaps "us" as in our group), causing concepts of wrong, good and evil to become hard to understand. We thus go 'back to basics', with morality becoming apparent through the inbuilt operation of our God-given mores.
Making church relevant
Regrettably this is likely to mean the world gets tougher not easier, requiring major rethinking of how to teach, live and demonstrate the Christian faith. That will be a key issue 10 to 15 years hence, but we can start thinking how to help our Kaleidoscope children learn their spiritual inheritance today!
Source: Church Times article, 18th May 2001.
NUMBERS FOR GRAPH:
Yr 2 or below Year 3 Year 4 Year 5 Year 6 Year 7 Year 8 Year 9 Year 10 Year 11 or above
6.5% 10% 13% 12% 15% 17.5% 19% 4.5% 1% 1.5%