[00:00:00] Hey, thanks so much for listening to this message. My name is Jason, and I'm one of the ministers here at the Madison Church of Christ. It's our hope and prayer that the teaching you hear today will bless your life and draw you closer to God. If you're ever in the Madison area, we'd love for you to stop by and study the Bible with us on Sundays at 5pm or Wednesdays at 7pm if you have questions about the Bible or want to know more about the Madison Church, you can find us
[email protected] be sure to subscribe to this podcast as well as our Sermons podcast. Madison Church of Christ Sermons. Thanks again for stopping by. I hope this study is a blessing to you.
[00:00:38] Quick show of hands. If this phrase means anything to you, free nights and weekends, raise your hand.
[00:00:47] Okay. All right. Hands down. What about no texting before 7:00pm Okay, a couple.
[00:00:57] What about be kind? Rewind.
[00:01:00] There we go. There's my people. All right.
[00:01:03] A lot of times when we think of the word technology, if you're like me, you think in terms of modern technology, cutting edge technology, the latest and the greatest.
[00:01:13] But the reality is we live in the digital age. We being all inclusive of everyone here, everyone alive, whether you're six or 60, we all live in the digital age. And so it's important for us to. To learn to navigate the digital age together, to be dismissive of one another, whether based off of appearance or age.
[00:01:33] The book of James would say, well, that's bigotry, right? That's prejudice. And in the church, we don't see through that lens. In the church, we understand that the body.
[00:01:43] Excuse me, that the church is the body of Christ and everyone has value. So it may seem odd to begin a talk, a series of talks about technology, talking about generations, but I think, and I hope by the end of tonight, you'll understand. Let's begin with a little game. Quick show of hands, if you know what this show is behind me.
[00:02:04] All right, Keep your hands real high.
[00:02:07] Trying to find somebody that doesn't know, maybe that's able to speak audibly and walk on their own. Okay, so most everybody understands that this is the Andy Griffith show, right?
[00:02:18] Andy Opie. Good old Barney, bless his heart. All right, quick show of hands, if you know what show this is.
[00:02:25] All right, mostly this side of the room. That's good to know. Good to know. All right, what show is this?
[00:02:32] It's okay, you can say it out loud. You don't know. You do know, but you don't want to Say it. All right. It is. It's Outer Banks. Outer Banks is a TV show. Very popular on Netflix.
[00:02:41] See ya. And nope, no bad people here.
[00:02:45] Outer Banks is a show that's popular now.
[00:02:47] We just don't have time.
[00:02:49] Digital age it is. I wanted to say this is the dragon age. No. No dragons. Dragons are weird. Keep going. No big deal. No big deal. No big deal. Thank you. Is this Yarls leader? Hey. We don't have time. I'm sorry. I know you're doing really good. All right. Doing great.
[00:03:05] Thank you.
[00:03:09] So for those of you who don't know, this is my 21st VBS and it's the first time I've not been in skits. I've been waiting to say that to them for 20 years.
[00:03:17] Get out.
[00:03:19] I definitely feel I'm in middle age. I'm 40, so old people think I'm young. Young people think I'm old. All I know is I want kids to stay off my lawn and turn the music down. So this was very thrilling for me.
[00:03:30] We'll keep going with the important stuff. According to the song written by Tommy 2 Tone in the glorious year of 1982.
[00:03:37] What was Jenny's phone number?
[00:03:43] I didn't expect it to come in rounds, but I love it. Great job. Great job. I have just checked two things off my bucket list. Welcome. Welcome to Madison. This is what we do. In the 1980s, this man was the epitome of what the kids today call Riz, right?
[00:04:01] And I gotta say, Maverick Tom Cruise, like, unforgivable. He has set us back roughly 30 years in men's facial hair. Because things are popular today, like the mustache and the mullet today.
[00:04:15] This is what Riz Light looks like today.
[00:04:19] Not much different. Not much. Except for the baby face. Not much different.
[00:04:24] My point with that is to kind of show that whether you grew up in the 40s, the 50s, the 60s, the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, or you're one of those young people, you had some form of entertainment. You had a TV show that you identified with. I was devastated when they moved Dawson's Creek from. I think it was Thursday night to Wednesday night because we couldn't watch it anymore live. We had to use the thing called a vcr. Just a big hassle, you know, all the film tape, you got to rewind it.
[00:04:49] You grew up watching a TV show somewhere along the way that today has a counterpart that today's generation is watching for the same reasons you. You watched.
[00:04:59] When we think about technology, one thing we don't often Think about is how the devil can leverage that, particularly in the church. He will oftentimes use our age to divide us.
[00:05:11] The role of technology is to help us to communicate. It's to help us have a more efficient way of life, to do work more efficiently, more quickly.
[00:05:20] But when we allow it, technology will shape us.
[00:05:24] Your relationship going up, I think with technology, particularly what I've seen in the adolescent years of life, oftentimes they take a long lasting impact in how you view other people. If you grew up in a time of innovation, if you grew up in the 50s and 60s watching the United States land on the moon, right then you understood that we could do anything if we could get to the moon. Today, our children are growing up hearing projects and we've got people in this town because, man, there's so many, we'll say engineers that they're helping us get to Mars.
[00:05:59] It's an exciting time of innovation.
[00:06:02] Your relationship with technology growing up oftentimes also limits how you see other people. If you were content because you believe that cars made in the 60s were the greatest and the pinnacle of automotive innovation, then today's cars, or for the little sissy pie tweety birds that drive around, that hinders sometimes how you see people because of how you see and relate to technology.
[00:06:26] So this is the basis for what we're going to be talking about tonight. What were your three greatest challenges in middle school and high school? This is a question that I asked.
[00:06:35] There was a Christian school down in Mobile that I spoke at a few months back. And I asked this among the faculty. Their faculty were made up of a few millennials, but mostly Gen Xers and mostly outside of that boomer generation.
[00:06:51] I said, list the three greatest challenges that you had growing up when you were in middle school and high school. And this. This was a list of their responses. Peer pressure and fitting in, body image, bullying, time management, school stress and drama.
[00:07:08] Social media. That was the lone millennial, I assume. And then finding purpose.
[00:07:13] I then presented this list of answers to the student body and I said, is there anything that you'd like to add?
[00:07:21] There wasn't much left to add.
[00:07:24] You see, we're not that different.
[00:07:27] The sins are the same, the temptations are the same, the packaging is quite different in a lot of cases. But when it comes to lust, when it comes to truth, when it comes to being an honest person, when it comes to finding a community or finding purpose or finding identity, those are the struggles of every generation.
[00:07:46] So when we allow technology to separate us, we allow Satan to be victorious.
[00:07:52] But when we look beyond the surface, when we understand that we see based off of spiritual value and we interact with people because of spiritual needs and spiritual reasons, then we understand that we are now living according to to the gospel in the digital age.
[00:08:07] I want to take a little bit of time tonight and look at a few of the generations that are with us right now.
[00:08:12] For the most part, members of the greatest generation have mostly passed on. So the largest, oldest generation that we have at this time are members of the silent generation. And they get that name from an article in Time magazine back in the 1950s.
[00:08:28] I think it was written a little prematurely. If you look at the pictures of people that are members of that generation, they're anything but silent.
[00:08:36] There are a few things that I want to highlight here. And most of this is taken from Gene Twingy's book Generations. And then it has a really long subtitle that I always forget. It's a great book.
[00:08:46] Tweeny gathered the largest database that we know of to create this book and to publish this. And she's identified a lot of the different themes and a lot of the different philosophies that over the years have brought us to where we are today. And there's some interesting things that I think are worthy of note.
[00:09:03] The silent generation born between 1925 and 1945 married earlier in the 1950s than the generation previous to them in the 1930s. In fact, they were younger than any generation in the 20th century on average to get married, that's going to be important in a couple of generations. Nearly half of new brides in the 1950s were teenagers.
[00:09:26] Think about that for a second. Getting married As a teenager versus getting married as a 25 year old, those are different experiences. The post war baby boom was a big deal. In 1957, the birth rate was 3.8 kids per woman. Not sure how they had 0.8 child back in the 50s, but I'm not questioning.
[00:09:45] So when you think about that, parents that grew up in two child homes, one sibling in their childhood they had one sibling, but now they have three and four kids. As a parent, that's a big shift culture. I grew up with one brother, my wife and I have four kids.
[00:10:01] It's not the same, I promise you that.
[00:10:05] Ill equipped might be the right word I would use. Divorce rates shot up in the 1960s and 70s. And I think a lot of times we key in on a couple of generations, particularly the boomers tend to get the rap for the divorce rate going up high. But it actually started among the Silents. Most divorces occur between those aged 25 and and 49.
[00:10:25] So they started the divorce trend. Of course, the Boomers took it to the next level.
[00:10:29] Remarriage was very common among this generation. 60% of men and 50% of women remarried within five years. So what's interesting is that among the Silent Generation, you still see a deep respect and reverence for marriage.
[00:10:45] However, they didn't live with people that they weren't married with.
[00:10:49] They just married a lot of people. You think of Johnny Carson, and let's see, who else Was it Elizabeth Taylor, Johnny Carson married four times. Liz Taylor famously married eight times. Larry King the same eight times.
[00:11:02] Silents were twice as likely as those in the Greatest Generation to believe that traditional gender roles were not necessarily better.
[00:11:09] You see, the Silents were kind of sandwiched between two impossible places. We have this generation that we not so subtly called the Greatest Generation.
[00:11:18] There may be a little bit of idolatry that comes with that. Maybe idolatry is too strong, but we definitely put them in a place of greatness that's unattainable for the next generation.
[00:11:28] And on the other side, they have the boomers who are just loud, who are big time proponents of revolution. So you've got rowdy and you've got legendary. And then in between is the shadowy generation of silence.
[00:11:42] Within two generations, opinions flipped, with most of the Greatest generations supporting traditional gender roles and most boomers disagreeing. So the Silents were caught in this tug of war and would ultimately lean towards the Boomers.
[00:11:54] They were more educated. Did you know that the Silent Generation was the first generation in American history where the majority of that group graduated from high school?
[00:12:05] When I was growing up, graduating from high school was sort of the expectation. And then most people go to college. Whether you knew what you wanted to do or not, that's just what you did. Right. Then you graduated with a lot of debt. Well, this is the first generation in American history where the majority graduated high school.
[00:12:21] They're known for consistent political power. People like Mitch McConnell, Trent Lott, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi. You've got Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sandra Day o', Connor, Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia. Some of these folks have been in political power for roughly 140 years. I'm pretty sure.
[00:12:40] They're known to be stable, known to be very calm. And as we're going to see in a little bit, particularly tomorrow, emotionally, they're pretty strong.
[00:12:49] They endured a lot. They navigated some things that younger generations have yet to encounter. And so again, this idea that they were silent is a little bit misguided. There is a noticeably lower suicide rate among this generation.
[00:13:05] And this next portion of our presentation is where I present to you my reasoning for why it's all the boomers fault for all the wrong things in the world.
[00:13:15] There will be no rebuttals allowed tonight. I have two microphones actually. So they were born between 1946 and 1964. What's interesting is we have had one president that was a member of the silent generation. Five of the last six have been members of the boomer generation. And technically, this last go around, both of our options were boomers.
[00:13:38] I know that it was spun that Donald Trump was this old, old man and Kamala Harris was this young, young, new option, but technically, Trump was born in 46 and Harris was born in 64. They're bookends of the same generation.
[00:13:51] It's really interesting to me.
[00:13:54] In 2021, they represented a little over 21% of our population. They're known for being comfortable with drug use. There was a big rise in self focus among this generation. Choice was at the center of the boomer experience.
[00:14:07] Growing up, they questioned things like the military draft. There was a big strive for gender equality counterculture kind of became the core battle cry of this generation.
[00:14:18] But there was an increase in mental distress and depression.
[00:14:23] They had fewer kids and more divorce. Growing up. They were known for breaking traditional rules, particularly sex before marriage. Here was an interesting stat. In a nationwide Survey conducted in 1967, 85% of U.S. adults said that premarital sex was wrong.
[00:14:42] In 1967, 85% said that premarital sex WAS wrong. By 1979, 12 years later, that number plummeted to 37 premium.
[00:14:53] We start to see a big shift in public opinion, a big change in what would be considered family values and core values. Of course, the sexual revolution was really a battle between the greatest generation and the boomers. And clearly the boomers won.
[00:15:09] I have a friend who would disagree with me that it's the boomers fault and would say that things today mostly fall at the feet of the millennials.
[00:15:16] My little card I like to play that I think wins the war is the very first boomer president in American history. If you recall, tried to redefine the definition of the word is Wait for it.
[00:15:30] Not yet. Nope. That usually gets a few more snickers. You remember when Bill Clinton was caught in his indiscretion and he was on trial and his response to one question Was. It depends on what your definition of the word is is.
[00:15:42] We live in a time now where words are being redefined. Pretty often people are trying to change definitions and change meanings. That's not new. And that's not just a young person's thing. That is a trend that goes back many, many decades and generations still think you should have laughed more at that one.
[00:16:01] This generation also pioneered that it's okay to talk about everything. You think about Oprah Winfrey, the massive influence that she has had on popular opinion in our American culture, partly because she was willing to talk about anything. She was willing to bring it out in the open, and people found that refreshing.
[00:16:18] The world changed with the rise of the boomers. And I thought this was very interesting that Twengy pointed out, when they were children in the 50s and 60s, the country was very child focused. Think about some of the entertainment shows around that time that really portrayed family values in a big way. When they were rebellious teens, the nation was roiled in social change. In the 1960s, when they were young adults, our culture experienced a fascination with the mystical. And you think about the 70s, that's the only explanation I have for why music took a weird turn for that, like four or five years of disco. That's the only logical explanation, is that they were experimenting with things they ought not to.
[00:17:00] Of course, in the 80s and 90s they were building their careers and the economy of our country was humming along pretty strong.
[00:17:06] The social movements of the protest and protest of the 1960s had a shift during the 70s as well. It went from a collective us to more of a me.
[00:17:17] There's more emphasis on changing self rather than society. The self help genre of books became a popular thing and developed during that time. There's this thing called the Google Word database, which is really interesting. Google keeps a database of all the word usage in literature. And if you go back around this time in the 70s, beginning in the 60s, the words unique in identity surged in usage, particularly the word identity. And if there's a word today that is maybe the biggest buzzword, then we're looking at identity, right?
[00:17:48] That's not new.
[00:17:50] That's not new at all. And this concludes why it is the boomer's fault. Now we'll move on to Gen X. Gen X is another generation that kind of falls in between two loud voices. They went from the boomers who were loud and there were many of them. And then on the other side, behind them will be the millennials who their time would be the largest generation in American history. But Gen X is kind of in between, and they're a unique group of folks. They're both analog and digital communicators. They were the first generation on the Internet and the last generation to make it all the way through high school without the Internet, which is interesting. When I was growing up in high school in like 10th and 11th grade in particular, there was a lot less Dewey Decimal in my life and a lot more Alabama Virtual Library. We were learning to research on a computer and not thumbing through a book. They were also the last ones to use the rotary phone, which I think is just kind of a tragedy.
[00:18:46] You think about major innovations that are a huge part of our lives today. YouTube, it was started by three Gen Xers. EBay, PayPal, MySpace, Twitter, Uber Napster, the first web browser. Netscape back then was referred to as Mosaic, all created by Gen Xers. Think about it this way. Gen Xers created the foundation of the digital city. They created the digital landscape. Millennials became the first users in the digital marketplace. And there's a big difference in those. They learn the facts of life by watching shows like the Facts of Life. As the divorce rate surged, people like Dr. Huxtable and eventually Officer Winslow, Mr. Belding, who is boy meets world.
[00:19:28] Feeny. Mr. Feeny. Heyday. Yeah. These guys that were character fictional characters actually played a pivotal role in the lives of young people growing up who were looking for father figures. Even all the way back to my good man, Fred Rogers, Mr. Rogers neighborhood. Because homes were changing with the rise of the women's movement and the popularity of equality in the workforce. That meant there were fewer moms at home.
[00:19:54] You had the rise of the latchkey kid in the Gen X experience, which meant they got off the bus and they walked home and there wasn't a parent there.
[00:20:02] The key was left under the mat or under the flower around the flower pot. And they were left to their own devices for two or three hours before their parents got home. Because if they did have two parents, they were both working full time. That's a big shift in family dynamics.
[00:20:16] The Atari game console brought video games into the living room. So you went from going to the arcade and having a community shared experience to having that experience in your home again. We see the surge in individualism particularly take off. Nearly three times as many children in 1980 were living with a divorced mom or dad than had in the 1960. Nearly three times as many.
[00:20:40] Divorce became common and became sort of normal.
[00:20:44] Most people either were a part of a family that had divorce or were very close in proximity to families that had divorce.
[00:20:53] As I mentioned, the rise and fall of the latchkey kid happened here. But Gen X also ended up marrying later than any generation in American history.
[00:21:02] Boomers married on average for women at the age of 20 and men 23.
[00:21:06] Gen Xers married on average at 25.
[00:21:12] Today, now that we're in the 21st century, the median average for women to first get married has risen to 28 years old, and for men, 30 years old.
[00:21:22] So in just a couple of generations, we've got a 10 year delay of marriage.
[00:21:28] Part of that is due to the economy. We have more of a knowledge based economy. And so it takes longer to go through school to get equipped for occupational work in the workforce. And if you go to school longer, generally you get married later and generally you have kids later. So there's sort of technical innovation that very directly, but very practically changes home life.
[00:21:51] One generational shift that I thought was really interesting is that only 11% of women aged 19 to 44, so that would cover the boomer. And the silent generations had lived with an unmarried partner before their first marriage by 2010 and 2013. So that would be the Gen X and millennial Group.
[00:22:09] Nearly 69% had.
[00:22:13] Things have changed. The divorce rate fell after the 1980s.
[00:22:17] Generally speaking, if you marry later in life, you stayed married longer in life. But also what happened is that people began living together rather than getting married. And so some of those stats are a little misleading at times.
[00:22:29] They had high self esteem and they were focused on self. The word self esteem skyrocketed from 1970 to 1995.
[00:22:36] So this gen X brought in a new opportunity. And you see a big change in childhood development as we move into the millennial generation. Millennials were born between 1980 and 1994, and the best of them were born in 1985, some would say.
[00:22:56] And they'd be right. All right. They were the most planned and wanted generation in American history.
[00:23:03] Again, technological innovation.
[00:23:05] With the introduction of the birth control pill in 1964, we were now able to remove what most people would consider to be the greatest consequence to sexual activity, and that is pregnancy. So it broke the link between marriage and sexual activity.
[00:23:23] When you get to the 1980s and 1990s, we also have now emerging fertility technology which allows people to plan and to adapt their plan. Right. So there's a change in the way child rearing and family development is seen from both sides of that. They navigated 9, 11, the housing bubble, the.com boom. After 2000, the first singular pronouns began to take off and in American literature and a decrease in collective pronouns were seen. So what started particularly with the Gen X experience, magnified and scaled up with the millennials, not only did we come home for games, we started to not leave the house and to go outside anymore. Among this generation, some would say this is a generation of entitled people.
[00:24:08] As individualism promoted self focus. This is a quote from Tweeny and unrealistically positive self views during the 90s and much of the 2000s emerged college students. Narcissism steadily rose. And then as the economic bubble burst, so did the bubble of narcissism. There was this promised job market out there that when a large chunk of the millennials graduated college with mountains of debt, there was no job market.
[00:24:32] And there's actually data that shows that grades increased among their generation, but study time decreased.
[00:24:40] I did that a lot. Like the grade part, not so much, but the study time decreased.
[00:24:45] When I was growing up, my grades didn't go up. But for those that did, what that shows is there was a real thing called grade inflation, which means that there was a lot of extra praise without the actual work to go along with it. When you get, when you find achievement without struggle, you don't develop resilience.
[00:25:06] What you do is you set yourself up for a crisis. And that's what we've seen now, particularly among the millennial generation, was there is this self inflated achievement. We got the awards, we got the promotions, but we didn't necessarily do all the work to get there. And that's why you see a massive decline in mental health over the lifespan of the millennials. That's why you see a tremendous rise in anxiety, depression, suicide ideation among this generation.
[00:25:31] Also in 2004, thefacebook.com became a thing. During this time, you're going to see the rise of Pre Facebook was MySpace. You see, analog methods of entertainment gave way to streaming. Things like Limewire and Napster became a thing. Instead of going to the store and buying a cd, you would wait three to four hours for the Dave Matthews album to download, only to realize at the end that it was actually Conway Twitty and somebody mislabeled him.
[00:25:59] Kids today don't understand the stress. They don't get it. They don't know that was a hard time. You don't remember the sounds of.
[00:26:07] You had to wait. There were some of these stopgaps in this transition period where we're moving into a digital age. But even that transition into the digital age also was kind of slow. And what's interesting. Today is the next chapter that we're moving into. The chapter of artificial intelligence didn't creep along quite the way the digital age. The entrance to the digital age did. It's moving not incrementally, but exponentially.
[00:26:32] That's important for those of us that are parents as millennials, because if we try to approach our kids with the same approach them with social media. If I parent my kids with regards to social media or technology based solely off of my experience growing up with it, then I'm going to be missing the boat because it's not the same.
[00:26:50] It moves on, and it moves on very quickly. They're highly educated. This is the first generation in which more than one out of three had a four year degree. By their late twenties, social norm shifted to pressuring millennials to go to college. And despite all of our moanings and groanings, we're actually pretty well paid. By 2019, households headed by millennials actually made more than silence boomers and Gen Xers, even when you correct for inflation.
[00:27:16] The last group we'll look at tonight is Gen Z. Gen Z is another large generation. They were roughly 23% of the US population in 2020.
[00:27:26] They're known for gender fluidity, known for the rise of the LGBTQ community.
[00:27:31] There's a big interest in restricting free speech and physical and emotional safety. They're racially conscious, dissatisfied, depressed, pessimistic. Sounds like a bummer.
[00:27:40] And that's what a lot of the stats say. I have also found this generation to be incredibly creative. I have found them to be very curious. I have found them to be willing and ready to get behind a cause. But I found them confused and struggling to find a cause worth getting behind.
[00:27:58] This is where the church comes in. There's some new research that's just recently come out out of England and Wales. And generally, if you look at Europe and you look at Australia, that's a little bit of a harbinger of what's going to be seen here in some of our stats. In the United States, usually we're a year or two behind some of those trends, but there's a recent rise in church attendance among Gen Z, and this is cause for great, great excitement. In 2018, just 4% of 18 to 24 year olds said they attended church at least monthly. Today it's risen to 16%, with young men increasing from 4 to 21. So young men in Gen Z are leading the way. Young women went from 3% to 12%. That's a 4 times 4x increase. And I know 12% sounds kind of sad, and it is. There's plenty of room to work. But a 4x increase is very encouraging. This is now the second most likely age group to attend church regularly. There were 3.7 million in 2018 and that has increased to 5.8 million in 2024. That's an increase of 56%. So I think there's great cause for concern and equally great cause for excitement and encouragement among the youngest generation. This is technically the youngest generation. This is the generation of my kids right now. They are known to be sometimes irritable, particularly when they don't nap or eat regularly. They're known to be curious, inquisitive, angry little fists, but also really kind and sweet.
[00:29:24] And then they start the other stuff right again. We'll see what happens with them. We don't have a lot of data right now. I want us to look at four of the. Well, there were four main revolutions that occurred particularly in the 60s and 70s, and these were first identified by Dr. Jeffrey Jensen. We're going to look in detail at two of them. The four he identified are the tech revolution, the sexual revolution, the women's movement and the youth movement. Particularly the tech revolution is interesting. Manufacturing, a manufacturing economy shifted during that time into a more knowledge based economy. Where we are today, a tech based economy. Manufacturing in 1950, it's a very different landscape today. It's more than six times the amount it was. It's grown massively, but it uses half of the workforce.
[00:30:12] And if you know about this little company called Amazon, they're doing their part to shrink that even more. If you've ever seen footage or been to an Amazon warehouse, nowadays it's massively populated by AI powered robots with a few human supervisors sprinkled in between.
[00:30:30] We need more education these days. So people go to school longer to get more education and as I mentioned before then takes longer to prepare. So family life starts later on in life.
[00:30:40] Mention the birth control pill in 1964. It broke the link between sexuality, reproduction and marriage. Most people today begin being sexually active 10 years, a decade or more before they get married.
[00:30:54] A longer period now where kids are making and breaking relationships. And in two nights on Tuesday night, we're going to talk about sexuality and technology. And there's some pretty eye opening statistics that we'll share there as well. But on average today, a young person is exposed to adult content roughly 10 years before they had their first sexual encounter with a real person. Which means a decade of pornography or lustful content teaching Them what to expect, cultivating their expectations of what sexual intimacy is supposed to be before they ever actually have an experience with a person.
[00:31:32] And we ask ourselves, how do we end up here?
[00:31:36] Well, a lot of times it's gradual. Sometimes it's not so subtle. We use this phrase a lot. Work smarter, not harder. And what we've done is we've raised a generation or two on that, that mentality.
[00:31:47] And they started growing up now in a time where things, particularly to AI, they can work real smart and not have to work real hard.
[00:31:56] And so over time, we end up raising a generation that can no longer work hard in the same ways that previous generations did.
[00:32:03] And then we wonder why it's hard for us to talk to one another because young people today won't get a job, which is true. Nobody here cuts grass. And teenage boys are missing out. Thousands of dollars in this town.
[00:32:15] Again, I'm in middle age, like, really drifting out of that into old age really quick. The more I talk, I think, what was your greatest challenge in high school or middle school? Remember that question?
[00:32:25] The challenges are the same, but the environment is a little bit different. The packaging and the voices that are allowed to be a part of their thinking today are a little bit different. And that just means that I duplicated slides. My point here is that there is nothing new under the sun. When we read in Ecclesiastes, what has been is what will be, what has been done is what will be done. And there is nothing new under the sun.
[00:32:49] We cannot allow the packaging that's a little bit different to prevent us from being in each other's lives.
[00:32:55] If you have wisdom and you live through a different time of childhood, kids today, whether they realize it or not, they still need to hear that. They need to learn that. Because as you were a child, you were trying to figure out what who you were. You were trying to figure out what your purpose was in life. You were trying to find your people. Those are the three things they're searching for as well. In a big way.
[00:33:17] This is an image of Vietnam.
[00:33:21] And for me, this is a history book.
[00:33:25] This is Forrest Gump.
[00:33:27] This is Saving Private Ryan.
[00:33:33] It's connected to a lot more movies than it is to actual personal memories. For me, Vietnam is simply history.
[00:33:43] But if you go back to when I was a junior in high school, it's in the fall, a little after 8am I was in Ms. Barmby's computer class.
[00:33:51] This image became a thing for me. This is not history.
[00:33:56] It was the first significant moment of history. And American history that I feel like I lived through.
[00:34:02] And I have a visceral reaction today when the song Where Were youe When the World Starts Turning comes on. I immediately go back to that place that the hair on my arm stands up. I can walk you through every moment of that day.
[00:34:15] My teacher in second block, for whatever reason, didn't let us watch the news that day. Every other class did.
[00:34:22] We didn't learn a lot book learning that day, but we learned that the world had changed. For me, this is a memory.
[00:34:29] So when you talk about when you grew up, for you it's a memory.
[00:34:33] But for emerging generations, it's at best history.
[00:34:37] Everything I know about the Korean War, I learned from Hawkeye and Radar on the TV show mash.
[00:34:44] But some of you guys lived through watching that on the news. What's crazy, what blows my mind is that we have just watched multiple conflicts in the Middle east and we didn't watch them and hear about them through the lens of Walter Cronkite.
[00:34:57] We watched it unfold through the personal cell phone of a thousand people that we'll never know.
[00:35:04] We didn't go to the news outlets. We just saw people, regular people like you and me.
[00:35:10] We've got footage now from a whole bunch of people that had their camcorders out in New York City that day, but it wasn't live streamed like it is today.
[00:35:19] So imagine how difficult it was for you to reconcile what was going on with Vietnam.
[00:35:25] Who are the good guys in this conflict? Why are all the adults in the room always so spun up about it?
[00:35:33] Now fast forward to today.
[00:35:35] Not only do they hear the adults in their room, in their home, at the family gatherings, but every person on the planet has been given a megaphone. And I used to say microphone, but that's inaccurate. A megaphone is, is a lot harder to understand right when you're outside.
[00:35:53] I mean, it's just like Charlie Brown's whole family talking, like all the adults. I have no idea what they just said, but they have my attention.
[00:36:02] Now that we're all online. We all get to talk in all caps. And if you talk louder, then everybody understand that's just not the way it works.
[00:36:09] So imagine how their younger generations now are growing up trying to reconcile all this thing. They have fewer tools in their toolbox emotionally and everything else around them has scaled up.
[00:36:22] We have to teach them how to learn how to think and you can't do that from afar.
[00:36:27] Why is this important? Why do we start with a study on generations? Because we have to learn to listen to each other.
[00:36:35] I don't listen to strangers in the same way that I listen to people that are in my life every day.
[00:36:41] I listen to my coach a lot easier than I listen to the other team's coach. Unless I'm trying to, like, steal the signs or something, right? Because I know my coach.
[00:36:52] I knew his plan for me was victory.
[00:36:55] When we all grew up on the family farm, the people that were answering questions like, who am I? Where do I belong? What's my purpose in life?
[00:37:02] Generally, they probably knew me. They lived in geographical proximity, which means that they loved me, they understood me, they knew my family.
[00:37:11] It was either a parent, a grandparent, a cousin, or a neighbor that I knew, because when the neighbor's cow got out of the fence, I would go and help put him back in the fence and vice versa.
[00:37:21] Our communities look a little different today.
[00:37:24] Here at Madison, we've been doing an emphasis on fellowship and hospitality. We've challenged ourselves to just go next door and to share a meal with our neighbors because. Because we don't do that well these days.
[00:37:36] Why do we start here so that we can end better?
[00:37:40] Because isolation is a choice, and the loss of another generation is unacceptable. And that's also a choice for us to refuse to allow them to try and navigate this age by themselves.
[00:37:55] It's not the right choice. We need each other. We have to learn from each other. A couple of passages that I want us to look at here, and I promise for the rest of what we're going to be doing here, we're going to have a lot more scripture in our lessons. Tonight was just a lot of data, a lot of information, but second Corinthians. Excuse me, first Corinthians, chapter 12. We have Paul writing to a group of people that are really struggling with division. They're struggling with understanding their identity as in Christ and not in another person. In verse 12, it says, for just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many are one body, so it is with Christ. For in one spirit, we were all baptized into one body. Jews are Greeks, slaves are free, and all were made to drink of one spirit. For the body does not consist of one member, but of many. I think if Paul were here in this class today, he would say that, for the body does not consist of one generation, but of many.
[00:38:52] If the foot should say, because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body, that would not make it any less a part of the body. For a millennial to say to a silent generation that I have no need of you is ridiculous.
[00:39:05] For a boomer to say to a Gen Z, I have no time for you is devastating.
[00:39:13] The eye cannot say to the hand, I have no need. On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable. And on those parts of the body that we think less honorable, we bestow the greater hon. And our unpresentable parts are treated with greater modesty, which are more presentable parts do not require.
[00:39:30] But God has so composed the body, but that the. Excuse me, man. That was going to be. That was it right there. I just missed it. He has so composed the body, giving greater honor to the part that lacked it. That there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffer, all suffers. And if one member is honored, we all rejoice together. There is no room and there is no time for us to separate one another based solely off of life experience.
[00:40:01] That sounds as ridiculous to me as ascribing a certain amount of value to a person based solely off of the amount of pigment in their skin. My skin changes colors in the summer. Does that change my value? No. And we know that that's ludicrous. To think that the book of James hits that squarely in the eyes. It says, if you base judgment and you judge someone and base their values solely off of how they present themselves, then that is despicable.
[00:40:25] That undermines the gospel. Because in the gospel, we are all one. There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave, nor free, male nor female. For we are all one in Christ.
[00:40:36] Identity, community, and purpose. We're going to talk about those three things a lot, because those are the three things that we're all in search of.
[00:40:43] Many of us have found answers to those questions, but many are still searching. And when we ignore one another, when we allow technology or our view of technology, even the volume of the music, to separate us, then we allow Satan to win.
[00:40:58] Romans 3:23. You might be familiar with that passage. It says, for all have sinned and all have fallen short of the glory of God.
[00:41:06] That means even the greatest generation needed Christ and even the millennials. For all of our faults, we need Christ and everybody in between and everybody before and everybody after.
[00:41:18] We need each other. We need Christ.
[00:41:20] And so technology can be used to unite us, to help us better communicate. But we have a choice in whether it divides us. Tomorrow night, we're going to spend time looking at a lot of recent research that's come out that has talked, has really shown us some of the symptoms that have been around, particularly due to social media, due to being online and the way screens are used.
[00:41:44] The next night, on Tuesday night, we're going to talk, as I mentioned before, about how sexuality has been redefined and impacted and shaped by technology.
[00:41:53] And then on Wednesday night, we're going to take a breath and smile more. We're going to spend some time talking. How do we cultivate conversations with younger generations, with the emerging generations, about technology?
[00:42:05] It's not exclusively a conversation for parents, although there's going to be tremendous value there, I think, but it's for all of us. I don't care how old you are. I don't care what your experience was growing up. You live in the digital age, and that means that we all need to be better informed about the digital age. And that's what I hope this does. I hope this opens some conversations for you in your life. I hope it makes you more aware of the people around you. And I hope that you see someone in a different generation a little more human and a little bit more approachable if you don't know what their experience was.
[00:42:36] Do what my kids do all the time.
[00:42:38] Why?
[00:42:40] Why?
[00:42:41] Why? Ask questions. Be curious. There's a great TED Lasso quote. He actually is quoting someone else and he says, don't be judgmental. Be curious. That's pretty good advice. I like it. So your homework tonight is to find someone that you think might be older than you. Don't ask them. Don't do that.
[00:42:58] You're gonna sabotage yourself right out of.
[00:43:00] Trust me on that. But just assume and just say, hey, what was your high school experience like? And then if they bring up, well, everything was in black and white, then, you know, you know, you kind of have a gauge. But ask what their favorite TV show was growing up and then share yours as well. If you had to get up and you had to hold, you were the sibling that had to hold the aluminum foil on the rabbit ears. You got something to talk about. If they don't know what rabbit ears are, they think it's a fuzzy little animal. You got a lot to talk about. All right, if you're joining us online, we are extremely grateful and very honored that you would join us as well. We're going to be back here tomorrow night at the same time, the same as Tuesday and Wednesday. And if this study piques your interest, then beginning the first Wednesday in August, go in August, September and October. We're going to do a deeper dive into a lot of these topics on Wednesday nights in adult class upstairs. So I hope you'll come back and join us for that. We're going to close with the prayer and then after that we will be dismissed for our snacks.
[00:43:54] Bow with me, please.
[00:43:55] Father in heaven, we are grateful for the opportunity to gather in your name tonight and thank you for every person that's here, for every person that may be joining us online or that may watch in the future, I pray that you would help us to be better informed, to be a little wiser when we look at other people that may not look like or sound like us, folks that may have had a different experience growing up than we did.
[00:44:17] Help us to not be judgmental of that.
[00:44:19] Help us to be curious.
[00:44:21] And I pray that that curiosity leads to relationship. I pray that that relationship with another person ultimately leads to a deeper relationship with you.
[00:44:30] Father, you have given us your son and you've given us your word and the gospel is true and right for every generation. Help us to do everything we can to make sure that we don't allow Satan to win.
[00:44:41] And help us to use technology to glorify you, to grow your kingdom, to not use it for evil and to not use it for division. It has been great for us to be together tonight. We thank you for the food that has been prepared for us and we thank you for providing it to us. Thank you for hearing and answering our prayer tonight. In Christ's name, amen.
