[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.
[00:00:37] Thank you so much for joining us tonight. This is the first night of our study of Analog faith in Digital Babylon. We did this class a couple of years ago. A few things have changed since then, and so we felt like it was probably a good idea to kind of do a refresher. And so if you have any questions, comments, and we aren't able to get to those during class, especially for those of you joining us online, we we have some folks that are trying to watch the online comments and take note of that and as best we can, engage with those in real time. But if for some reason that you're not able to get that thought addressed in class, then find me afterwards and we'll make sure and try to incorporate all the thoughts. There's a lot that goes into this idea of technology and faith, and I think a lot of times we find ourselves in a situation that we didn't intend, but we found ourselves there gradually. We've got a couple of questions here. The first thing that we want to do tonight is we want to kind of get an idea of what our class looks like from an age standpoint. So on your phone there, you should be able to follow along with the slides on the screen and you should have some options there to let us know what generation you're a part of. This is Anonymous, so no ages will be revealed publicly, but it'll give us an idea of kind of what the makeup of this room is. And I find this to be a really interesting exercise. You don't have to keep pushing the thumbs there, but if you hate me, feel free to continue to do so.
[00:01:59] There's about eight of you right now that I know. Those are y'. Alls. That's right.
[00:02:02] All right, we've got 100 out of 115, so we'll wait for 15 more folks. As you can see, it's kind of populating there, which is a pretty cool. In real time, most of our audience tonight is Gen Z, 39% millennial, 33%. I went and looked at it last year or two years ago when we did this class and the millennials were the major population. We had about 43% millennials. So that number has dropped and the young people are taking over also. Silent generation, you don't have to stand up, but you scanned a QR code and you were represented.
[00:02:38] I just want to say I love you and I thank you.
[00:02:41] That's wonderful, wonderful. And if you find me afterwards, I'll take you to lunch at Morrison's. All right, Boomers. We've got Boomers.
[00:02:53] Hopefully nobody heard that. Boomer generation.
[00:02:57] These age demographics that specific years are based off of a book by Gene Twenge called Generations and then the subtitle. I can never remember the real differences between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers in Silence, and what they mean for America's future. Gene Twenge has become fairly famous over the last two years. The book was published in 23, and she, along with Jonathan Haidt, you probably have heard his name quite a bit over the last couple of years as well, have partnered together and produced a lot of really good research. She has used the largest data set that we have to draw her conclusions and publish those in that book. Some really, really interesting trends.
[00:03:33] The reason we begin with this topic is that I think that there is a generation gap. But I think most of that generation gap oftentimes is perceived.
[00:03:44] If you walk into a room and you make an immediate judgment on someone based solely off of how old they appear, then we're in dangerous territory, particularly in the church.
[00:03:56] We do some things here at Madison that have the potential to divide us, a consequence that we're not intending. For instance, on Sunday nights when you come here for Bible study, we divide our Bible studies based off of general life stage. Nobody's at the door checking your id, but based off of general life stage because we believe it's been helpful for most folks when you come to a large place. By almost all accounts, Madison is a pretty large congregation, biggest congregation I've ever been associated with.
[00:04:24] And so we wanted to try to find some smaller entry points.
[00:04:28] So the idea is, when you come to Bible class on Sunday night, you have at least one thing in common with most people in that room, and that's usually a helpful thought.
[00:04:37] Where it falls short is that if your life circumstance doesn't Fit nice and neatly in the title of that particular class.
[00:04:45] And so we know that there are some shortcomings. But this chart here shows you that there's not just one generation that's a part of this church. To me, that's a sign of a healthy church.
[00:04:56] We need all parts of the body working together. So that's kind of the basis of our discussion. This next question is, in what year did you first receive a smartphone?
[00:05:06] Please use numbers. Try to find something between 1985 and 2025. If you were using a smartphone before 1985, this is a church building. You should never lie in church.
[00:05:17] But this will be an interesting one to see, kind of where that number lies.
[00:05:25] There you go. So smartphone. This means you had a mobile device, BlackBerry, Nokia, that you could send not just a telephone call or a text message, but also receive email or some other kind of connect to the Internet.
[00:05:38] You may have had the anthracite and black BlackBerry. You may have had the blue and gray BlackBerry. You may have had a Nokia where all you could play was Snake. And this particular question probably doesn't reach you.
[00:05:51] Also, once again, 1985. Thank you, Sonny Burch. That's my guess on that one.
[00:05:58] 85 being one of the greatest years in American history, for obvious reasons. All right, we're getting close. 107 out of 118.
[00:06:07] So 15 folks have said here, and for some reason, I thought that this would show me the answers.
[00:06:14] Let's see. Nope.
[00:06:16] Is Will Waldron in here? He's not. Thank you, Will, for leading me out to dry.
[00:06:22] Okay, so the correct answer was 2001.
[00:06:25] That's when I got mine.
[00:06:27] So I'm gonna say that's somewhere around 2012 is what we're seeing. This spike looked based off of two years ago. That was the most common answer between 2012 and 2014, which makes sense because in the year 2012, it was the first year in American history where more than 50% of teenagers had access to a smartphone and therefore access to all the app stores that the app stores had to offer. I believe it was 2007 is when the iPhone was introduced. And by the time you get to 2012, you have multiple millions of apps that are now available as the app store continued. Excuse me. By 2013, you had over a million apps available in the app store. So the access here is kind of interesting. When people of all ages started to get their phones. We're looking at a shift of generations here. When you were growing up, you may have grown. I put a poll on my instagram last night to see what generation you most identified with. If you grew up going to the arcade, mostly playing, like, pinball.
[00:07:26] Quick show of hands.
[00:07:29] Thank you, both of you. Okay, a few of you.
[00:07:31] When I was growing up, I was born in 1985. When I was growing up, we mostly went. By the time we got to junior high or middle school, most of the going to the arcade was for birthday parties.
[00:07:43] I grew up playing probably just as much games as my dad did. My dad played a lot of pinball growing up. His older brother, actually later in life, had his own pinball machine. So we'd go to visit Uncle Dean.
[00:07:56] It was just great. You didn't have to put a quarter in or anything.
[00:07:59] Pinball wizard. That's what I felt like.
[00:08:02] Three of you got that.
[00:08:03] When I was growing up, the arcade, it came home.
[00:08:07] It came into my living room in the form of a console, a game console. I didn't have to now go to Diamond Gems or Aladdin's Castle, because I could access it there in, I think, sixth grade. We had. At the end of the school year, we had this activity where we had earned money throughout the year and we got to spend it all. Well, I bought three months of Sega Channel because nobody else bid on it, and I loved it. It was great. That was the beginning of streaming.
[00:08:31] So the activity itself is very similar. Playing games and playing games with friends, but the packaging and the access is very, very different.
[00:08:40] I have a theory that all of us have experienced mostly the same things in life at their spiritual core. And that theory comes from the book of Ecclesiastes, which says there is nothing new under the sun.
[00:08:52] I do believe that the things that we struggle with today, identity, truth, sexuality, things like lust, things like anger, wrath, malice, these sound kind of like Bible verses. They have been around. The struggles have been around for ages and generations.
[00:09:08] When we think that our experience is completely different from someone else simply because we are growing up in a different age. I think we're letting Satan win.
[00:09:17] There are some distinctive differences, and we're going to talk about those. But the differences are more in the packaging than they are in the spiritual truth and the spiritual challenge at their core. We're going to look over the course of this quarter at a lot of data and research. Things like anxiety, reports of anxiety, depression, suicide, ideation.
[00:09:35] I believe those are symptoms.
[00:09:37] Those are devastating emotional challenges that people like the US Surgeon General have taken note of. But they are the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the spiritual challenges that exist in our world today. And I think scripture is extremely.
[00:09:51] In the 1980s, if you were to go back today, you would say, well, this is what Riz looks like. Short shorts, mustache, Hawaiian shirt.
[00:10:00] He was a handsome man. Still is, just to be quite honest.
[00:10:03] Unfortunately, I blame Tom Cruise and Maverick and Top Gun for setting us back about 30 to 40 years in men's grooming. Because still today this is kind of what Riz looks like. But throwing in a mustache and throwing in a mullet and it's back.
[00:10:18] My boys play baseball, so at the park there's always mullets to be found all around.
[00:10:23] Thought we moved on. Billy Ray, my question for you tonight is how does your relationship with technology impact your relationship to other people?
[00:10:34] If you grow up and you hear your parents, your grandparents talk about watching Bonanza, watching the Duke, you know, watching the old westerns, and you go and you watch those and they're in black and white, monochrome.
[00:10:45] There's a visceral reaction to that. As a teenager or a 40 year old recovering teenager, it's like, man, that's old.
[00:10:53] At least make it in color. Like first episodes of Gilligan's island versus Gilligan's Island. In color. Right.
[00:11:00] My kids right now love randomly, they love Bewitched and there's two different seasons of that. They won't watch the ones in black and white, they'll watch the ones in color.
[00:11:09] Because everything we've seen, obviously everything we've experienced is in color, but also everything we've experienced online now for the last several years, last few decades, has been in color.
[00:11:21] That makes a difference to your experience and most of all your perception.
[00:11:26] So I think it's a good place to start. I think it's a reasonable question to ask. We're going to look at a few of the main generations, beginning with the silence. Tonight's going to be filled with a lot of data and a lot of information. And if you've been a part of this class before, you know that we getting to a destination. And from this point forward we'll have a lot more scripture that are the core of our studies. But tonight we need to get a little bit of information out in front. The oldest among us right now are members of the silent Generation born between 1925 and 1945. Some of them are coming up on their 100th birthday.
[00:11:55] Silents were twice as likely as those in the greatest generation to believe that traditional gender roles were not necessarily better. Silents found themselves in this strange place. There was a Time magazine article in the 1950s that gave them this title that said where are they?
[00:12:10] Well, if you look at the nine people pictured on there, pretty prominent voices and faces. So I think that article was a little premature. But the point was, what would happen is the Silents found themselves in between two really big difficult generations to be sandwiched between. You've got the greatest generation, which simply in the name means that the next generation to come along, you ain't gonna be that great.
[00:12:34] You're in the shadow of the greatest generation. I think sometimes there's a tendency to almost idolize that generation. And I get it rightly so to some degree because they went through things like the Depression, multiple world wars, they went through a lot and they came out on the other side. And so that title comes from a place of reverence. But what that title does is it also casts a shadow to where the next generation can't possibly live up to the standard set by the greatest. If they're the greatest, then there's no other greatest, right? The next one's at least pretty good at best.
[00:13:07] So the Silents found themselves in that particular place.
[00:13:10] There's this war going on between the greatest generation and the boomers. When they get a little bit louder, the silence, we're caught in between that. Within two generations, opinions had flipped, with most of the Greatest generations supporting traditional gender roles and idea of marriage. And most Boomers disagreeing.
[00:13:27] Silence ultimately would lean more towards the Boomers. So there's this cultural tug of war that would go on among these generations. They had very early marriages and they had lots of kids. They married earlier in the 1950s than they did in the 1930s. They were younger than any generation in the 20th century to marry.
[00:13:48] They married youngest of all the generations. Nearly half of new brides in the 1950s were teenagers.
[00:13:55] In 1956, the median age of first time brides reached an all time low of 20.1 years.
[00:14:01] So nearly half of them were teenagers when they got married.
[00:14:05] Several years ago. I got married several years ago, yeah, I got married at the age of 26.
[00:14:14] I had friends that got married as teenagers may or may not have had to have their spouse sign their report card. And a lot of times we had these generational differences. And I would hear from one particular friend, like, man, when are you getting married? I don't know. I really want to know too. It's not for a lack of trying.
[00:14:31] But getting married at 26 versus getting married at 19, it's a very different stage of life. One particular friend, by the time he was 26, had been married for almost seven years, had two or three kids, had a master's degree, was teaching at a college level.
[00:14:49] I was watching YouTube.
[00:14:51] Those are two different. Not just life stages. Those are two different life experiences. And so sometimes we would have a little bit of conflict of like, hey, man, it's not just a matter of going and finding your wife, like in your desk next door, you know, like in school. It's just a different experience. And shortly after that, that was sort of the front end of online dating, which is a completely foreign experience to those that grew up among this generation. What you mean you met them online, you didn't know who, you didn't see them in person. Like, y' all dated for months or years even.
[00:15:19] But that's a very common thing today. So the experience is different. The pursuit, a loving marriage, companionship, the same. The packaging, very different.
[00:15:29] There was the post war baby boom. So in 1957, the birth rate was 3.8 kids per woman. I don't know how you get to 0.8, but they did. Siblings and two child families. Think about this. Children that grew up with one sibling were now parents of three and four kids.
[00:15:45] That's a big shift in family dynamics.
[00:15:48] Divorce rates shot up between the 1960s and the 1970s. Most divorces between occur between the ages of 25 and 49.
[00:15:56] Silent started the divorce trend, and boomers kept it going. Boomers are kind of credited as really starting divorce popularity, but we see that it really started among the silent generation. Some of the contributing factors to this were a massive rise in individualism. And you see that shift take place particularly in a big way in the boomers.
[00:16:16] Technology in the home allowed more women to join the workforce and achieve job equality. There was less emphasis on the family as it had been in the past.
[00:16:24] Remarriage was very common. Six out of 10 men and five out of 10 women remarried within five years of getting divorced in this generation. Think of people like Elizabeth Taylor, married eight times. Johnny Carson, I think was four times, Larry King, another eight timer. Silents were the most marrying generation in the 20th century.
[00:16:41] So they believed in marriage. They got divorced, but they didn't go and live with somebody. They would remarry again and again and again and again. You see that kind of reverse today.
[00:16:53] There's not. Remarriage is not as common as it once was, particularly with this generation. Living together before and after. Divorce, even sometimes is more common today than it was during the rise of this generation. Silence.
[00:17:07] Excuse me. They were the Most marrying generation 20th century. So how does that Impact our perception of marriage today.
[00:17:13] Completely different views coming to the marriage idea here.
[00:17:18] They were more educated. Think about this. They were the first generation to have a majority of their group graduate high school.
[00:17:26] The first generation to have the majority of them, not all of them, but the majority, graduate high school. When I graduated in 2003, the expectation there was everybody graduates high school and then most everybody goes to college and then most everybody gets a job because they have a college degree. Completely foreign idea. Just a couple of generations prior to that.
[00:17:46] It's a big change. It's a reflection of the change in our economy. We were moving from a manufacturing economy where you could get a job at 12, a full time job, and many of your grandparents or great grandparents probably did start working in the fields or working in a factory in young teenage years. You can't do that anymore.
[00:18:04] Not just child labor laws, but from an equipment standpoint or equipping standpoint, we live in a more technology based economy. So it takes longer to get prepared. Education wise, they have consistent political power. Mitch McConnell, Trent Lott, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Newt Gingrich. You think of folks like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sandra Day o', Connor, Anthony Kennedy and Antonin Scalia. Some of these folks have been in political power for like 150 years. It feels like they've been around my entire life. And the most prominent voices, also with their experience growing up, they have been the most influential at shaping legislation, legislation. Oftentimes we think of it as creating culture, but it's really kind of driven by culture. Right. For instance, we don't put a stoplight up at an intersection until we have a bunch of accidents and realize, oh, we should do something about that.
[00:18:54] So legislation more often than not responds to culture. And these voices have been the most prominent for the last several decades.
[00:19:02] They're known as being conservative compared to other generations, stable, calm and trusting. They're more likely to trust someone which has actually led to greater exploitation later in life directly due to technology. How many of you have gotten a voicemail for someone that wants to sell you a car warranty or some wonderful prints in Uganda has this load of treasure for you, or somebody needs help, but you know it's a robot, but your grandparents don't know it's a robot and so they send hundreds or thousands of dollars. It's a very common occurrence.
[00:19:36] So that trusting nature that they grew up, it sounded like a person. Yeah, but it's not.
[00:19:41] That's a very, very different experience.
[00:19:44] The next up, next generation, we have Are the boomer generations the boomers? That's Gen X. That went too far.
[00:19:50] Way too far.
[00:19:51] No, just in wrong order.
[00:19:54] It says X, doesn't it? I'm tired, guys. Alright, the boomers should be right there. Here we go. They were born between 1946 and 1964. What's interesting is that five out of the last six presidents of the United States have been boomers. We've had one silent president and that was Joe Biden. Took us a while to get there.
[00:20:15] And last year or the last election are two options.
[00:20:18] Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. Donald Trump born in 1946, Harris born in 1964.
[00:20:25] So how were they pitted against each other in the election? One that was way old and one that was way young, but technically a part of the same generation. It's really interesting how we can kind of see the bookends in a different light.
[00:20:38] They're large generation, 21% of the US population still in 2021, before the baby boom, our country's birth rate had been in decline for over 200 years.
[00:20:48] So when the baby boomers came on board, this was when our soldiers came back from World War II. And you see a huge spike, particularly in the mid-50s, like 1957, when it gets really, really high there. They became more comfortable with drug use. Throughout the course of their life, particularly in adolescence and early adulthood, choice was at the center of the boomer experience. They questioned things like the military draft. It had never been questioned before, not in a big way, but boomers questioned the fact that I shouldn't have to just automatically go and fight. I should have a choice in that. So you see choice becoming a big part of their experience, which then become a big part of legislation and the overall culture.
[00:21:26] There was a big striving for gender equality came about under the boomers. They made the core values of their experience growing up counterculture. That was kind of what they were after.
[00:21:39] There was an increase in mental distress and depression. They were dominant political chameleons. They had fewer kids and they had more divorce. So they took it to the next level. In a nationwide survey that was conducted in 1967, 85% of US adults said that premarital sex was wrong.
[00:21:55] Say that one more time. 85% of U.S. adults surveyed in 1967 said that premarital sex was wrong. Twelve years later, in 1979, that number plummeted to 37%.
[00:22:09] So the sexual revolution was a big deal.
[00:22:13] And perception and ideas.
[00:22:15] What home should look like, consequently, what church should look like, what should be accepted. What shouldn't be accepted was challenged during the boomers in a really big way. The sexual revolution was ultimately a battle between the silents and the boomers. And the boomers won. Clearly, staying single longer became a lot more acceptable as marriage was no longer the mandate for was no longer a mandate, but rather a choice. Particularly with the introduction of the birth control pill in 1960, removed what was conceived or perceived as the.
[00:22:48] There's a joke in there too. What was perceived as the greatest consequence to sexual activity was to get pregnant.
[00:22:54] Well, now that has been removed. There's a very different attitude towards sex and equality, particularly.
[00:23:01] There's a lot of information, particularly Twinky points out a lot of the perceptions that were slanted towards women and not men simply because they were the ones that got pregnant. And we still see some of that today. But that really kind of got ingrained in the 50s, moving into the 60s.
[00:23:16] They tried to redefine the word is, if you remember that in the early 90s, one of our very first boomer president. So whenever boomers try to tell me it's the millennial's fault, this is like, this is my one card. Well, we didn't start changing words until you guys did. You tried to redefine is. Bill Clinton got caught in some indiscretion in the Oval Office at one of his hearings. His response was, well, it depends on what your definition of the word is. Is.
[00:23:40] It means is. It always has, it always will. But we find ourselves today talking about pronouns and other words that are being redefined.
[00:23:50] But that's not new. It's been around for generations.
[00:23:54] They pioneered the idea that it was okay to talk about just about anything out in the open. You look at the Oprah Winfrey Show. That's one reason why that caught on, because everything was okay to talk about. That was new. That was different, particularly different from the silent and the greatest generation experience.
[00:24:08] But even Oprah had a voice because of television, because of technology. It amplified everything. So that technology, particularly in the 40s, the 50s, we go from radio to television, go from black and white TV to color tv. We get two or three channels to now more and more channels, more and more voices, everything gets amplified.
[00:24:28] The world changed with the rise of the boomers.
[00:24:31] Social movements and protests of the 60s started to kind of decline into the 70s.
[00:24:36] So more emphasis moved from changing the world of the 60s, a collective unity there, to more than the 70s, more of changing myself.
[00:24:46] There was the rise of the self help genre of books. It wasn't really A thing until the 1970s. If you look in the Google Book database, which is a massive database where Google has scanned in all of these books and they've cataloged different terms.
[00:24:59] The words identity and self, especially identity, began to surge in the 1960s into the 70s.
[00:25:07] If there's a word today that is the most common buzzword, it's identity, right?
[00:25:12] Nothing new. We're talking 60 years ago.
[00:25:15] Again, nothing new under the sun.
[00:25:18] We'll look at Gen X if we'll go back this way. Gen X is an interesting group because they're both analog and digital communicators. They were the first generation on the Internet, but they were really the ones that kind of created the foundation of the Internet that we have today. They kind of created the marketplace. They didn't grow up on the Internet, but as they were coming of age in their 20s, they certainly found it.
[00:25:39] They were the first generation to use it, in the last generation to have a mostly analog childhood. They were also the last one to use the rotary phones, which I just think is noteworthy. But they were also the last ones to go through high school without the Internet.
[00:25:53] When I was in high school in the early 2000s, we used a lot less Dewey Decimal and a lot more Alabama Virtual Library. Shout out to Dewey, may he live forever in a card catalog somewhere.
[00:26:06] But you truly had to change your skill set. You had to learn how to research online. You had to learn how to use this database. What was the database? For those of us in high school, it was a new experience, but now it's completely common. We hardly ever go to a physical library and pull out a physical car catalog because the car catalog is not there. They look it up on a computer, they scan it in. So that experience is very, very different. YouTube was started by three Gen Xers. The first web browser, Netscape, which was first called Mosaic when it came out. Written by a Gen Xer. EBay, PayPal, those are Elon Musk, MySpace, Twitter, Uber Napster, all of these startups were started by Gen Xers. So they created the platforms that millennials then would come on board as the first members of the marketplace, the first consumers of the digital space.
[00:26:54] They helped create the foundation of our world today. They also shared a lot of pop culture. They learned the facts of life. By watching the facts of Life, people like Dr. Huxtable became a surrogate father figure. As divorce continued to rise and more split families, more families without a father figure became common. Then you started to see some of that reflected in television and entertainment as well.
[00:27:17] The Atari game console brought video games into the living room. So they moved from passively watching TV to now they could control what was on tv. And that's a significant element when you think about your kids today and children today. In our house, it's a fight over the remote. It was that way growing up as well. But there's a difference in all of us looking up at the television in the living room and having a shared experience versus me holding the device in my hand and being solely in control of that. It's a different experience. And we start to see some of that occurring with this generation. Nearly three times as many children in 1980 were living with a divorced mom or dad than had in 1960. So in 20 years, we tripled the amount of divorced families. Divorced families grew to become the new normal. You had the rise and the fall of the latchkey kid. You remember that phrase, kids that would go to school, ride the bus home.
[00:28:07] But now, because we either have both parents working or we only have a one parent home and they're working full time, they would come home and no one was there, no adult was there. So they leave a key under the mat or under the flower pot and they'd have an hour, two or three hours by themselves.
[00:28:22] There's a lot of growing up that happens when you're by yourself, right? There's a lot of responsibility. If you want a snack, you got to make a snack. If there's a scary noise outside, you've got to figure out how to deal with that. All the different things that come with, well, come with being on your own and independent.
[00:28:38] It was interesting that schools didn't, they didn't respond to that initially. They didn't recognize the need. You didn't start seeing after school programs offered until like the 1990s.
[00:28:48] So there's this specific window that falls under Gen X where it's a very different experience where there's not at least one parent at home waiting. And there's also not an after school option and they're not working.
[00:29:00] So they're at home left to their own devices.
[00:29:03] Boomers and Gen Xers were raised in this fast life strategy. The most needed to get to work sooner than the millennials and the generations that would come after them. So the pursuit was to get educated and get a job, or to just get a job.
[00:29:16] There was a shorter childhood that started to occur with Gen X. They married later than any generation in American history.
[00:29:24] Boomers married on average at the age of 20 for women and 23 for men.
[00:29:29] Gen X married on average, 25 for women and 27 for men. Today, the median average age for a woman to have her first marriage has risen to 28 in the year 2023, while for men it's 30.
[00:29:45] So over the course of a couple of generations, we've moved from 20 and 23 to 28 and 30.
[00:29:50] That's a big change.
[00:29:52] There's a lower age for their first sexual experience and a higher age for their first marriage.
[00:29:57] Having children was no longer tied to marriage.
[00:30:00] Living together became much more acceptable. You think of TV shows that were popular among this generation. Friends, they all lived together. Seinfeld, they all slept around together. We'll come back to those in a few weeks.
[00:30:10] But you just look at entertainment and it's one of those where art imitates life or life imitates art, it's one of the way, whichever way it's supposed to be. There's a key generational shift that occurs during this time. 11%. Only 11% of women aged 19 to 44. So those in the boomer and silent generation had lived with an unmarried partner before their first marriage. 11%.
[00:30:33] By the time you get to Gen X and the Millennials, it had risen to 69%.
[00:30:39] So as ideas change, as philosophies change, so do relationship dynamics. Gen X was the first generation where having divorced parents was considered a normal thing.
[00:30:51] Got a high self esteem, and there's a big focus on stealth. During this generation, they were exploring the great wild west online. And so a lot of innovation came about because of that. There was also a rise in materialistic lifestyles. You think of lifestyles of the rich and famous, some of those shows that really showcased on mtv, you had cribs, all these different celebrities now that had access to everybody's living room. They would show their entire extravagant lifestyles, not just what you would see in newspaper, but you had more access. Because entertainment becomes increasingly more important in the life of families. There's a growing divide between the rich and the poor.
[00:31:28] They're known as tough. You got the rise of grunge and hip hop becomes a major factor in their entertainment. And they have these super predators that become common when you think of TV shows. And particularly as you move into the millennial childhood, TV shows like America's Most Wanted and Unsolved Mysteries become very, very influential.
[00:31:51] So now we get to my people, the Millennials. We are the most planned generation in American history and the most wanted generation. There was a rise in birth control and fertility technology during that time. That proves that they're Relentlessly self confident lived through the 911 housing bubble.com boom. After 2000, the first singular pronouns began to take off in literature and decrease. There's a decrease in collective pronouns.
[00:32:16] You can actually chart some of this. There is children spent less time doing homework, but grades remain the same or went up. So as grades go up, study time goes down. That's not the way it happened in my life, but documented wise from a research standpoint, there is a true data centric reason for grade inflation that happened for millennials.
[00:32:40] When you encounter, when you, I guess, access achievement, when you achieve without having to go through difficulty, you don't develop resilience, you develop a sense of entitlement. And then when you do encounter difficulties, there's usually a disaster looming. And that's what we see among this particular generation. That along with the timing of social media saw a huge rise in anxiety, depression and suicide ideation.
[00:33:09] There were digital natives. This generation came of age as the Internet was advancing. So analog methods of entertainment and music gave way to streaming. You think of platforms like Limewire and Napster.
[00:33:19] Metallica fell out of favor because Lars Ulrich really wanted all his money and we wanted it for free. Most of you don't know the pain of sitting through six hours of waiting for a Dave Matthews Band album to download, only to realize at the very end that it was mislabeled as a Conway Twitty album.
[00:33:36] Gut wrenching is the only way I can describe that.
[00:33:40] But this was ushering in the age of streaming. It was robust and it was not robust. Excuse me. It was long and it was arduous. But it eventually got us to where we are today. 2004 thefacebook.com comes out.
[00:33:52] College morons could live on forever on YouTube. Now things that happen with very precarious phones, as we would call them now, low resolution phones. It only would get better and better and more clear. More and more data would be online. More and more of our lives would be documented highly educated. They were the first generation with more than one out of three had a four year degree by their late twenties.
[00:34:15] So you see this idea of more education being needed for a more technology based economy.
[00:34:21] Politically they were participatory as adults, not as high schoolers, but increasing numbers as adults. They kind of got into politics later in life.
[00:34:30] Let's see, in 2020 they were more likely to vote liberal Democrat or libertarian than older generations conservative Republicans. Six out of ten identify as Democrat and four out of ten identify as Republican.
[00:34:42] So for nearly all the millennial's life America has been deadlocked politically. And as more of these social media opportunities came for everyone to voice their opinion, the more that deadlock just amplified and the polarization and the politicalization of everything has been a major part of their experience.
[00:35:03] All right, we'll move on because we're running out of time. Gen Z, we don't have. We're gaining more and more information about Gen Z right now. What we know about them is 23% of the US population in 2020. That's a huge number. It's a massive, massive group of people born between 95 and 2012.
[00:35:20] The world seems to be as uncertain as it's ever been. They have grown up completely immersed in a digital landscape. Many of them have grown up online, spent more time online by the age of 10 than their ancestors spent in their entire lifetime, than even their parents spent in their lifetime.
[00:35:38] They're growing up slowly. There's a delayed adulthood that has been tracked. Now they're drinking, having sex later in life, driving later in life. The milestones of rites of passage have changed. For me, it was car keys, but for my kids it'll be a cell phone. That's a very different experience.
[00:35:53] But I have also found them to be ready to find a cause to promote. I found them very, very creative. And just recently, just about a month ago, we had some new research coming out of England and Wales that revealed a rise in church attendance among this generation. In 2018, just 4% of 18 to 24 year olds said they attended church at least monthly. Today that number has risen to 16%. That's 4x, with young men increasing from 4 to 21%. So more than five times young women from 3 to 12, another 4x. This is now the second most likely age group to attend church regularly. 3.7 million in 2018 and increased to 5.8 in 2024. So an increase of 56%. There is reason to be very excited and to see younger generations with confidence and joy.
[00:36:44] When we look at all of these generations, we've got one more generation, Gen Alpha. My kids, I don't know what they're going to be. We don't have, we don't have data on them yet, but they're growing up in a time where social media is being legislated differently, where there will be age limits on access, the way that we had age limits on alcohol and cigarettes. They have that on social media and on their devices. So it's interesting to see where this might lead. There are four major revolutions that occurred during the 60s and 70s, the tech revolution, sexual revolution, women's movement and youth movement. I want to look at two of those very quickly. As we mentioned with the tech revolution, excuse me, manufacturing economy moved to a knowledge based economy. Manufacturing today is six times the amount it was in 1950, but it uses half of the amount of workforce and I think that number will continue to drop. If you visited the Amazon plant here and other places. More and more AI controlled robots are filling some job spaces, particularly in manufacturing.
[00:37:39] You need extended education. More people get more education for longer, which pushes family life later in life. Marriage and having kids usually comes later in life.
[00:37:48] The birth control pill that should be 1960, not 1964 broke the link between sexuality, reproduction and marriage. Most people today are sexually active 10 years or more before they actually get married. So it's a longer period of time where young people are making and breaking relationships.
[00:38:03] These are big deals.
[00:38:05] For a long time we kept saying work smarter, not harder. And then we raised a generation that grew up in the tech revolution and where they can work really smart without having to work really hard.
[00:38:16] And so now we have a generation or two that doesn't know how to work hard the way previous generations did. That's a real problem when it comes to communication, expectation in the workplace, getting along, you're just lazy. It's a different skill set. It's totally different toolbox that they were given in their experience. I asked a group of faculty at a Christian school down in Mobile last year and I did a workshop there and asked them, what were your three greatest challenges in middle school and high school? This was kind of the combination of all those you had anywhere from millennial to one or two silent members that were a part of that faculty. Peer pressure, fitting in, body image, bullying, time management, school stress and drama, social media, finding purpose.
[00:38:57] I showed this to the students and asked them, what would you change?
[00:39:01] No, that pretty well covers it.
[00:39:04] Pretty well covers it. Although we may look different, old people are recovering teenagers. Teenagers are soon to be old people.
[00:39:14] The experiences are packaged differently, but at their core they're the same. The struggles are the same. What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done. And there is nothing new under the sun. Amen.
[00:39:27] So don't let difference keep us from seeing value in each other.
[00:39:32] James calls that prejudice.
[00:39:34] If I let someone base value off of the amount of melanin in their skin based off of skin tone, my skin changes color in the summer, it gets darker. My value as a person doesn't change.
[00:39:45] Well, James says, if you see someone that looks rich and you treat them differently. If someone looks poor, you are wrong.
[00:39:51] I would venture to say that that mentality is anti Christ. It's anti what God died for. It's anti gospel. It's anti his church. This is a place of diversity, age, ethnicity, all of those things. When you look at Antioch, a beautiful mosaic of what God's people are supposed to be.
[00:40:09] I don't know why that's in there twice. What's the difference in an old person and a young person? It's just experience for me. This is an image of Vietnam. This is Forrest Gump. This is the part of the textbook that we never got to in high school, you know, year after year. This is history.
[00:40:25] I relate to history different than I relate to something like this. This is sitting in Ms. Barmby's computer class as a junior in high school. And I can walk you through every moment, every hour of my day, that day. This, for me, is a memory.
[00:40:37] So when young people talk about history, the old people are talking about it as a memory.
[00:40:41] There's a reason God told his people, after a crossing of the Jordan or the Red Sea, put some stones here, create something that causes the next generation to go, hey, what's that about? Let me tell you about my God.
[00:40:52] Read Deuteronomy 6, where the next generation is told about the ways of God and the way he loves his people over and over again. It's important to learn from one another. If you come to this building and you don't talk to somebody because they look older or because they look younger than you, well, that sounds a lot more like Kendrick Lamar. They not like us than it does the Gospel of Christ.
[00:41:12] For some of you, you can Google Kendrick.
[00:41:17] If I look, and because of appearance, I do, I'll admit I judge books by their cover. If it's not an interesting cover, I'm probably not going to read it. If it doesn't have pictures, I ain't going to read it. But when it comes to people, the wrinkles on their face tell stories. I want to know those stories. The fact that they still have hair. I want to know, how do you. How do you deal with hair? Like, what is that like?
[00:41:37] And it's not just because I need now young people to get my phone back in English and old people need me to, like, wash the car. I don't know, whatever. Like, I'm in this weird pool from old and young. Old people think I'm young. Young people think I'm old. I have A chiropractor that I know his first name. So I'm clearly not as young as I once was, which puts me in an interesting space to see the value of both sides, because I still need the wisdom of their experience, those that have done more life than me. And I also need the creativity and the energy of those younger than me to keep me curious. I don't want to lose the curiosity. I don't think becoming a better student of Scripture makes you less curious. It makes you less more curious. I'm going to leave you with this passage. In First Corinthians 12:21, Paul says, the eye cannot say to the hand, I have no need of you. Nor again, the head to the feet, I have no need of you. On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable. Let's skip down to verse 23. If one member suffers, all suffer together. If one member is honored, all rejoice together. Now, you are the body of Christ, and individually members of it. The boomer cannot say to the millennial, I have no need of you.
[00:42:39] The Gen Z cannot say to the silent, I have no need of you. We are all part of the body of Christ, therefore we all need each other. We need to be in each other's lives. We need to know each other's names. We live in a. We worship at a really big congregation.
[00:42:55] That's not an excuse to stay huddled in our little groups.
[00:42:59] That's an opportunity that every week you've got hundreds of other people here that you get to meet and learn from.
[00:43:05] I eat lunch every day.
[00:43:07] You probably do, too. If not, you should. It's the best meal of the day. Ziggy, I see you shaking your head, but it's the best meal of the day, man, I'm telling you, find somebody that you don't know or that you don't know well, that doesn't look like you.
[00:43:19] And go to lunch with them and find out about their experience. It's probably not that different than yours, and if it is, that's great. You get to learn. Romans 3:23 says that we all sin and we all fall short of the glory of God. We fall short. We're all shaped by technology. If you're old and say, ah, digital technology is not a big whatever, I'm sorry, You live in the digital age.
[00:43:38] It's best for you to learn about it, too. Because when a young person hears that you know about AI, they're intrigued by that. Oh, man. What do you know about AI?
[00:43:48] So many conversations, we limit ourselves.
[00:43:51] My encouragement to you this week. Find somebody that doesn't look like you in some shape, form or fashion. Get to know them better. Every week this quarter that is a homework assignment. Get to know someone better. If you want to use technology to facilitate that, that's great. Bonus points or just a good old fashioned? Hey, how you doing? Handshake. Thank you so much for being with us tonight. Love you very much. Lord willing, we will see you next week at 7pm.
