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July 1, 2000
The generations' next wave is hitting the shore, and baby busters may soon feel overtaken by the surge. While most attenders at the Generation X convention in Orlando plotted to reach the Starbucks society (those born between 1965 and 1980), a few leaders warned X-ers to look over their shoulders. Today's youth group is entering college, turning 20, and defying many of our assumptions based on those just a few years their senior.
Generation X, with its aimless, hopeless, extreme sensibility, is mostly an American culture, but their wired successors are a global phenomenon. The world is a much smaller place for them. They have lived most of their lives at warp speed with cyber freedom. And similar characteristics are showing up in their age group in many cultures.
Even with school shootings and the overall devaluation of life, society has embraced these kids. Their parents were more involved in their upbringing than Gen-Xers' parents were. Their childhoods were "The Lion King" years.
And they're much more hopeful.
That's good news for ministry, according to Ken Baugh, Frontline pastor at McLean (Va.) Bible Church. The emerging generation seems more willing to hear a message of hope. The challenge is to make it the message of hope in Christ.
Rich Hurst, co-author with Baugh of Getting Real: An Interactive Guide to Relational Ministry (NavPress, 2000), says we should talk in terms of two generations. Those born after 1980 who are coming of age now he calls millennials—"milli's" for short. Kids born after 1990 are the real "net gen." They've never known life without the Internet.
The next generation(s), Hurst says, have the numbers and the power to soon surpass Generation X in influence. "There is nothing more important to us ...
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