Catalyst Track: Meet Generation Z // Day Two

Move over Boomers, Xers, and Millennials; there's a new generation now.

This track comes from James Emery White’s new book, Meet Generation Z.

Making up more than 25 percent of the US population, Generation Z represents a seismic cultural shift. Born approximately between 1993 and 2012, Generation Z is poised to challenge every church to rethink its role in light of a rapidly changing culture.

From the award-winning author of The Rise of the Nones comes this enlightening introduction to the youngest generation. James Emery White explains who this generation is, how it came to be, and the impact it is likely to have on the nation and the faith. He helps us rethink our old evangelistic and apologetic methods, cultivate a culture of invitation, and communicate with this connected generation right where they are. Start this track if you want to learn how to better connect with and lead a new generation.

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DAY 2 – The Church

 

In writing about the teaching of Jesus, John Stott noted that “if the church realistically accepted his standards and values . . . and lived by them, it would be the alternative society he always intended it to be, and would offer to the world an authentic Christian counter-culture.”

Those two ideas—church and counterculture—lie at the heart of reaching a post-Christian generation. The challenge is, first, to understand the ideas and, second, to engage them. Let’s start with understanding, for if there is any doctrine that is ignored or grossly misunderstood by Christ followers—at least among evangelical Christians in the United States—it is the doctrine of the church.

The church is to serve as the ongoing manifestation of Christ himself on earth, being called his body, an idea of profound significance throughout the New Testament. As the apostle Paul writes, “Just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ we, though many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others. We have different gifts, according to the grace given to each of us” (Rom. 12:4–6). The church is the locus of Christ’s activity, and he works through the church now as he worked through his physical body during his thirty-three-year life. In the New Testament, there is simply no ministry outside the church, or at least its umbrella.