Generation Z and the Cycle of Renewal

Judges 2:10-19 traces what theologians call the Deuteronomic cycle. We can read human history as an interplay: on one side, the downward pull of sin and death on the human heart and human culture, set loose at the fall and pressed on by the passing of time; on the other, the mercy of God, who will not let the descent run forever.

We have watched a long spiritual decline in this nation since the Jesus Revolution of the 1970s, that season when millions of young people, worn out and burned out on sex, drugs, rock and roll, and counterculture, turned to Jesus. My father-in-law, Len, met Christ in the theater department at Trinity College. Another friend of mine met him on an acid trip. Len has said that his experience with the church since those days has more often than not felt like a disappointment, a long ache for what he knows is possible.

These fifty years since the 1970s echo the book of Judges, in which the text tells us “another generation grew up who knew neither the Lord nor what he had done.” After the Boomers came Gen X, then the Millennials, then Gen Z and Alpha, each with less collective memory of God’s presence, power, and movement than the one before.

But God does not let the cycle sink forever. In ancient Israel, he raised up judges to rescue the nation. The cycle runs both ways, both down and up. The memory of God fades as new generations rise. Yet those same generations grow desperate, starved by a society with less and less of God and his Kingdom in it. As secularism’s promise falls flat, young people grow increasingly aware of the God-shaped hole in every human heart. But now they are no longer inoculated against a weak, watered-down Christianity. When they meet the real thing, they have no immunity to it.

When the church is at its weakest, God does it. Perhaps because the church cannot or will not, God begins to raise up leaders himself, directly. My twelve-year-old attends public school on the secular east side of Providence. Last year two of his friends, both troubled, both desperate, both from families that had no religious background, secular agnostic families, found something called the Bible app, installed it on their phones, began reading voraciously, and led themselves to Christ. Their families still do not know what to make of it. The reason it is a deuteronomic cycle and not a deuteronomic plane crash, is that God will not give up on humanity, or his purposes. He intervenes in Iran, in the Muslim world, in unreached countries with dreams, with visions, direct intervention. Eventually, God starts doing it himself. And he has started to do it. It would be good for us to join him, to pray, to have our eyes open, to pay attention, and to be here for it.

Society and culture may trend downward. But it is a cycle, friends, because at the trough a merciful God intervenes. Let us pray in this hour, that the Lord Himself would raise up leaders for a new generation, Gideons and Deborahs, unlikely people he touches, anoints, sets apart, and calls to himself. Let us pray that he would tap young people on the shoulder as he tapped Gideon: "The Lord is with you, mighty warrior. Go in the strength you have. Tear down the idols your fathers built, and rebuild the altar of the Lord."

Rev. Greg Johnson
Director, Revive New England