“We are the best apologist and Christian worldview communicator who our kids will ever know.” – J. Warner Wallace
In just a few weeks, I’ll be taking my son a thousand miles away for his first year of college. Mixed in with the roller coaster of emotions from sadness to excitement, are my prayers for him—that his faith in Christ will only grow deeper and his commitment to the Church will hold steadfast. I pray this out of concern that so many teenagers today have walked away from church. The statistics are chilling: the percentage of today’s teens who identify as atheists is twice as high as the general population.
Speaking on this topic, John Stonestreet of The Colson Center says,
If you’re a parent, educator, or youth leader, you may be asking, “Where did we go wrong?” The truth is we live in a very challenging culture, and those of us responsible for equipping the next generation often find ourselves fumbling in the dark for how to help our youth.
How will we bring the next generation back to the faith? What can Christians called to love their neighbors do about it? To start, we can learn more about who these young people are.
Today’s teens and twenty-somethings are really part of Generation Z, a cohort that’s 25% of the population. They outnumber both Baby Boomers and Millennials and alarmingly, Generation Z is leaving the church at an unprecedented rate.
The Colson Center is offering a new resource to help us understand and reach the next generation. I joined a live webinar with two experts in training students, Sean McDowell and J. Warner Wallace, who have written a new book titled, “So the Next Generation Will Know – Preparing Young Christians for a Challenging World.”
You can access the 60-minute webinar recording here. We hope this is a helpful tool in your home and in your ministry. (We only ask that you not post it to social media or any other public file-sharing site such as YouTube or Vimeo.)
In this book, the authors stress the importance of building intentional relationships while preserving Truth, and they provide practical ways to do this. They also acknowledge that it’s important to love our kids through their doubts.
It was such a powerful presentation that I bought the book for myself before the webinar concluded! It’s so critical that our young people know that we care about them, and as John Stonestreet says, “Understanding the next generation is the first step toward reaching them.”
