church planting gen z
In his sparkling Christmas tune, Another Year, FINNEAS (one of Gen Z’s leading musical producers) croons: “It never snows in LA / You’d never know it was a holiday / I don’t believe that Jesus Christ was born to save me / That’s an awful lot of pressure for a baby”
This sentiment reflects a common perspective that I’ve consistently encountered in reaching Gen Z: ideas of sin and the cross do not resonate. Subsequently, salvation doesn’t sound like good news. What are we being saved from? Ultimately, this isn’t an issue with the gospel itself! It is always good news for every kind of person, everywhere. Instead, this may be an issue with our communication and lack of cultural translation:
- In recent decades, the Western church has presented sin as an individual feeling of a guilty conscience or shame about how you have lived. Biblically, this perspective isn’t wrong, but it is a myopic view of sin. For Gen Z, this message lands like unnecessary self-hate and religious fear-mongering.
- Gen Z has been the generation most influenced by postmodern moral relativism: rejecting absolute moral truth, grand narratives (like Christianity) that offer a singular explanation for the world and instead embracing Ethical Pluralism where multiple truths can co-exist. Morality defined by one authority doesn’t instinctively make sense.
- For an unchurched person, why would they feel guilty about sinning against a God they never knew about? What is sin anyway? With Biblical literacy very low across the nation, Gen Z are rejecting pop-culture ideas of sin rather than the relational fracture between humans and a loving God.
Hearing someone explaining the gospel starting with the idea of all of us being sinners lacks coherence and resonance. Your average unchurched Gen Z Aussie might be thinking a version of this, “I didn’t ask Jesus to die for me, that’s really intense and weird, especially because I am just an average imperfect person like everyone else.” They might nod along politely but struggle to connect with the message.
Leadership Lessons
In our communication, it is vital that we start with the loving God who created humanity for goodness before we get to sin. Not only is this more representative of the Biblical story but it connects with the existential longings of Gen Z who are overexposed to suffering and are craving fulfillment, justice and purpose.
This starting point is the most natural invitation to explore the idea of sin, which needs to be explained primarily as a relational separation between us and God rather than a list of bad things that we do (which is symptomatic of our broken relationship).Theologically, I come to this topic from a Reformed perspective: it is essential that each person understands that Jesus lived, died and rose on their behalf. It would be dangerous to soften the idea of sin, but presenting a simplistic idea of sin doesn’t honour the gospel or the contextualisation needed for Gen Z.
We can embrace and communicate a fuller picture of sin through dialectical thinking. You can unintentionally reject God and still be responsible for rejecting Him: we already think this because we unintentionally hurt people in our lives all the time! You can be both a victim and perpetrator of sin in different ways: this is how we discover a God who is too loving and just to sweep suffering and sin under the rug. You can accept Jesus as your Lord and Saviour to escape the consequences of sin and to embrace the life of purpose and meaning that God designed for you to have.
The gospel of our Lord Jesus is good news for Gen Z. Our role is to join in what God is already doing and pay attention to how we might explore and contextualise the gospel in a way that connects with this generation.
