I am a member of the smallest generation in modern American History.
Generation X, or those born between 1965 and 1979, occupy a unique place on the spectrum of American culture and influence. Sandwiched between the Baby Boomer and the Millennial Generations, my generation finds itself on the balance beam between two vastly different centuries.
Gen Xers were formed in a world that looks very different than the one we occupy today. We remember having access to only three channels on the TV, and we recall a world of researching with the Encyclopedia Britannica at the local library. We were latch-key children and had great license to skin our knees and get into trouble with our friends. We shared a telephone with our family, rode the school bus, and made our own brown-bag lunches.
Many Gen Xers grew up in a church that our elders had built. Our families attended church with great regularity. We filled Sunday School classrooms and competed for seats on the church bus on youth retreats and mission trips. Gen Xers remember needing to arrive early to get a seat in the sanctuary, and we remember walking by a long line of parents who were dropping off their babies at the nursery.
Gen Xers remember a world before the internet and before personal devices would demand every ounce of our attention. We remember a less complicated world that, while not perfect, looked and felt like the culmination of a century's worth of hard-won advances and steps forward.
We know another world, also. Our adulthood has been lived with the scent of burning buildings from lower Manhattan in our psyche. Financial uncertainty, anger, fear, institutional chaos, and social upheaval have become familiar markers along the path to middle age. Any rising tide of change we experienced in the wake of 9/11 became a tsunami of transformation in March of 2020. Adjustment and readjustment in the time of pandemic have found us bewildered and exhausted as we care for our children and our aging parents.
And although it hardly needs to be said, the landscape of the emerging world looks increasingly alien to those of us who once called the 20th Century home.
Interestingly, my generation will not be central figures in what this next world will be. Gen X will not be taking the cultural keys from our wise elders nearly as much as we will be handing them to those coming behind us. It will be the Millennials—or those born between 1980 and 2000 (now the largest generation in American history) who will shape and occupy what is to become.
What does that mean for my generation, or more pointedly, for the legacy of my professional ministry? My generation and I will bridge the world we are leaving to the world that is becoming. Whether we will admit to it or not, one way of life is ending, and another is beginning. My generation's call is to fill the gap between what came before and what will now be.
In my better moments, I'm at peace with this. I understand that the bulk of my professional career will be to take an institution from one place to another. However, it is a hard position to occupy as I frequently grieve what—and who—we are losing. However, I identify with Paul's words about hope and groaning for something we cannot see. I have a growing respect for Moses's experience when he was privileged to see the Promised Land from Mount Pisgah, knowing that he would not be able to enter it.
As you are very much aware, the world that shaped us is not the world we now live in. There is no better example of this than our experience with an institution that you and I both love—that is, the church. Consider the changes that we have experienced this last decade. Now, think back two decades, and now three, and four. The changes and seasons that the church world has experienced in the last half-century have been radical and disruptive.
But we are still here. And we will still be here tomorrow, and next year, and in the years to come. Yet, how we will be faithful together in the future will be different than how we were in the past. The story of the Body of Christ through the centuries is one of change and modification, adaptation, and creative faithfulness. Spoken as a bridge-builder in his own right, St. Augustine once said that the Church "must always be reformed."
We build bridges when we need to get to the other side. Sometimes we are reluctant builders as we're unwilling to leave the place where we were born and the place where we made our home. At other times, we are frantic builders as we were at the start of the pandemic when we needed to reach the other side out of sheer survival.
A bridge is what is now required. Where we have been is not where we will continue to be. God is leading us to become better situated to a new reality. Any temptation to yield to denial and prideful stubbornness will only imperil our good intentions when we need to be extending our reach to a new world.
What is now required is a commitment to the hope that what God has started in us will be seen through to completion. This process of bridge-building will require thoughtful discernment and wisdom. It will require the courage and hope of Caleb and Joshua. It will require a vision for what God is now building and constructing on the other side.
Yes, we can plunge into the water of the Jordan to reach the other side, but wouldn't a bridge be nice?
The past and the future are not mutually exclusive. The two are connected. We find ourselves at the place of that connection, and we call it a bridge.
Let's build the bridge together.