Cultural Apologetics for the Next Generation

A college minister at our local university recently told me a story that shocked me. The university is an SEC school in the Deep South, a part of the country sometimes called the Bible Belt. His ministry has for years taken place within fraternity houses. The long-held assumption in this ministry context has been that any student was at minimum familiar with Christianity and likely would identify themselves as a Christian.

The minister told me he was recently meeting with a student, who had questions for him after he heard him talk to their fraternity chapter. They met and the campus minister shared the gospel with him and answered his questions about Jesus—standard work for a campus minister. But the campus minister noticed that the student’s questions had a slightly different tone than other meetings he has taken with curious students over the years. At the end of the meeting, my friend asked the student, “Have you heard any of this before?”

The student looked at him, surging with energized curiosity and answered, “No, I have never heard any of this about Jesus.”

In the last twenty-five years, 40 million Americans have left the church, a phenomenon called by Michael Graham and Jim Davis, “The Great Dechurching.” And what happens when a generation of the dechurched gives birth to the next generation? If one generation dechurches, the next generation grows up totally unchurched. The residue of Christian influence on a culture begins to wear off. Ideas which used to be widely shared, like the existence of an objective moral order, a transcendent reality outside of this world, an afterlife where we give account for our lives, all fade into a distant memory. The culture that is formed by these generations of dechurched and unchurched might still bear a passing resemblance to its progenitor, but it is an image in a mirror quickly forgotten. The world of ideas and possibilities offered by our culture today is a whole new world. It is a world where moral norms, physical realities, and universal assumptions are turned upside down and inside out.

Tim Keller acknowledged the challenges and opportunities such a moment presents in his booklet How to Reach the West Again. As Keller wrote, “Past evangelistic strategies assumed that nearly everyone held this shared set of beliefs about a sacred order—that there was a God, an afterlife, a standard of moral truth, and a sense of sin.” He referred to these as the “religious dots.” The work of apologetics and evangelism was to connect these dots to a person’s need for the gospel. The work of discipleship could depend somewhat on the railing offered by the culture’s shared assumptions.

Now, what do we do when we live in a culture without these dots and railing? How should our approach to gospel ministry change when the young people in our churches grow up in a world without dots, or rather without the dots that Western culture has been familiar with for the preceding century?

How do we share the gospel with the young man who has never heard of Jesus but carries existential longings he has learned from his culture? Part of the answer is the church’s historic practice that has recently been termed “cultural apologetics.”

Two years and a half years ago, The Gospel Coalition started a new initiative called The Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics. The goal of The Keller Center has been, “to help Christians share the goodness, truth, and beauty of the gospel as the only hope that fulfills our deepest longings.” The labor of cultural apologetics is seeking to understand those longings, as they are expressed culturally today, and promote ways of sharing the gospel that subverts and fulfills them. Still the term “cultural apologetics” remains ambiguous to many people. The most common question I get about our work is, “What is cultural apologetics?”

This is why Collin Hansen, Ivan Mesa, and I have edited a recently released volume The Gospel After Christendom: An Introduction to Cultural Apologetics. The aim of the book is “to define cultural apologetics, explain its biblical and historical grounding, and demonstrate how it is important for the church today” (10). Thus, we hoped to answer the prevalent question posed before, but we also hoped within that answer to address several related questions. Who should be doing cultural apologetics? Where should we be doing cultural apologetics? To whom should cultural apologetics be directed?

In part, the answer to all three questions is contained in the last line of our aim: the church. The church both needs cultural apologetics for its own support, edification, and encouragement today, and the church needs cultural apologetics for its ministry, witness, and evangelism today. If in the past the popular imagination portrayed an apologist as a particularly gifted public figure, we must reimagine. The church, its ministers, and members, should be doing cultural apologetics within its walls and out in the world. The church should be doing cultural apologetics as far as culture is found.

However, this work is skilled labor. That is not to say that is inaccessible to the average person or church—whether rural, urban, rich, poor, big, small, educated, American, international, etc.—but it does require intentionality and certain tools. This intentionality and these tools should be applied to the church’s entire ministry, but in this article I want to highlight their usefulness in a ministry area perhaps less obviously in need of cultural apologetics but which is among the largest and most strategic ministries in most churches: the church’s ministry to the next generation. I will explore the challenges and opportunities the next generation presents for cultural formation. I will then consider how to use the tools of cultural apologetics to prepare the hearts of young people to receive and apply the gospel in their lives.

The next generation is at the front lines of cultural formation. This can be understood two ways. First, the next generation are those most prevalently and powerfully formed by the swell, rising, turning, and breaking of cultural waves. Notice how quickly a new slang term proliferates online then reaches the mouths of even the students whose parents do not allow them to have social media accounts. The influencer speaks to the algorithm, who shares to the masses, where your child’s friend picks up the expression. Your child feels excluded by not sharing this insider knowledge and, thus, must employ it themselves swiftly in appropriate ways. As parents and ministers to youths, we stand back and ask, “What are they talking about?”

The speed by which an internet meme can reach the children of our church reflects more serious and weighty matters. Teens learn what to laugh at, whom and how to love, what’s worth weeping over and celebrating, how to dress, how to treat their bodies, what is happening in the world, how they have come to exist and for what purpose, and more, from the culture they inhabit—regardless of media exposure. If I may borrow a well-worn expression, culture is indeed the air they breathe. Parents cannot negate the force of cultural formation on their children.

But there is a second way by which it might be said the next generation stands at the front lines of cultural formation: the next generation does not only offer a receptive posture to culture but also are among the primary actors creating and shaping the direction of culture. Their “views” are among the highest commodities any media organization could hope to capture. The recent Rolling Stone ranking of the top 25 creators proves such. Names such as Ishowspeed, Kai Centat, and Mr. Beast, unfamiliar and foreign to me, are household names for young people. Each placed in the top ten of the Rolling Stone ranking. The proliferation of their content by young people—reposting, sharing, laughing, discussing, binging, etc.—is in its own way an act of cultural formation. Teens multiply the power of cultural conversations they invest in with their “views” and comments, and they shape and form the culture of their local networks and communities by acting along with, speaking in the manner of, and prioritizing the values of the culture they consume.

Social media is only a fragment and simply illustrative of the culture they consume and create. Geographic, educational, socio-economic, familial, and many other cultures and sub-cultures exist as the arenas of their culture making work. The world is, indeed, in their hands. Culture is not something “out there,” a buffet of options for consumption, but everywhere. Culture is inhabited in time, space, and community. It is the work of minds, mouths, eyes, ears, hands, and feet here and now in schools, homes, clubs, sleepovers, and text messages. The next generation both receives culture and creates culture.

It is for this reason that I want to set forward that the work of next generation ministry—children, teens, and college-aged—must employ and emphasize the tools of cultural apologetics in their ministries. The world students inhabit feels given. It is the only reality they have ever known or could have known. There is an assumed truthfulness in the presentation of the world as such. For the gospel to penetrate their hearts through the power and work of the Holy Spirit, those who minister to the next generation of students must consider how the only world they have ever known—it’s values, narratives, and artifacts—fails to offer them the meaning, love, and life they have always wanted and how the gospel itself fulfills these values in a way they could have never imagined. This is cultural apologetics.

And this work brings about two effects that meet the culture the next generation receives and creates. Cultural apologetics, by interacting with their cultural consumption and creation, disciples and evangelizes the next generation.

On any given week, the pastors to our young people might spend, at most, two concentrated hours of shaping their students by the power of God’s Word. Assuming students were engaged attentively in those whole two hours (being extremely generous), the weight of those two hours would still be vastly outweighed by the day-in and day-out life they live in their homes, at their schools, and before their screens. Especially during their teenage years, the multiplying effect of influence might suggest that the thoughts and words of their peers is doubly or triply as important than the thoughts and words of the Bible, their ministers and mentors, and parents.

The church cannot change this reality—though many have tried. The church cannot isolate, occupy, or force the concentration of the next generation enough to outweigh the time each child will spend exposed to and personal importance each child will place upon the culture around them. This has always been the case. The early church walked Roman streets surrounded by their gods. They married and produced children in a world with radically different sexual values. They served and sacrificed for the poor, sick, and vulnerable in a context that suggested those in such stations belonged there and deserved their fates. The church’s first generations had to pass down the faith to their succeeding generations within contexts of cultural formation not dissimilar to our own. This challenge is a common one to the church across the ages. How has the church responded?

It has not been with either defiant or defeated withdrawal. The church has rather sought to disciple its members to participate in their given culture in ways that support their spiritual well-being rather than denigrate it. Here’s the point: you may be able to slow (for a time) the cultural intake your child receives but you cannot stop it totally. But through discipleship we can equip the next generation to receive their given culture in spiritually beneficial ways.

For instance, let’s consider a narrative of identity. Your child is likely exposed to a cultural narrative about human identity far more frequently than to a Christian concept of human identity. They hear daily that they should, “Be true to themselves,” and they must, “look inside to discover who they truly are.” That is their “authentic self,” and they should work to bring that internal self out. Others should honor and validate this identity. This is not a hypothetical scenario. This is the narrative that drives the next generation and is proclaimed through every screen and microphone.

Cultural apologetics as discipleship is more than simply telling the students in your church that this narrative is false. Though accurate, this approach is simplistic, failing to offer the Christian vision of human identity that affirms various aspects of the world’s understanding. Instead, cultural apologetic discipleship seeks to help students identify the narrative beneath their friends’ comments or media’s portrayal about identity. Once identified, a student can begin to understand the power of this narrative and the various aspects of it that are worth affirming. This demonstrates a posture that is more than condemnation, but which also does not float unmoored into accommodation. From this posture, one can critique the narrative from a place of understanding and clarity that helps students to see why this narrative fails—why this narrative is at its core idolatry and ultimately destroys us in this life and the next. Returning to that which we can affirm, we can then offer how the Christian worldview and the gospel itself fulfills the existential longings of these narratives. The moves made here are not complex or unique, and they are flexible to be applied in various contexts. From discussing a teenage small group’s “highs and lows” from the week, to exploring Genesis’ account of the creation of humans, to answering direct questions posed by students, every context in which discipleship occurs is a context for cultural apologetics.

Now, here’s how this sort of discipleship counters the problem presented by the influence multiplier. Cultural apologetic discipleship puts a bug in the system of the world’s cultural narratives. Cultural apologetic discipleship teaches our students to critically interact with the culture they receive, to question its answers to life’s biggest questions. It teaches them the Bible in such a way that they see Christian hope as their only hope of attaining that which is over-promised and under-delivered by the culture. Equipped students can then enter the cultural arena in such a way that when impelled by cultural forces, they can subvert those forces and use them to strengthen their faith and grasp of the gospel’s significance in their lives. Every time they are captured by a narrative in film, moved by the heartbreak and dissonance in another’s life, plagued by the difficulty of reconciling contradictory values, they will be able to work their way back to the answers provided by Christianity and the fulfillment offered in the gospel. Their discipleship should form a pathway back home.

The church’s teaching, service, worship, life, and everything must itself recognize the cultural air it too breathes and apply the gospel there. The church is not a place where one comes to escape the toxicity of culture to gather fresh air before plunging back down into its murky depths. The church breathes the same air as the culture. Discipleship, then, must teach how to breathe that air and find an aroma for life and not death. To do so, the church must demonstrate two principles:

First, the church understands that the world has been given to us by God. He is the creator of heaven and earth. He filled the lungs of the first man and woman. He has stitched us together in our mother’s wombs (Psalm 139:13). He has given nations allotted periods and boundaries for their dwelling place (Acts 17:26). The king’s heart is a stream of water in the hand of the Lord (Proverbs 21:1). From him, to him, and through him are all things (Romans 11:36). The Lord has providentially ordered all things for his glory and our good. That includes the cultures we live in. There is not one runaway strand of culture that exists outside of the will of God. Sin has ruined the full enjoyment of the world God has given, but it has not rendered it ruined beyond reformation. The church then can interact with the world and the vast array of its diverse cultures with a beautiful knowledge that the Lord has seen fit to give humans such desires. Obscured though they may be, our cultures are gifts of God by which we might know him, love him, serve him, and call others to do the same.

Second, the church understands that the work of culture is the work God has given to man to exercise dominion over the earth. Humanity was given the task, before sin, to work. Adam was given a helper in his labor. To be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth was a commission given to humanity to see the garden extended over the face of the earth. Sin has wrought thorns and thistles, the sweat of the brow and the pains of childbirth into that work, but the commission remains. Cultural work continues the work given to humanity to see the earth and its inhabitants to dwell with God and enjoy him forever.

The church understands the origins and destiny of culture in a contradictory way to the way the world does. Culture is not the giver or judge of truth. Culture is not the force most engaged for our flourishing. Culture’s beauty, if left only immanent, stops short of its transcendent splendor. Discipleship within the church then takes up the true work of culture that has been lost by sin and co-opted by the world. Discipleship restores the Christian understanding of culture and thus instills within all cultural interaction a hope. To disciple the children in our church to return to the world and find fruitful interaction in the culture in which they dwell, we must ground our interaction with it by understanding the goodness of cultural work and the purpose of cultural work. Christianity is not opposed to culture. Christianity offers culture its only hope of reaching its desired end.

It is this discipleship the next generation needs. If instilled in them at a young age, they will grow and flourish as all cultural watershed will be turned into a refreshing rain on the soil of their hearts.

Culture is the created context around us made by human labor, language, and love. It surrounds every human being in an unconscious yet deeply impactful way. It is no surprise, then, that the most common metaphor is the air and the unconscious act of breathing. We inhabit culture, but culture habituates us. Thus, every Christian needs to understand its culture and how the biblical worldview confronts or confirms its beliefs and values. This is especially true of the young Christians we seek to rear within our churches. But there is one final and crucial dimension.

Most of a young Christian’s life will not be lived within the confines of our churches. Because they are at the front lines of cultural formation, they also can penetrate cultural contexts that will be largely inaccessible to more mature cultural apologists. This is not a bad thing. Indeed, the influence multiplier that conceptually could work against their spiritual formation can in this way be seen to be a positive for their influence on their peers. Equipping the next generation is important not only for their spiritual life and well-being, but it also equips them to evangelize and disciple their peers as opportunities arise. We question the answers the culture supplies to evangelize and disciple them. Likewise, they in turn grow in confidence to enter back into their culture to do the same. Adults’ senses dull and diminish. We are slow to adapt or notice, often needing another’s keen insight to recognize that the time has changed and the mood has shifted. The young people in our lives have quicker cultural reflexes. They are exposed to more, converse more, live together in deeper and more intimate ways. In other words, they likely have more opportunities to employ the tools of cultural apologetics in a week than the average adult does in a month. The most effective cultural apologist in your church, in your kid’s school, in the next generation’s lives, is likely from the next generation.

Then, one day this next generation will no longer be “next” in any real sense. They will grow to be educated in great halls of learning, labor in workplaces, enjoy leisure in public spaces, start families in their homes. They will further enter our Father’s world where he has ordained that man and woman should have dominion over the earth and thus take up the work of cultural creation and dwell next to other creatures who, either wittingly or unwittingly, will themselves be engaged in this same work. The hope of cultural apologetic evangelism and discipleship is that the children of our church would grow to engage that work in this world near their co-laborers as those ready to offer the words of life in words that strike the hearer as lifegiving. The hope is that they will grow to be cultural consumers and contributors who can critically sift out the self-serving idolatry of the narratives we live by and seek instead their fulfillment in Christ. The hope of cultural apologetics to the next generation is that we would raise them up to be Christians in every area of their life, and in doing so they would grow to be a generation of cultural apologists themselves.