You Lost Me, by David Kinnaman

Chapter Two

1. Let’s return to the way teens and young adults express their disconnection from the Christian community: you lost me. When someone uses this idiom, they are suggesting that something hasn’t translated, that the message has not been received. Wait, I don’t understand. You lost me. This is what many Mosaics are saying to the church. As we’ll see in this chapter, it’s not that they’re not listening; it’s that they can’t understand what we are saying.

- When and where have you experienced this with Mosaics/others?

2.  Busters learned to use technology as an ally against the Boomers’ influence and control; if they could master technology, they had a strategic advantage. Mosaics, however, have been raised with these technologies in full supply, and that reality is facilitating new patterns of learning, relating, and influencing the world, as well as changing the way they think about church and Christianity. Technological access allows them to experience and examine content originating from nonbiblical worldviews, giving them ample reasons to question the nature of truth. It generates extraordinary distractions and invites them to be less linear and logical in their thought processes. It empowers them to think as participants, not just as consumers, of media. And it makes them both more connected & more isolated than generations before.

- Where do find such connection & isolation in family & friends?

3. The second seismic cultural shift is how alienated today’s teens and young adults feel from the structures that undergird our society. We might think of alienation as very high levels of isolation from family, community, and institutions. Alienation is rooted in the massive social changes that began in the 1960s; the drama of dislocation unfolding in the Mosaic generation is taking place on a stage set by the Baby Boomers.

- What’s different now compared to the 1960s? How are young adults alienated in family, in adulthood, and in institutions?

4. There is both good news and bad news for the church with regard to young adults’ alienation from what used to be normative in our society.

The bad news is that, where congregations and parishes are structured to meet the needs of the “old normal,” it will be difficult for young people to find a meaningful place. The good news, however, is that the church is uniquely called to be the community of God— and true, authentic community banishes isolation, loneliness, and alienation and replaces them with love.

- What will have to change about how we “do ministry” to meet the needs of the “new normal?”

5. The changing spiritual narrative in North America is the third factor in our culture’s discontinuity from previous eras. Let’s call this skepticism of authority – new questions about who to believe and why. However, there is a new spiritual narrative on the rise that says Christianity is no longer the “default setting” of American society. The Christian faith exerted significant influence on our culture in previous generations, but much of that public role has dissipated during the past 130-plus years – the acceleration of those secularizing effects has been felt strongly in the last fifty.

- Specifically, how are the three arenas of Scripture, Christianity & Culture, and Christian Influencers impacted by their skepticism?

6. Let’s summarize the challenges and opportunities created by each of these new cultural factors:

Access. Few would debate that we live in a knowledge economy, in a creative age, powered by science-fiction– like technologies.

- Will the Christian community connect meaningfully with the generation growing up in this context?

Alienation. We are conducting a real-time experiment with relationships, family bonds, and institutional reinventions.

- Will the Christian community cultivate a presence-centered approach to developing young people, bringing us out of our isolation and alienating pragmatism?

Authority. The spiritual narrative of our culture has shifted— slowly in places, quickly in others— toward secularism and away from the Bible and Christianity.

- Will the Christian community see skepticism of authority as an opportunity or as a threat?