“I’m tired of the church answering questions I’m not asking.”
When Kara Powell heard that statement come from a fifteen-year-old, it felt like an arrow through her heart. As the executive director of the Fuller Youth Institute, Powell cares deeply about cultivating communities that meet the spiritual needs of young people. Determined to figure out the questions that teenagers and young adults are asking, Powell and her colleagues conducted a survey that brought three themes to the surface: identity, belonging, and purpose.
The questions, then, sound something like this:
Who am I?
Where am I?
What difference can I make?
On a new episode of The Russell Moore Show, Powell and Moore discuss these questions and what it might look like to engage in answering them with Generation Z. While the answers are varied and complex, they center on a common call to listening and empathizing. By starting there, may we find ourselves better able to understand the questions the next generation is asking. And as we do, may we earn their trust as a companion in finding the answers.
