X = Bridge

Driving along in my automobile, my son beside me at the wheel, we are listening to a radio station play “classic” tunes from the 1980s! Besides the fact that “classic” and “1980s” should never be used in the same sentence—Do you remember the synthesizer, leg warmers, New Coke, PTL Club and the Hyundai Pony?—I nostalgically sing along and answer a child’s questions about the good old days.

Despite the Duran Duran influence, this was a divine moment as I became keenly aware of the synthesizing of my thoughts into crushing reality: I was born in the last century and I am old.

Many of you will think this a ludicrous statement. At 35, I am a spring chicken, a young pup, a mere bud on the branch, to probably the vast majority of those reading these words, but that is precisely what troubles me.

My generation—labelled X—is increasingly caught betwixt and between, and indifferent about both poles. We are halfway, but we’re not sure what we are halfway from or to as we begin to find our legs, voice and place in the world, let alone the church. Many of us are floundering because the world of our parents and the world swallowing us up are equally strange. Communism has been traded for terrorism; Pacman eaten up by Halo; the Walkman overtaken by the iPod; Ethiopian famine eclipsed by AIDS; and the VCR, which we’re still teaching our parents how to run when we don’t even use them anymore, by the PVR.

Let’s just say we who inherited the radical challenges and culture-quake of the Boomers are really caught between two worlds. We don’t understand the traditional world our Boomer parents sought to dismantle—even the most conservative of our parents dismantled something—nor this strange place in which we must raise our children, which is maybe why many of us are unsure about having kids at all.

The X of my generation marks confusion. This, however, reveals a challenge I throw at my generational comrades in hopes some catch it: Can we Christ-following Xers already turn our attention to the first true post-Christian generations? It will be our turn in the next few years—if it isn’t already—to embrace the leading and shaping of a church and culture. Like others before, we will be tempted to champion our right to build it to our specs. Dare we lay aside this right?

Thankfully—and what a gift of grace this may turn out to be—we mostly laugh disparagingly at our “good old days.” We can’t take them seriously. Perhaps we knew even then that the times were in transition as we created a culture symbolized by Michael Jackson’s moonwalk (going backwards while appearing to go forwards).

Our mission may very well be to embrace the cost of laying ourselves down as a bridge. We are a demographic caught between a fading age and an emerging, yet fuzzy one. What great joy it may be for us to lie down and get walked on! First, by our Boomer parents, who will mourn a world that is no more. Then by our children, who need us to be a sure Christ-centred foundation, their link to a new day in which the naming of Jesus Christ as Lord is an affront to the Empire.

Because we don’t know who we are or where we fit, I propose we are the perfect generation for this glorious task.