This article originally appeared in print journal July/Aug. 1996.

Disenfranchised citizens scattered across the former Soviet Union. Millions living in the Muslim nations. Military personnel. Photojournalists. These are unreached people groups—individuals who are especially prone to isolation and very difficult to reach with the gospel. At the Navigators’ home base in Colorado Springs, Christian leaders have been gathering for years to strategize how to reach unreached people groups like these.

But the leaders who came together last March may have one of the biggest evangelism challenges yet: making a case for Christianity to the nearly 40 million young people between the ages of 18 and 34 who make up what many people call Generation X.

Gen-X, the Lost Generation, baby busters—whatever one wants to call them—are described as a been-there-done-that, postmodern, post-Christian group that’s perhaps beyond the reach of the gospel. They are deserting church pews in huge numbers and are giving fits to Christian leaders concerned about the survival of the faith in America.

Around 200 people involved in ministry to Generation X attended a sold-out conference sponsored by the Leadership Network of Tyler, Texas. And when it was all said and done, more than a few attendees expressed a combination of confusion and despair about the task of reaching this group.

Dieter Zander, who founded New Song Church in Covina, California, before heading up Willow Creek’s baby buster ministry, spoke for many at the forum. “If you feel like you’re fumbling around the dark,” he said, “you are.”

But the gathering wasn’t all darkness and dismay. There was a general agreement that this Gen-X could be reached if young leaders were willing to step forward, if older leaders gave them the support and room they needed, and if everyone were to remember the following principles:

The story’s the thing.
Talk to American newspaper executives or college professors, and they’ll tell you that Gen-Xers don’t read. It’s not that they can’t read, but they’d rather be doing nearly anything else. The rage among them is cruising the Internet, playing with CD-ROMs, or hanging out with their friends.

But just because they don’t read doesn’t mean they don’t like stories or they don’t have spiritual hunger. The challenge is convincing Christian teachers to change the way they communicate to members of this generation.

Kevin Ford, an evangelism consultant, opened his talk by not talking. Instead, he played Joan Osborne’s Grammy-nominated song, “One of Us,” which wonders in a seductively melodic fashion, “What if God was one of us?” Osborne’s popular tune is just one of many contemporary songs exploring spiritual issues.

Ford challenged Bible teachers to create biblically based narratives that touch the imaginations of Gen-Xers with as much power as Osborne’s song. “Find the stories behind the [biblical] passages,” he said. “Don’t destroy a good narrative by breaking it up with points. Just tell the story. And don’t explain it. That’s condescending.”

Christian pollster George Barna’s books Evangelism that Works and The Invisible Generation: Baby Busters have likewise urged that Christian communicators change the way they’re presenting the gospel. In his convention address, Barna argued that the most effective form of evangelism for Gen-Xers is a type of Socratic communication employing questions that cause listeners to think, search, and consider the truth.

“This is our first postmodern, post-Christian generation,” Barna said. “They’ve been immersed in the philosophy of existentialism and the view that there’s no objective reality. They’re very nonlinear, very comfortable with contradictions, and inclined to view all religions as equally valid. So the nice thing about telling stories is that no one can say your story isn’t true.”

Create new wineskins.
One of the conference’s emphases was devoted to leaders of new ministries. Among the conclusions:

• In order to reach this generation, you’ve got to leave the established church and break off in new directions.
• Many new and successful ministries are held in hotels, eateries, or clubs—anything but a church building. The reason is, in part, because baby busters are disillusioned by tradition—especially the institution of the church. “We do our Gen-X ministry at a local hotel,” said one attendee.
• Speaker after speaker stressed the need to find new leaders. Their admonition of present church leaders was simple and direct—if you are serious about reaching Busters, then recruit and empower leaders who are their peers. Their advice to 35-and-older Christian leaders? Get out of the way so others can do the work of ministry.
• Some went so far to say that the future of Christianity in America depended on such new patterns of leadership and outreach.

Replace church bureaucracies with one-to-one relationships.
Gen-X pastor Chris Seay’s University Baptist Church, launched in January 1995 in a Waco, Texas, movie theater, was attracting about 700 people for Sunday services by year’s end. Seay, whose passion for reaching his own generation is palpable and moving, said he urges everyone within earshot to reach out to baby busters—a spiritually needy population which he fears is “falling through the cracks of Christendom.”

“This is a generation that has rejected the church…but it hasn’t rejected Jesus Christ,” said Seay, whose baggy clothes and short-cropped hair and beard are Gen-X fashion statements. “This generation is desiring dialogue with a church that won’t listen.”

Members of the University Baptist Church praise band performed and led worship at the conference. Their song, “There’s No Chain,” was particularly evocative, showing how Jesus answers the spiritual cravings of a generation living in the shadow of divorce, inflation, global disasters, and Howard Stern.

there’s no heart too wounded
no heart so broken that He can’t mend
no life so hopeless
no life so empty
Jesus can’t fill

“We want to make them feel like out congregation is a place where they belong,” Seay said.

Ken Baugh, the director of Frontline—a ministry to baby busters at McLean Bible Church in McLean, Virginia—agreed with Seay. “For many of the young people between the ages of 18 and 34, preachers are like used car salesmen or politicians,” Baugh said. “But if your relationships with them are good—and if you’re perceived as authentic—then they’ll follow you into the church through the back door.”

“We see Chris’s ministry as the beginning of a new approach that we believe many other leaders and churches will be a part of,” said Brad Smith, representing the Leadership Network. Others agreed that Seay’s University Baptist Church would be one of the more interesting settings to observe effective Buster outreach. The church sports a compelling combination of aggressive, rock ‘n’ roll-styled worship music, and preaching that presents a traditional Christian message in decidedly nontraditional ways.

Seay’s church is an answer to prayer for young people whose faith had floundered at Baylor University—the world’s largest Southern Baptist college—and who say they’re turned off by the boring music, irrelevant sermons, holier-than-thou attitudes, and blatant hypocrisy of traditional churches.

“They’re open to the God thing,” says Seay, “but they’re not into the church thing.”

Growing up as a pastor’s son, Seay had “a love-hate relationship with the church” and never wanted to enter the ministry. “The thought of being a pastor looked pretty revolting to me,” he said. But after Seay’s high school Bible study took off, Seay realized he had the gift—and the responsibility—of leadership.

“God said, ‘You can really use this if you use it the right way,'” he explained. University Baptist services do have some similarities to more traditional churches: it features periods of worship, preaching, and prayer, as well as Sunday bulletins and offering baskets. But that’s where the similarities end.

One Sunday, Seay took the stage to deliver his sermon (if you want to call it that), strode to a stool in the middle of the pulpitless stage, sat down, propped his feet on a nearby speaker, took a drink from a bottle of Snapple, and launched into a meandering monologue about the R-rated, Richard Gere movie, Primal Fear.

Before long, Seay used the movie’s plot of dishonesty and intrigue to bring the congregation to a Socratic inquiry on the nature of truth: whether it can be known, how it can be understood, and where it can be found. For Seay—and most others in his congregation—truth lies beyond the simple certainties and mundane “churchianity” of their youth.