How many of you have been to a restaurant lately, or maybe even a family dinner and most of if not all of the people sitting at the table looked like this…

What was your gut feeling? How many of you feel angry? Indignant? Wonder what on earth is wrong with these people?!

Excellent. Because your parents and grandparents thought the exact same thing about you! Why can’t they sit still? Why don’t they listen to what their parents tell them?

Why are they always on the phone? “Get off the phone!” Those words sound familiar from growing up?

Many of you may have fond memories of your childhood laying on the bed with your head hanging off the end, stretched out as far as you could because that’s as far as the phone cord would reach. You’d chat with your friends for as long as you could which was generally until you got yelled at. “Get off the phone!”

And every generation thinks to themselves, oh, but that’s different! That was us and we were right. That’s nothing like these kids today. Now everyone has a phone in their pocket and three generations alive that barely know how to use them never mind the one’s that just don’t care to learn anything about new technology.

The Greatest Generation: 1901 to 1927

Silent Generation: 1928 to 1945

Baby Boomers: 1946 to 1964

Generation X: 1965 to 1980

Millennials (Generation Y): 1981 to 1996

Generation Z: 1997 to 2012

Generation Alpha: 2013- 2025 which is already starting to be followed by the brand new Generation Beta.

Every generation thinks the same thing about the previous generation method of communication. Every generation wonders what is wrong with those kids! Every generation says you need to make friends but also yells at you for communicating with them. Humans are such weird creatures. Today though we’re going to talk about those “kids” all those one’s that I keep hearing you want in your church.

Generation Alpha has many different names. Often referred to as “ipad kids” or “the anxious generation,” they also have another nickname that is of interest. Generation Alpha is also called Generation Image. The are the most materialistically endowed and technologically savvy as of yet and likely to have the longest lifespans. They are our future as a church and as a world. They are likely to be the first generation to really suffer the effects of climate change and a great many of them will live to see the turn of the century. They are the future.

Every generation will master the communication of its time, leaving the previous generation bewildered, flustered and frustrate. Generation Alpha will surpass Generation Z in its use of cell phone communication especially texting. Generation Alpha will likely communicate to an overwhelming to us extent, with pictures. Photographs, emojis, icons, gifs, memes, chibi, stickers, selfies, anything but words flabbergasting those of us who spent half our childhood learning grammar, spelling cursive and printing. But this is no longer our world, it’s theirs and they don’t use it. And most importantly, these are the people you say you want to see more of in your church. These people who speak a different language than you do. These people who communicate not by making eye contact or using body language but using pictures, images of their lives and what you will probably refer to as their limited imaginations just as your grandparents looked at you.

You want to survive in the world as a church, you either learn to use the this generations method of communication or you don’t expect to see them in these walls.

Have you ever wondered why telemarketers exist? All of you who spent your youth chatting away on the telephone tied to the wall with your friends raise your hands. You are why it exists. You who saw the phone progress from a rotary dial party-line, to a cordless wonder you could sneak into your bedroom or the bathroom, to Star Trek Communicator Flip Phone, to a cell phone the size of a deck of cards. All of you who saw the telephone evolve from resembling a banana to a pop-tart are the reason telemarketers exist, because you are their primary pray because you trusted its integrity, just as a generation trusted the integrity of email, and now we have text scammers.

The telephone was the new technological communication of your time, and advertisers seized the opportunity to use it! The church… did not, and as a result, that telephone-obsessed generation has gone to the wind unable to relate to a church that didn’t like their lifestyle of talking on the phone rather than meeting in person even if they lived three doors down. They are not sitting in our pews because, for many other cultural, generational, and technological reasons, the church lost touch with them. The church failed to communicate with them.

The church refused to change its method of communication, insisting that the old ways were the best ways, despite that this is not the old way! In the old way, we’d be here for hours upon hours. I would preach at you for over half of that. Have you ever tried to read a John Wesley or a Craddock sermon? They are long! But people listened because oration was the most technologically advanced method of communication at the time.

The church is slow to respond to the changes in communication to the world around it and the message is getting lost because we are not delivering it to the next generation in a way that they have been trained to digest information. On the day of Pentecost the miracle of the holy Spirit was that everyone could communicate the Word of God together in a language they understood. And ever since, we have been failing.

The current generation growing up is the image generation. In 2024, approximately 1.94 trillion photos were taken annually, averaging 54,000 photos per second. 54,000 photos a second! How many photos as a church do we post online a day? Oh, wait we don’t have a Facebook Page, Instagram, YouTube Channel, functional webpage, nothing. Are we even trying to communicate with the people we say we want to bring into our church?

Think back again to those days of stretching that phone cord as far as it would go for a moment. What happened to the friends who weren’t allowed to talk on the phone with you or had very limited phone privileges. Were they included? Involved? Invited? They got left behind. The only way you got invited to a party is if you are in communication with the one’s doing the inviting. You are only invited if the two of you are communicating in the same way.

Communicating the way you want to communicate and ignoring how the other person wants to communicate will get you nowhere in life. No matter how long I insist on talking to someone who is deaf, they are never going to hear me if I don’t learn to speak their language, or at the very least learn to speak mine in a way they can understand. I can hardly expect them to learn mine can I? And yet, we expect children who spend their days in constant communication using acronyms and images to read a newsletter. The children of today receive most of their education via tablet or computer, and yet we expect them to do it OUR way if they want to talk to us by reading signs, bulletins and newsletters. If it’s not an entertaining 30 second video clip, they’ll probably never get the message.

Do you know how many grandparents I hear complain about their grandchildren not talking to them? The answer is simple. Learn to use a smartphone. Your grandkids will text you. They will video call you. They will send you selfies and pictures of what they are up to. The current generation communicates through images. You can either get on board or you can get left behind but let me warn you, their communication is far more compact and efficient than ours is. Their attention spans are short because they are cramming a ton of information into a thirty second video or a 5 letter text.

Thechurch is getting left behind, not because we have lost the message of Jesus Christ but because we are not communicating it in a way that the current generation understands or remembers things. We’re speaking a foreign language of stubbornness telling them over and over again that THEY need to change, as if we are the one’s who do everything right in this world. They need to move at our ridiculously slow pace not their flitting around on their youthful energetic legs pace like hummingbirds. Every generation looks at the newest one, especially one two to or three generations behind them wondering what is wrong with them! We get angry and frustrated about them not communicating with us yet we refuse to be the ones who communicate with them.

We are to work together not expect them to come to us. They are not wrong! Generation image, while you may not understand them, are much better able to adapt to today than we are. They are preparing for a future that we will not be a part of. They will be able to do things we could never even dream of because they haven’t been even been invented yet.

The problem isn’t the message, it’s the delivery!

We are living in a visual culture now. I don’t want to be in it any more than most of you do, I like the way of life I grew up in. But that is not our choice, it’s where we are. Our lives are in their past, there are stretching out before us into the future. Cell phones, computers, videos, and billions of photos aren ‘t going away. If anything, they are going to become even more prevalent in the world. The internet is forever.

People today are trading images, not words, and interestingly not really money. Images are currency. So, what does trading images allow us to see? What does it allow us to do?

It allows you, if you are willing, to get to know your grandkids, to talk to them every single day, even if they live on the other side of the country or the other side of the world. That’s amazing! But it is up to us to communicate with them, it is not up to them to learn to understand the message we’re sending them. They receive enough information every day, they are bombarded and overwhelmed by it already. Learning another method of communication just for you that doesn’t work with anyone else and is unlikely to benefit them in their future job market, takes a special kind of personality that most children don’t have. Like people today who still learn Latin. Arguably useful but certainly not essential.

The average American takes an average of 6 pictures with their Smartphone a Day. How many of you grew up where that was probably more photos than you took in a year? I remember when I was younger, we’d develop a roll of film which took 24 photos, maybe half of which weren’t fingers, then the remaining non-finger pictures covered 3-5 years of birthday parties and Christmas. 6 pictures a day was unimaginable! Who could afford to have that much film developed and where on earth would you store them all?

Jesus walked the streets communicating in the most effective means of communication at the time. The best way to reach the most people was to talk to the most people. When he could, they gathered together and he preached from a raised platform or hill to people who were trained and used to hearing a verbal message. He didn’t just stand in one place, preach in one building, and expect the people to come to him. He went to them where they worked, where they ate, and where they engaged in fellowship with each other. He used their primary means of communication to get a message to them.

We have absolutely no record of Jesus trying to write down his ministry. Why? Because the people he was trying to reach couldn’t read!

Imagine if Jesus Christ just sat down and wrote a codex of parables, thinking to himself: If they want the message, they’ll learn to read. How effective do you think that would have been?

Jesus worked with people. He didn’t expect them to work with him and do things his way, he changed the way he did things. He went beyond what he learned as a child and went to the people. Jesus was personable. He knew how to bridge the gap between who he was to who the person he was talking to was. He used their language, their culture, their way of life to teach, not his.

Changing the way we pass along our faith doesn’t change what we believe in; the mode of communication changes. It has to. People text now instead of calling. People use video chat instead of phone calls when they do call. Sermons get shorter. Music moves with the times. Christian music is a half-a-billion-dollar industry today and we hardly use any of it in our worship services

Storytelling remains a faithful art but its format has changed. The world of today likes videos and pictures with their stories. It would be like reading a novel to a 6 year old. They want pictures to see what’s going on.

Now, here comes the hard part. This does not mean we give up what we have and switch entirely to something new. It means we find ways to incorporate visual image culture into our worship. Why? Because God wants to be involved in every part of our lives. God wants us to use everything we do every day to worship him. Which means… that image culture, those 54,000 photos a second being taken, those videos, those text messages, all of it, God wants to be a part of it, so why are we excluding it especially when it is preventing us from being able to communicate with two going on three generations of people who need to know God.

It is us who need to change and adapt to create a worship environment that holds on to what we need but also makes sense to Gen X, Gen Z, Generation Alpha, and coming up terrifyingly quick Generation Beta. Why on earth do we continually demonstrate and tell our children that we do not value their interests in our church? God values their interest; why don’t we?

We are obsessed with our past and the way things were so much better when we were younger just as much as the previous generations were. We need to become obsessed with the future of the church. We need to find ways to be where God is, not where he was. If we are obsessed with where God was, we will never get to where God wants us to be.

The Bible is about telling the story of Jesus Christ. A good story-teller communicates in a way that people can understand, that’s what makes them good storytellers. If we want to spread the word of God in today’s world, we are the ones who need to learn to communicate in a mode that the people who need to hear it are going to receive it in a language they can understand.

If we truly love our neighbor, we do the work not expect our neighbor to do it.

Pentecost is about communication between God and people and people and neighbor. God changed all those who gathered so they heard God in their native language. We know how to speak our native language now we just need to let God help us learn to speak our children’s and our grandchildren’s that we might also hear our language in them.