Tanita Maddox | What Gen Z Really Wants to Know About God

The world is becoming increasingly proficient at telling stories that deny God. As such, we need thinking Christian to become as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian podcast. I'm Dr. James Spencer. Through calm, thoughtful, theological discussions, Thinking Christian highlights the ways God is working in the world and questions the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that hinder Christians from becoming more like Christ. Now, on to today's episode of Thinking Christian. Hey, everyone. Welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I'm Dr. James Spencer, and I'm joined today by Tanita Maddox. Tanita's written a book called What Gen Z Really Wants to Know About God. She is pretty much an expert in this area. She's the National Director of Generational Impact for Young Life, and so we're going to have a conversation about Gen Z, her book, and probably a few other things. But thanks, Tanita, for being on the podcast. Really appreciate you coming on. No, I'm excited for today's conversation. Yeah, so tell me a little bit about what you do as National Director of Generational Impact. Oh, you know, it's so funny. Some of these titles, it's really hard to figure out what's going on, you know, and that's what I do for half my job at Young Life is I get the honor of taking everything I've researched, everything I'm studying, and then play with it in real life. How does it impact how we're training staff? How does it impact how our strategy around reaching young people? How do we train staff? And so I get to do that for part of this, and then I also work locally in Spokane on staff at Young Life, very much in the field doing what other Young Life field staff do, training leaders and raising money and doing local ministry. Was a lot of this, I know you did your DMN at Phoenix Seminary. Was this related to where you did most of your DMN work? Because you've been in youth ministry and all that kind of good stuff, but how does your DMN project connect with what you're doing now? When I was going through the DMN, you know, one of the pieces of advice a couple classmates gave me is they said, pick something you're going to study that you will actually use because at some point you're going to be tired of it. You're tired of reading about it. I don't know if that was your experience. No, it was. Yeah. And it was this critical moment. It just, the timing was so perfect in that sense that I was doing Young Life in Scottsdale, Arizona, and I was feeling like I was failing at what I was doing. So the messages I was giving just seemed like they were falling flat, and I was seeing a lot of panic attacks with kids at middle school and high school levels. I would see groups of kids that didn't want to hang out. They only wanted to do one-on-one stuff. And I couldn't figure out what was happening in that space. I literally thought that I was, you know, approaching 40, and I was like, maybe I'm too old. I'm not cool anymore. I can't do this. And so all that happened while I was in the DMN program and figured out that there was a new generation. And so I thought, what better thing to study than to study the next generation, how to share the gospel with them because I was failing in that moment doing that. So that's how I led to this project and has led, just kind of gone on from there. Yeah. I mean, I have, I guess, three Gen Z kids and whatever we're calling the next one, I think Gen Alpha. So my kids remind me every day that I am definitely old and not cool anymore. Do they say 6, 7? They say a lot of different things that I don't understand. I'm pretty sure they aren't told to me most of the time, but I'll never know it. What are, what sensibilities have really changed? I mean, aside from the, what is really an interesting sort of phenomenon as far as language. I mean, I can remember saying words that my parents probably wouldn't have used when I was a kid, but they were still actual words. We didn't usually make up our own language, but Gen Z has a whole different vocabulary. They've got a whole different mentality. So what would you say is unique about that Gen Z generation that's coming up? And like, what are some of those features that maybe we don't, we don't quite grasp? Yeah, slang is kind of a misnomer in all of it because I think people fit slang with different generations, but slang is kind of slang. It moves really quickly through the cultural setting of every generation and just even within a generation itself, it can change, you know? However, I think what's more interesting is that we can sometimes use the exact same words as Gen Z and actually be saying completely different things. So like the word acceptance means something different. The word truth, they have a different relationship with the word safety. They have a different relationship with. And so those now we're, now we're getting into trouble areas where we're saying the same words, but we actually are meaning different things. And that's all informed by their generational experience, which is so unique to what we had ever seen before. Yeah. When they're thinking then about, you know, when you think about that sort of shift in language, how do they think about the language of the church? So there's a, I mean, I'm an Old Testament guy. I've done a lot of theology. And so there is a language in the church that you sort of grab onto. You know, you write in your book about, you know, is God good? And I'm wondering if, you know, some of that language is just not connecting with Gen Z. And if not, why not? We have to unpack our language. So one of the things that, that led to this project is I was realizing that as I was sharing the gospel with young people, that I was answering questions they weren't asking and answering ones, you know, that I was ignoring the ones they were, they were, they were asking. So in other words, the incarnation is pinnacle. Like it's so important, right? If nothing else happens without it. Right. Sort of the, yeah. Yeah. But when I would share that Jesus was a hundred percent human and a hundred percent divine, the missing piece for our Gen Zers was, well, why does that matter to what I'm asking about life? How does that answer the questions that I have as I face the world, as I face faith, how does that impact how I live my life when I walk out of this room? And so that's kind of the part of the piece that we're having to really wrestle with in our own faith so we can explain it to our young people is why does this matter? And so some of this language that we think is common, so let's talk about, you want to talk about truth? Let's talk about the idea of truth. I think for a lot of generations before this, truth was a safe Harbor. If you said something was true, you could kind of reorient some of the things you, you maybe believed or thought or, or value systems around what you now discovered was true. For Gen Z in their lifetime, they've seen truth become weaponized. They've seen it be used to hurt people, to exclude people, to reject people. And so sometimes if we open up a Bible and we hold it up in front of our Gen Zers and say, this is truth, we may be thinking, Hey, I'm giving you something that you can rely on rest in this, but they may be hearing because of their generational experience. This is a tool for rejection and hurting people. And so right there by itself, we are, we're conveying a different message than maybe our young people are hearing from us. So I can certainly get how we, you know, you can see the way that truth gets pressed into service of other things. You like totally understand that. How do they think though about reality? You know, that there is a reality around us that has a claim on us, right? That we don't determine what is good or what is bad, but these things are predetermined for us. And we're really just recognizing it. And, and the way that, that the Bible sort of helps us frame those things out, like how would we express that to a Gen Zer? How do they, how do they, how does that impact them? Yeah. And by the way, I have to give my disclaimer that when we're talking about generational study, we're talking about very broad stereotypes. Anyone else out there who's like, that's not what I think. You're like, that's fine. We're talking about a couple billion people. So there's going to be some nuances in there. Yeah. No, I mean, even the way I speak to my son is different than the way I speak to my daughters. And so they're like, you know, four or five years apart and they're completely different people. And so, yeah, broad trends don't necessarily equal specifics. Yeah. I just have, before I start talking about these things, because they're complex topics, right? Yeah. Okay. So generally when you say the reality that we don't actually determine what is good or what is right or what is fair, that is not the worldview that Gen Z shares. They, they would say, I do get to determine what is good and what is right and what is fair. So when we start talking about aspects of why is God good, where a Gen Zer would more, most likely phrase it as why would God, you know, and then fill in the blank, fill in, you know, the terrible things they're seeing, which is at the bottom line is, is he good? If there's, then he has a good reason. What they're really saying is I have my idea of what is good and

of those three aspects, and it gives them a heuristic sort of trace through some of the challenges that you're having in each of these reformation. So kind of reading what you're saying through those lenses, what we're really getting is an elevation of maybe experience that's also shifting the authority away from what we might say is God's Word into their own individual determinations about what is good and true and beautiful. And then, you know, sort of sitting in the middle of that is a logic that is slightly different than our own. And so the generational shift really is impacting all three of those categories if we just thought about it that way. Is that a fair way of kind of summarizing the broad trend? Yeah, I think that's a great way to look at it because when I talk about, like, let's talk about sin, all right? Let's talk about sin. It's a nice fun topic to chat about. It used to be that we had enough of a generational understanding about sin that we mostly primarily I've seen it, and maybe you see it differently in your circles, but primarily I've seen it talked about as a moral failing, essentially, like this was God's law and his standard, and we've fallen short of that, which is in the Bible. And I've seen it also as a relational break, that we were designed to be in a relationship with God, but sin, we've walked away from that, which is also in the Bible. However, for most of Gen Z, if there is no universal moralism, then when you say we've fallen short, then that doesn't, they're like, well, you might, maybe in your truth, but not in mine, so I'm okay. And for a lot of Gen Z that got, who see God as a concept and more of an idea that is, that I conform to what I like and what I want to believe, that relational piece also can fall apart really quickly. And so I had to figure out how am I going to talk about sin with a generation that does not believe that God is personal or that there is a universal moral that they're falling short of and that they can judge whether or not they're good people. And what I ended up working with and still do is I talk about the concept of freedom because freedom is really attractive to Gen Z. Getting to do what I want, when I want, how I want, where I want. I am the decider. And more than anything, I start to pull up that thread and say, let's talk about the places that you were promised total freedom and control, and let's see how it's working out. And really pull that through. And, you know, I kind of borrow a little bit of Tim Keller had a sermon about sin as addiction, that it always is going to require more and more and more and more. And kind of pull through that thread to say, do you really think you're free? Like, let's play this out. You will always need more. You will always be unfulfilled. There's not an end to this. You're actually now chained to trying to fill these needs that you have in ways that will never do that. Do you, do you think that's free or is there another name for this that is actually pulling you further and further into darkness? Yeah. That's really interesting. Do they, do they respond to language like incompleteness? You know, part of what I see in the, in scripture, especially like, let's say we look at something like the Tower of Babel, right? The Tower of Babel builders don't seem to be hell-bent on rebelling against God. They seem to have an incomplete understanding of how the world works that leads them to do something that ends up being opposed to God. And so there's a, there's sort of a captivity to our own ignorance, we might say, that keeps us from understanding the world sufficient to really live well within it. Is that sort of a, you know, a path you've seen people go down or is that ignorance language like just too harsh, right? No, I think that there's just a lot of work that I'm doing more and more to get kids and young people in a place where they can be open to this kind of language. And so the incomplete piece is I often use, like, there is truth outside of our experience. Can you admit that there's truth outside of your personal experience? Because there's such an experiment, a whole group of people. And one of the ways that I do this is, oh my goodness, do you remember the dress picture, the blue and black and the gold? I know. It's still, I mean, it starts fights in the room every time. It broke my brain and my relationships because I'm the one, I'm one of the people that saw white and gold, you know? And they're like, people are like, you're insane, you know? Anyway. You're one of the fakers. My eyes are, my brain's broken, I guess is what it is. Yeah. I put it up there just to go like, look, if you see like white and gold, like you, there's nothing like that right now that can make you not see that except if you zoom out and see the entire picture of the dress. So our incomplete partial picture of anything, we're deciding what's true based on an incomplete picture. So that's the closest. I don't know if I've ever talked about personal incompleteness, but maybe I'll try that this semester. Maybe I'll experiment and see what happens. Let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed? With inflation, market volatility, and ongoing global uncertainty, more families are taking a closer look at whether their retirement plan is truly built to hold up. And many are finding that adding a layer of protection makes a lot of sense. Sanctuary Metals is a Christian-owned company that helps families strengthen their retirement savings with physical gold and silver through a gold IRA. During uncertain times, many people look to precious metals as a way to add stability when other assets may be under pressure. If you'd like to explore whether a gold IRA is a good fit for your situation, Sanctuary Metals makes it easy to get started. Text GUIDE to 94878 to receive your free retirement defense guide or call 888-958-6579 to speak with one of their knowledgeable team members. Again, text GUIDE to 94878 or call 888-958-6579. Yeah. I've done a, I'm doing some work on, you know, just decision-making and discernment and Christian life. And one of the illustrations I use when I teach on epistemology is, you know, think about sitting around an art class table and drawing a basket of fruit. You're ultimately going to get a different perspective. One person could actually draw an apple, banana, and a kiwi, and another person could draw a pineapple, you know, an orange, and a grapefruit. And they'd both be correct because they're seeing it from two totally different perspectives. And until they move and shift perspectives, they can't see the rest of it. And so there's a sense in which our angle on things, our point of view is always sort of conditioning what we think we know and how we think we know it. This is one of the reasons that when we start to talk about the Bible with our young people, our Gen Zers, and talk about the idea of truth, one of the ways that I've been able to have a conversation is by acknowledging that they have to, have had to navigate the world with essentially our culture removing truth from them. And so then they're, they are drawn towards justice, right? They want to fight for what's right, fight against what's wrong, fight for good, fight against what's evil. And when I say things like, I can't believe that you've had to do that, but with no one actually telling you what is true, with no anchor point on that, and with constantly having to figure it out moment by moment, how are you going to decide? That sounds absolutely exhausting. And it sounds like it's a burden that's too heavy to carry. And it's amazing to watch. When you recognize what's been happening internally in our Gen Zers and you say it out loud in a compassionate way, like that sounds awful. It's like they can relax for a second and say, Oh my goodness, that's what's been going on. That's what I've been dealing with. And then we can start to introduce this idea of what if there is truth that guides all of this? What if it's not up to you and you can rely on God who is outside of our experience, who created the fruit bowl, so knows what's in the fruit bowl. And so you're not relying on what only you see. What are some of the, you know, if I think through the worldview kind of questions, right? Who are we? Where are we? What's our problem? What's the solution? When you get down to it, I mean, what's the general sense of what's our problem with Gen Z? And I would guess that differs across cultures. And again, we're dealing in broad categories, but just feels to me that there's a, a deep instability right now in the world that, you know, folks our age are probably concerned about, but we also have had a lot of years behind us and we've hopefully built up some resiliency across those years, you know, financially, socially, career-wise, all those things. Whereas Gen Z are just moving into this. They're, they're starting to just now experience this world where there's a lot of instability. Is that part of what's sort of influencing their perspective on things? Their, their whole life has been instability. I mean, the COVID closures happened in the midst of their development, like in, in key parts of their development. They had, you know, a few years ago, the stat was that three quarters of high school students had some kind of anxiety that a school shooting would happen on their campus, right? It's what's normal for my kids is they have lockdown drills.

And what is honorable and noble one day is taken apart the next day. It's only been instability. And so they are resilient in different ways because they had to navigate that through adolescence. They made it look a little bit easier than we thought it was, and so that's why I think older generations were like, why are they so weak? And you're like, look, I don't know how they're standing, man. I thought adolescence was hard enough without dealing with the things that they were dealing with. Right, right. No, fair enough. Yeah, I guess I, you know, COVID, again, you know, experiencing it at a generation above, right? As someone who works remotely, whose wife worked remotely. My wife's in healthcare, right, so she had a whole different experience with COVID, and it was hard and difficult. But again, you know, we had a level of stability that I don't know that our kids really experienced. I mean, everything they were doing was essentially taken away from them. It's, that's an interesting thought process to go through. So how do we, how do we help, how do we leverage the resilience they have and help them with some of the frustration they're experiencing? I think it's helpful always. For me, it's helpful to compare it to my own experience because then I can understand what was, what do we have the same and different. And so for anyone out here, if you've got a Gen Z in your life and ask them, you know, how old were you when the closures happened? I just did this with a young man, and he said, I was 18. And I said, okay, let me talk about when I was 18. I was 18, I moved out of my house to a college that was a few hours away. I had to figure out campus and getting my own groceries and taking care of my own needs and cooking my own meals and my own laundry. If I was sick, I had to figure out my own medical, you know, appointments, my class schedules, my finances and the financial aid office, as well as like, how do you budget if you have a school loan like I did? How do you budget that money for a whole semester and not go broke in the middle of it? You know, like all those things that were, I said, that were a part of it, is it, how, how much of that was similar to yours? And he looked at me, I mean, just like none of it, none of it's my, that was my experience. Like there was not a single thing that was the same. He goes, when I was 18, school's closed and I was in my house with my mom. I could see my mom where I was sitting in the house, basically all the time. And I hung out with my friends on Zoom once a week. Okay. So we have their, it's helping me to remember that some of those experiences were either delayed, some experiences for young people were deleted. Like for, you know, bless those Gen Z'ers who missed middle school dances, you know, didn't have to do that with all the rest of us that didn't. So then again, some of those were moved on and then they were replaced by different experiences. So we go, okay, what experiences did you learn? What are hard things you did move through so they can understand some of their skill sets there. But this, this generation is such a high value for safety that I think we've got to walk into that place with them and unpack it and going, okay, what feels, what feels risky about this next move? Where do you want to grow? And acknowledging things like growth usually means pain, you know, maturing and learning a skill means feeling stupid sometimes, that these are natural processes that feel unsafe, but moving through and helping them develop some of the soft skills of moving through failure and feeling embarrassed and trying something new and not being good at it. We need some, give some, some concrete steps from it because some of those, some of those places they would have learned it were erased from their development experience. So do you find this, and I'm just in my, my only interaction really with Gen Z is my own children. So it's a really small sample size. Small, small sample. So we had made the decision really early on that social media would be limited. Like we got our kids involved in sports. You know, one of my daughters is a gymnast. Both of them lift weights with me, like that kind of stuff. Right. And so these are areas where failure is imminent. Like you experience it all the time. It's, if not rare, right. You're doing it right. You're going to screw it up and it's not going to work. I'm wondering, do you find greater senses of that sort of need for safety with kids who just haven't had even those kinds of experiences? Like, is there a spectrum within Gen Z where you'd say, like, if they haven't been involved in those types of activities at all, that they're more on the edge of, Hey, I don't feel safe. I don't feel like I can fail. I feel like I, you know, those kinds of things versus if they've had them, they have a different sort of mentality and resiliency. So, you know, again, sort of bifurcating that generation a little bit, I guess. You know, it's interesting that the term safety is it's taken on an extremely broad meaning. Like, you know, when I grew up in the eighties, it was like, don't talk to strangers. And like the second rule was, for our family was don't ride in the bed of a pickup truck. And those were kind of the two main things. Right. Those are the big safety features. That was be safe. Those two things. A lot of other things were sure. Wander around the ball for hours. My kids get a kick out of that PSA in the nineties. It was something like, it's 10 o'clock. You know where your children are. And they're like, why wouldn't you know where your children are? I'm like, because that was where they didn't have to know where we were. Yeah. So this was actually something that the government had to put out and they felt concerned with. So yeah, they don't, they don't really have that, that sort of feel. So yeah, I get that. There's a, there's a shift in safety. So what, what is safety for them? What is safety for them? I mean, I think you've heard this, right? It's not just physical. We were just talking about physical safety. Like literally, do you know where your kids are? You know, are they at home? Don't die. Right. Don't die. The other part, but now we have emotional safety and psychological safety. You know, all the, in this broad place of safety from, it can be safety from risk, safety from failure. It can be safety from disagreement. It can be safety from being uncomfortable. It can be safety from being embarrassed. Like it just has gone very, very, very broad. And the issue with that too, is it's also very individualistic. So if you have a group of people and say, what do you need to feel safe in this room? You're going to have a bunch of different things. And that's why it's a little harder to nail down. And as a generation, they can have, they can all say they value safety, but have a different definition for what that means. So it could be, you feel safe because I can call on, I call on you in a group and you feel like you have permission to speak in the room. You've, you've been given space. And for someone else, like if you call on me, I feel like I'm. Like completely unsafe because. Yeah, completely unsafe. Why are you picking on me? Yeah. Oh my gosh. So even in those different spaces where you may have some experience with failure and then getting up and trying again, there may be other aspects of safety that, that play a role in those places. Like maybe it's the personality of the coach or how the failures are treated or how they compare with other people who are in the same sport. Uh, at their age and what their placement and stats are. So it can be a lot of different, a lot of different things. Yeah. It's just like sort of scattershot and almost anything that makes me feel uncomfortable could be considered unsafe. Yeah. I think if we really leaned into how, how does Gen Z define safety? I mean, overall, even with all the different definitions is probably like a guarantee that I will be happy and that I will be, I will succeed in that. I won't experience hurt, uh, or, um, failure. So that seems to be really challenging when it comes to the central message of the gospel. Um, because, you know, all the suffering like Jesus did and, you know, like our paradigm is a guy who was crucified. Like nothing in the Bible looks safe. Are you kidding? Yeah. Yeah. Right. Everything seemed a little too dangerous and uncomfortable. So yeah. How do you navigate that aspect? Yeah, that is complex because like, if you used what a generational or cultural idea of safety is, like the Bible automatically, like you just, you know, you don't have to get very far into it before you're like, that's not safe, right? I bet it gets better at some point, you know? right. Uh, exactly. And so it, so part of it is understanding that we have borrowed an idea from safety of safety. That is not God's idea of safety. So how does God, if God is good and if God, um, and part of that goodness is he is safe in some aspect, what is his definition of safety? And I like to, uh, and there was risk involved

Sitting on the boat in a storm is the safest place, but it was. And it didn't actually rely on Peter. He started to sink when he realized the circumstances did not change when he got out of the boat. They were the same. And it was scary. But was it the safest place to be? Of course it was, because it all relied on Jesus, and Jesus had him. He held him. He was there. And so I go, we've got to redefine what safety means and looks like, because that was the safest place. With Jesus Christ is the safest place to be. Yeah, yeah. Really good. Yeah. Very interesting. I, I haven't done much on safety. I've played around with human capacity in Genesis. And so if you look at the early narratives in Genesis, you know, the human couple is initially naked and unashamed. And then after the fall, they're now they realize that they're naked and make the fig leaves. They've lost something of their capacity because they've been disconnected from a vital relationship with God. And so what, what I think those early chapters in Genesis speak to is, we are our most human and have the greatest capacity to flourish in right relationship to God. And when that relationship is broken, now we experience turmoil and difficulty and lack of safety and all those kinds of things. And I think the Peter jumping out of the boat, getting out of the boat is another great example of that. I had thought of that word. I love it. Yeah. Fantastic. Oh, it's yeah. I mean, there's lots of quite like, what I, I love what you just said, because most of the book I write, I, I stayed on the picture of who Jesus is, you know, but it's what I love about what you just stated is, I think we went right. Adam and Eve go from a place of feeling safe in the sense of like, there is no risk. Like I, I am unashamed, like you said. And then the moment that the fall happens is probably the first time the question comes out, is God safe? Because they hit and they hurt. Yeah, yeah. Well, and what's fascinating about that conversation, even if you think through some of what you've said about Gen Z, is you look at the way the serpent twists the truth and gets Eve to see the tree in a way that God doesn't want her to see it. Like there's that, there's that twisting moment where all of this truth that the serpent is actually, he's saying a lot of true things, but he's using it to deceive, as opposed to God who is really trying to create a context where humans can flourish. And it's, yeah, I think it's, uh, thinking through some of these like different themes or thinking through some of the theological themes differently seems to me to be, like, sort of what you're saying is crucial to really communicating with Gen Z, coming at it from a different angle. Yeah, and this is the heart of primissiology and then cultural apologetics, right? Like, how do I explain this in a way that makes cultural sense to you? And which, it's been such a beautiful process for me personally. I think I've seen the Scripture come alive and, I mean, I've always believed, I always believed in the authority of Scripture, but then, but you, there's one thing, like, theoretically to know that this has been good news for people around the world over, like, many, many centuries, right? Um, and it's different to actually see it applied and go, oh my goodness, I never saw that there, but this is actually addressing the needs of the next generation. And I was missing these aspects of it. So even just, like, when the Spirit leads Jesus into the desert to be tempted, like that, it's not a question. The Bible is very clear. The Spirit leading and the purpose of the being in the desert was to be tempted. And you'd start to go, okay, so how then do we, do we look at this and say, okay, if God is safe, then what is safe about this? You know, he's not reckless with us. He is not careless with us. Certainly not with his own son. So what about this interaction and this, uh, this moment that the Spirit leads the son to be tempted in the desert? What about it is safe? And those are kind of the fun places that, uh, we get to explore that with our young people. Yeah, yeah. Do you think some of, and I kind of like get the question, like, do you, I wrote a chapter, Do All People Matter to God? I'm kind of interested to get there. But what you just said kind of raised a question for me. There's been all this kind of conversation around penal substitutionary atonement, and I don't really, you know, I don't need to know what you think about it necessarily, but it seems to me that, like, what you're saying sort of gives me a different context for understanding why it's becoming such an issue right now. In part because it, it does speak to this idea that God wasn't safe for Jesus. You know, that God was really doing something that was harmful to his son. And I'm wondering if that resonated. Am I reading into that too much? Or is that sort of something you're seeing on the ground? No, I think that it, it looks like God's a bad dad, right? Like that, why would he do that? And I chalk, I mean, there's, it's poor Trinitarian theology at the end of the day. Like that somehow Jesus is a victim of God in that moment is, is poor Trinitarian theology, but we can't blame Gen Z for having poor Trinitarian theology. They haven't been around the church, but we can, we can start to unpack it for them to say, and I, and I talk about this a little bit in the, in the answering the question, am I enough? To say, Hey, God, the father, God, the son, and God, the spirit are eternal. And so in the beginning, before you were born, they decided the triune God decided that you were enough to make a plan to be with, that you were enough and valuable enough to, to God to make it up a way so that you had an opportunity to be in a relationship with him. So Jesus, Jesus is a part of that. And I know, I know the topic's not Trinitarian theology, but that the God, the father, God, the son, God, the spirit cannot be separated from one another. And so all participate in the act of atonement in the way that we cannot explain. And is very mysterious, but, but that this is not God sending Jesus on an errand and the Holy spirit's just nowhere. Like they're all three participating in the act of atonement. Yeah. Let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed with inflation, market volatility, and ongoing global uncertainty? More families are taking a closer look at whether their retirement plan is truly built to hold up. And many are finding that adding a layer of protection makes a lot of sense. Sanctuary metals is a Christian owned company that helps families strengthen their retirement savings with physical gold and silver through a gold IRA. During uncertain times, many people look to precious metals as a way to add stability when other assets may be under pressure. If you'd like to explore whether a gold IRA is a good fit for your situation, sanctuary metals makes it easy to get started. Text guide to 94878 to receive your free retirement defense guide or call 888-958-6579 to speak with one of their knowledgeable team members. Again, text guide to 94878 or call 888-958-6579. No, that's helpful. Yeah, it's that came to mind today. I find it so interesting. I'm starting to hear sort of conversations flare up around that, around original sin, particularly, you know, what happens to infants when they die, those kind of things, which, you know, you cover sort of in theological education, but they seem to be much more like prominent now. They keep coming back up, coming back up, coming back up. And so it's just interesting to think about it in terms of what Gen Z is feeling and thinking right now. Totally. I know. I mean, we don't, we usually don't have enough time on the conversation to say that the sacrifice of a firstborn son made was a, a totally different sense, right? When we're talking about first, first century, uh, the Greco-Roman world, very, very different. You know, that is the ultimate sacrifice. That is, there is nothing more valuable than that. And then we come to our, this part of our, you know, people history, and we go, no, no, no, my life is the most important. Right, right. So we have got, so getting to say, no, no, no, no, no. God participates. Um, it's, it's, it's just, I think the Lord that, you know, his, his atonement, his scripture, it transcends cultural context. And so we, but we do have to frame it in a cultural context. He does interact with us within our cultural context, but then exist outside of it. So it's been beautiful. Well, and what's kind of nice is, um, I remember one time I was teaching a hermeneutics class and I was trying to explain to students how the Bible worked. And I said, it's kind of like, uh, when my kids play with glitter, right? You, you, they play with glitter and you go and you try to wipe the glitter up. And then the next month and a half, you're still finding glitter

but overall, most people say, he knew what he was doing. Like, he identified where they were missing it and then redefined what the relationship between us and God is, and people did, not a lot, but people did come to faith because he was asking them to move major paradigm shifts in order to become followers of God. Right, right, right. No, I would agree with that. I mean, I think it's questionable whether he was overly harsh with them toward the end or not, but I think at the end of the day, he's pointing out something. He's inviting them to let him tell them who the unknown God is, you know? And he's saying, like, I know who this is. You're worshiping someone you don't know, but I know who it is. And so, almost like, if you'd like to know, just text me. It'll be fine. You know? But he didn't start by saying, like, you pagan foolish people, you know? And how people are starting our conversation with Gen Z like that. You know, they're like, you fragile, weak, ignorant generation, let me tell you about God. Like, I don't think that, that's not how Paul did it either. I don't think that works. Well, let's finish out because we're getting close to the end of the interview, but I wanted to talk about, you know, does God love everybody? Does everybody matter? It seems like that would be a really big sort of crux for a lot of Gen Z folks. So, talk a little bit about that and how you navigate it. When I was growing up, I really cared if God cared about me. It was really just about me. What I have learned by working with Gen Z and studying them is that they have said in there and to me personally have said, if God doesn't care about these people over here or this group of people over here, I don't want anything to do with your God. And so they're much more communally minded than I think they get credit for. And they're really wondering, does God only care about certain people? Does he see what's going on? Does he matter? Is he going to enact something? And in some ways, right, is he going to set things right? Is this really a God who is going to make things right? And so getting to go into Scripture and taking them with us on the journey to see where Jesus did truly change things and was with the powerful and powerless and the insider and the outsider and the religious and the non-religious and the men and the women. Like all the places and really is a social, has this idea of social justice that our young people can relate to. And you look at the sermon on the plains and it removes the spiritual language from the sermon on the mount and says, you should care about these things. He's got his good Samaritan, but also just in his personal ministry that he moves past a lot of these things to work with those who were considered problems or marginalized in his world. And so, and then models that, that our faith should not be this impersonal individual siloed experience. That's just me and God, right? It should not just be vertical, that it is supposed to change us in a way that actually impacts how we live out in the world. And so, but they just have not witnessed that very well or it's not, or if they are seeing it, they are disconnecting someone's communal ministry from their vertical relationship with God. And so I'm going to make those connections for them. I mean, how do you navigate some of that? Because I just had on a gentleman who works a lot with coaching churches who have LGBTQ members, right? How do you work with those LGBTQ members to help them come the way he phrased it was a wise sexual ethic or a biblical sexual ethic? Like what does that look like? And he was advocating for things like celibacy, but also mixed orientation marriages, which I'd never heard of, but that found really sort of interesting. Like to me, there, there, when I hear that kind of conversation and I think about some of the churches I've been to in the past, I'm like, man, good luck. Like I really hope this works for you. I can't even envision people like settling down enough to have that conversation sometimes. Right. And just objectively think about it. Are those the sort of things that Gen Z is reacting to or are they reacting to the basic message of, look, there's a guideline for all of us. We're all supposed to practice, you know, we're all supposed to behave in a certain way. We're all supposed to be conformed to the image of Christ. And so when we're not conformed in that direction, there is discipline. There is, you know, loving redirection. There is rebuke. There is all these different things. Does that question resonate? Does that make sense? Yeah, I think there's two parts of what you just shared. And one is what I go with in the beginning of the book. And the question is, is God good? And go, can you follow a God that you do not agree with or understand all the time? That actually becoming a follower of God is letting go of all the ideas that we had and replace them with what God has to say. That's what it means to be a follower, is letting go of everything. And that's a really painful, lifelong process. And so that's a piece of would it be? I'm not, I don't not like sugarcoat that piece of it. For all of us, really. Yeah. For all of us, for me still. So the other piece of this is there is this idea that all humans deserve to be treated with dignity and human rights. Now, here's where it gets complicated. I think Gen Zers, a lot of times, are talking about human rights or understanding human rights is different than different generations do. And that is a pie across the board. So, for example, I think that my understanding of how Gen Z looks at safety is that that is a human right and any violation of safety is a violation of a human right. So, but we would, I don't think a lot of other generations would say that. So you have the same thing with love, that in order to be human, that you have the right to be in romantic relationship, that that is somehow making you more human or living to the fullest of what humanity is. Yeah. So when you say when there is any limitation put on that, then what is being said is, is that you are removing a human right. So some, so when we look at what Gen Z is looking at, they're looking at people saying all people deserve some kind of right. Now we can agree that all humans deserve some kind of, deserve dignity. They deserve to hear about who Jesus is. They actually don't have a reason why. And that's one of the things that I think that the church can come alongside our Gen Zers because if you say, well, why, what makes someone human? What gives them innate value in this world? Because as far as I have found so far, there is not a secular worldview that does say these kinds of things that we can come alongside is because people are made in the image of God. Like God is the one, God's the one who said people have value and then showed that, showed like with his own, his own plan for us just to say that, you know, you are, you have value because I made you and I made you in my image. And then that value then is innately there because God put it there, not because of any other reason. And that becomes the start of a conversation with the young people. Yeah, it's really, I mean, you started this conversation out talking a little bit about freedom, right? And how you presented freedom to Gen Zers to help them understand sin. It just seems to me that the flip side of that coin is constraint. Like we all, we all follow sets of rules. We all constrain ourselves, decide to operate within a system in order just to function on a daily basis. You know, I mean, driving a car down the right side of the road, you're technically free, I suppose, to go on the left, but it's going to be real bad for everybody. I mean, it's not going to work out very well. And so we, we follow those constraints to get along in society. And it just seems to me like that flip side of that coin of freedom is constraint. And as we think about some of these ethics, some of these, you know, behaviors that we're talking about, anything really in scripture, what we're trying to do is live according to the constraints God has set because they're not too broad and they're not too narrow. They're, they're sort of like, you know, the Goldilocks and the three bears. They're just right. Um, but yeah, it's fascinating to think through, um, really, uh, really appreciate your work. This is like, it's very helpful to hear some of what Gen Z thinks. I never would have framed it in terms of safety being a human right. I never would have thought that, but it rings true. So, yeah, really fascinating. Well, kind of last question before we end here. Um, how would you suggest people who are like our age or older? I'm a Gen Xer. Um, so I'm pretty angry and passive aggressive anyway. And so, yeah, I mean, sarcastic. Sarcasm was my love language. My love language. A lot of sad, angry rock music, you know, that's right. Creeding. Yeah. You know, all those, um, think Creed. Yeah, Creed. Oh yeah. You gotta love Creed. Of all the Gen X bands we could have listed, that's what you went with. Oh, Nickelback. I learned a lot about you with that one answer. Like 182

maximally ready to approach Gen Z with the gospel. We start with listening. One of the biggest complaints and requests I guess I've heard from Gen Zers over the years is they feel like they're not being listened to. And I know most generations are like, we are listening, you're not saying anything, but it's just because they have a different communication style. Or they don't feel like we're in a spot where we are going to listen to them and really hear what they have to say. And sometimes listening means, you're not listening to me means you're not feeling with me, you're not agreeing with me. And so those are all kind of wrapped into that. So I just start by asking questions. Like, what do you wish people my age understood about what it's like to be your age? And I'll let them fill in the blank. Some of it's, what do you hear about yourself or your generation from older generations or the media? You hear what messages they're hearing about themselves. I've yet to hear a positive word come out. And it's been an interesting activity then to just replace those words and go, can I tell you what I see? You know, and then get to replace those words for them, speak hope and vision over them. I think that's one of the biggest things we can do as adults. Like, we are charged with stewardship over our young people and they need to hear that we have vision and hope for them. It's our job to raise them and disciple them. And so they will live into the words we speak over them. So choose your words carefully that you speak over generations and young people. And the last piece is one question that you can ask that's very, very dangerous. And so I would say you need to prepare your heart before you ask this question, is on a scale of 1 to 10, how well do I listen to you? Can you hear why that's dangerous? You cannot defend it. You cannot explain it away. This is not about how well you think you listen. It's how well the person on the other side of you receives that. And ask them, what would make it one number better? Not what goes from a 5 to a 10, but how would I go from a 5 to a 6? And you'll learn how our young people want to be listened to in those spaces. And they may not know. They may not say, I actually don't know. But you go, okay, well, I'm going to work on this with you. And I do encourage people to read this book with a Gen Zer in their life and then ask them, don't take my word for it. I'm a 46-year-old Gen Xer myself. Don't take my word for it. Ask them. Go to the source and say, will you read this to me and tell me what you think is you agree with in this? And invite them in the conversation. They will both love that you bought a book about them, that you're so interested in them, that you actually want to go try to figure this out. And they will also love that you thought that their opinion was so important that you would listen to them over a stranger that wrote a book. Yeah. Really helpful. Thanks, Danita. That's an awesome answer. I look forward to having that very hard, awkward conversation with my kids and trying to hold back my Gen X sarcasm as much as possible. So, yeah, appreciate that. Fantastic stuff. Really appreciate you being on the podcast. This is an IVP title, and so IVP gives us a 20% discount to everybody. I would suggest you go out and buy What Gen Z Really Wants to Know About God by Danita Maddox. It's available on Amazon, but go to IVP's website, which will get the 20% off. That link will be in our show notes. And any place else they can keep up with you, Danita? Yeah, you can follow Dr. Danita Maddox on Instagram. I put little pieces out there in more bite-sized forms for people like me who maybe can take about 30 seconds of information at a time, as well as my website, DanitaMaddox.com. You can also contact me through both of those places. We'll link to those there in the show notes as well. But really appreciate you being here. Appreciate you doing this work. And really insightful and helpful. So thanks very much. It was so fun to be with you and have this combo. Yeah, thanks a lot. All right, everybody. Well, we'll catch you on the next episode of Thinking Christian. Take care. I just want to take a second to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the Thinking Christian podcast. If you go to lifeaudio.com, you'll find dozens of other faith-centered podcasts in their network. They've got shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting, and more. Two weeks old in an iron lung, which is like a sealed oxygen unit, fighting for my life. I couldn't breathe properly. And apparently I didn't make a sound from the day I was born because my lungs were all messed up. That's Martin Smith of Delirious sharing a personal testimony on The Walk, a podcast for worshipers. Join us weekly to hear songwriters, worship leaders, filmmakers, and other creatives tell stories in the form of a devotional. The Walk can be found on lifeaudio.com or your favorite podcast platform.