GENERATING HOPE
By Jimmy Long
Marshall Pickering. 264 pages. £6.99
ISBN 0 551 03199 9
Jimmy Long is a regional director for the US InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and has written this book out of experience of moving among young people for many years.
The book seeks to grapple with the question of the form that the church needs to take on to be most relevant to the people of the third millennium. Its basic thesis is that Generation X (people born between 1964-1984) is radically different in outlook from the so-called baby-boomers (US term) born in the immediate post-war period. The central reason for this radical difference is that Generation X is the first generation to be brought up within a post-modern environment. Whereas the post-war kids craved freedom and felt that the future was theirs for the taking, Generation X has been on the wrong end of all the mistakes the Boomers made. They are the children of divorce, of economic slow-down, the latchkey children for whom the TV was their baby-sitter. Many of them are people profoundly hurt and lacking in hope.
