A Prayer for the Next Generation

I attended Challenge for the first time in 2004. I was the 14-year-old son of a youth pastor, trying to navigate the complexities of adolescence, as our youth group crammed in sauna-hot vans to trek from Minnesota to Salt Lake City. When I arrived—sweaty and exhausted—I experienced a God who was bigger than I’d ever imagined. And it blew me away. As I worshiped, prayed and learned alongside thousands of other students, I remember specifically praying:  

“God, I want my life to be about You.” 

Two decades later, I now have the privilege of serving as the prayer director for Challenge—a role I started back in 2014. As thousands of students gather every other year, God has given me a front-row seat to watch what He’s doing in the hearts of young people in the EFCA—and it’s amazing. 

My favorite parts of the week are the optional evening prayer times that we host just before the main gathering. Students come—of their own free will—simply to pray. If you’ve never seen 1,500 middle and high school students gathered to pray, add it to your bucket list. I can still picture groups of students gathered around each other, praying for God to move. Year after year, I’ve watched as students, who’ve never prayed out loud before, boldly pray for their friends and even strangers. 

For such a time as this 

Often, our picture of the future is bleak. We all feel the gravitational pull of culture and its effect on young people today. At times, it can be difficult to believe the gospel will continue to impact the generations of the future. We’ve said—or, at least, heard—things like, “I’m just so worried for my kids,” or “I feel sorry for young people today. How are they going to make it?” It can be easy to feel powerless in our inability to ensure a safe and thriving future for our kids and grandkids.  

Students have internalized this angst. I can tell you from conversations I’ve had that many of them feel abandoned by older generations who seem to have left them a world that is only getting worse. 

To regain a sense of power, we tend to turn to all the wrong things: moralism, political systems, wealth, tribalism, to name a few—all of which promise what they ultimately cannot deliver. Could it be that the answer to the crises our youth are facing is not any of those things but rather an intimate relationship with the living God? 

“From one man he has made every nationality to live over the whole earth and has determined their appointed times and the boundaries of where they live. He did this so that they might seek God, and perhaps they might reach out and find him, though he is not far from each one of us” (Acts 17:26-27, CSB). 

As Paul’s words in Acts 17 remind us, God is sovereign over the events of human history. He is determining events to play out in ways that move people to turn to Him. And when we turn to Him, He is not far off. He has come near to us. 

A call to prayer

Although today’s context is much different than 2004, students still feel the same longing I did two decades earlier. Their issues and questions are unique, but the remedy has spanned the test of time. 

Like me as a 14-year-old sweat monster, students today are searching for a sense of identity and belonging. I have three small children and one more on the way. I can’t imagine the complex questions they’ll have to navigate during the next 10, 20, 30 years. But what I know for certain is that God has called them for this specific time. And what I can do now is show them what it looks like to have an authentic, intimate relationship with God.  

As you think about the future, I invite you first to pray faith-filled prayers for this next generation of Christ-followers and church leaders. Certainly, Jesus is not anxiously wringing His hands. Even death is not too permanent an ailment for Him. Second, I ask you to pray specifically for those who will be joining us for Challenge 2024 in Kansas City next week (July 1-5). Pray they would—as I did in my simple, eighth-grade way—encounter our God, who is both more transcendent and more immanent than they ever imagined.