Why Are Millennials Embracing Complementarity?

(At the Council on Biblical Manhood & Womanhood, we’re excited to go public with this news: students can pay a $40 rate for our April 2016 T4G pre-conference!)

Everybody knows we’re in an age of cultural upheaval. Those most caught in the storm are not boomers, but millennials. It’s easy to read one poll or another and fret about this oft-discussed group. Here’s what I would say about our millennial friends: the kids are going to be alright.

From my vantage point, there’s plenty of young blood that wants what we would call a “deep faith,” not a shallow, culturally-approved version. Here are a few signs of this:

• Most of our writers for the Council on Biblical Manhood & Womanhood are young; To attend a conference like Together for the Gospel or The Gospel Coalition is to come into contact with hordes of bright, cheery, God-intoxicated young people
• The clutch of future church planters and revitalizers crowding seminaries like Midwestern are quite young; here’s official ATS data on seminary enrollments, showing that multiple complementarian seminaries have relatively large enrollments (SBTS, SEBTS, SWBTS, RTS, and so on), and here’s more on SBC seminary enrollments, many of them historically high
• Outside of specific ethical matters, in terms of hard data, among adults under 30, nearly 24 percent claim to be evangelical, a number that has increased several percentage points since 2007 (according to a 2013 study by pollster Ed Stetzer and Christianity Today)

We hear a ton of discouraging material today about the future of America, the future of evangelicalism, and the state of young people. It’s quite clear that disheartening trends are afoot. It’s also quite clear that now is no time to turn away from millennials. Do not abandon the ship. If you open your eyes, there is actually good reason to be encouraged in our time about the evangelical future.

Even as the culture secularizes and embraces a blurry, gender-neutral vision of life, there is a counter-movement afoot among God’s people. This is borne out by the work of CBMW. We’re seeing a very young audience respond to a fulsome, gospel-shaped presentation of biblical manhood and womanhood. We’re trying to keep up with the demand, in other words! For this reason, we’re excited to announce a $40 student rate for our 2016 T4G pre-conference on April 11-12, 2016. Because we know funds can be tight in the student years, we’re very glad to offer students this $40 rate, which guarantees at least one free book.

If you’re a student, join us in April, just over one month from now, and get loaded for bear for future ministry. Hear inspiring and rich messages from leaders like John MacArthur, Alistair Begg, John Piper, Kevin DeYoung, Al Mohler, Ligon Duncan, Danny Akin, Jason Allen, Mike Kruger, and more. Young women will be encouraged by a women’s micro-conference on Tuesday morning (April 12) featuring Mary Kassian, Mary Mohler, and more trustworthy voices tackling tough issues of our time.

I’m thrilled to see the Lord doing a new work today. We do not know the precise shape of the future. We do know that God loves his church, and he is raising up a fresh generation of Christ-exalting men and women to proclaim his truth and seek the salvation of the lost. I suppose that’s a fancy way of saying this: the evangelical kids are going to be alright.

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(Image: “Cheering Students” by AlbertHerring, used with permission of Wikimedia Commons