THE BOOMERS AND THE BAPTIST
James Wilson, PrayNorthstate

While attending a prophetic conference recently I heard a world renowned prophet weeping – and calling for the rest of us to grieve with her – for my generation, the Boomer Generation. She said that when the Boomer Generation sang the Paul Simon classic, “Sounds of Silence,” in the sixties we opened doorways into darkness that continue to plague the world today. It just goes to show that anyone can mis-hear the Lord, because what she said is simply not true.

The song was in some ways an unsaved anthem for my generation – a generation called to the ministry of John the Baptist – and grieving is appropriate, albeit for very different reasons. The song opened no doors, but it did trumpet the presence of an elephant on the sofa that few from any generation want to talk about. “And the sign said the words of the prophets were written on the subway walls, and tenement halls…” went the lyrics, and they were written and recorded by members of the previous generation, although we boomers certainly joined the chorus and swelled the crescendo.

We are known as the “me” generation, the one that failed our commitments, failed to parent our young, and squandered the legacy left us by the victors over the Great Depression and World War II. But we are in reality the ones who staffed the Peace Corps and Vista, reintroducing idealism into a culture that was all about getting ahead. We are the ones who went south during the civil rights movement and risked our lives on the freedom marches to declare that justice denied to anyone is justice denied to everyone. We are the ones who fought in the Vietnam War and the ones who fought against it – a generation divided against itself because of the very passion with which we searched for ideals in which to believe and live. We have been blamed for high rates of divorce and abortion, although these practices became popular while we were in grade school; they came into vogue after sex was divorced from marriage and the termination of marriage on demand became socially acceptable. We simply followed our parents’ lead in these areas, although (as Paul points out in Romans 1) we are not absolved of our own responsibility by that reality.

It is true that we were a largely Godless generation. More of my peers than in any previous American generation could honestly say that we had never heard the Gospel – and in many cases never even heard of it. Yet God did not forsake us. He heard our echo of the Baptist’s cry to make straight in the desert a highway for Himself; He raised up the Charismatic Renewal, the Jesus People, mission ministries like Youth With a Mission, and phenomena like the Association of Vineyard Churches from and within our midst. He provided mentors for our generation like Jack Hayford, Chuck Smith, John Wimber, and even Ronald Reagan – to name a few – so that we were not an altogether unfathered generation. But we were the first to essentially find ourselves on our own when it came time to develop values and a worldview.

It was our task to call out the words we saw written on subway walls and tenement halls. It was our task to cherish also the legacy that we were given – a legacy left by the previous generation of independent thinking and entrepreneurial prowess that put men on the moon and made our nation the mightiest economic and social reformation power the world has ever known. We have all too often failed to cherish that legacy and give thanks to and for those who went before us – but we have also seen our spiritual inheritance held away from us by those who should have passed the baton with joy and instead choose to this day to blame us for ills we never inflicted. 2008 – a year of new beginnings in Bible parlance – heralds a new day for the Boomer Generation – a day in which we do receive our inheritance and are called to invest it in the Kingdom of God.

Luke 1:11-17 declares, “Then an angel of the Lord appeared to him, standing at the right side of the altar of incense. When Zechariah saw him, he was startled and gripped with fear. But the angel said to him, ‘Do not be afraid, Zechariah; your prayer has been heard. Your wife, Elizabeth, will bear you a son, and you are to give him the name John. He will be a joy and delight to you, and many will rejoice because of his birth, for he will be great in the sight of the Lord. He is never to take wine or other fermented drink, and he will be filled with the Holy Spirit even from birth. Many of the people of Israel will he bring back to the Lord their God. And he will go on before the Lord, in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the fathers to their children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous – to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.” These words were spoken prophetically over the year and the generation on the last night of 2007. They have been confirmed by many prophetic voices, and anyone reading this piece is invited to receive them only if they resonate in the readers’ heart.

John’s message was to prepare the way of the Messianic Lord, paving a straight highway in the desert for His coming. He called the people to enter into a lifestyle of repentance – not mourning their sins but turning progressively from the lives they had fashioned to the life that God was and is creating. The first chapter of Mark actually calls the opportunity to participate in this process the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ – not a preliminary to receiving it. I know this – when I sang the songs of the sixties – the protest songs and the songs of defiance – I knew what I was against, but I had nothing to be for. I did not yet know Jesus Christ and Him crucified. When I met the Lord I came to know what I could be for – but I remained set against the hypocrisies and cynicisms I had learned to hate before I found salvation.

So what are we called to oppose – in the Church and in the world? We need to stand against the same things the Baptist – and the Messiah – stood against, and we need to stand with our heads held high. We are called to oppose dry religion when it comes in the place of relationship to the Living Lord and to His people. We are called to reject the watering down of the revelation of Scripture – whether that means compromising the ethical standards of human sexuality or tolerating the mistreatment of minorities on the one hand – or believing that Christians performed miracles in the Name of the Lord in the First century but no more. Our Gospel is a Gospel of power and not of mere words (I Cor. 4:20) and that power is the capacity to live abundant life within the boundaries of human being that were set for our hope and prosperity.

But what then are we called to favor? We need to stand for the raising of the dead, the restoration of the blind and deaf, the healing of all that is dis-eased, and the proclamation of the good news of Christ to every human heart, as He says in Matthew 11:2-6. We need to stand for these things in physical and spiritual terms. We are called to rejoice in the very otherness of those who confess and believe Christ (Romans 10:9) from within a denominational tradition other than our own (1 Cor. 12) and we need to be ever thankful and ever hungry for the new and unexpected things that God means to do in our midst (Is. 62:6-7 and John 14:12-14). We need to accept no substitutes for the fullness of the Kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. And we need to see our triumph in the passing of the leadership baton to the next generation – the genesis generation – which will harvest what we have sown.

The long delayed inheritance of the Boomer Generation is to seek the fullness of God’s Kingdom on earth, accepting no substitutes for it, and paving the highway in the desert for the King’s return. We go in the spirit and power of Elijah – as the greatest outpouring of miracles in history attests – alongside the Baptist’s penchant for telling it like it really is. It is our honor to pass to the next generation the privilege of walking that highway with the King, but it is our vocation to prepare the land for His coming.

The Sounds of Silence may have been the unsaved anthem for the Boomer Generation, but The Days of Elijah is the anthem for us as pavers of the King’s Highway. “Behold He comes, riding on the clouds, shining like the sun, at the trumpet’s call. Lift your voice; it’s the year of jubilee; from out of Zion’s hill salvation comes!”