Everything You Need to Know About the Next Generation ft. Kara Powell | 009

What do young people actually need from the adults around them? Kara Powell joins John for a conversation about trust, judgment, and the slow work of becoming an adult a young person can rely on. As Executive Director of the Fuller Youth Institute, Kara has spent more than twenty years studying Millennials, Gen Z, and now Gen Alpha, translating decades of research into what actually helps young people form a lasting faith. This is a conversation about scars, friction, and why the most formative thing you can offer a teenager is often just showing up.

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What this Conversation Explores:

• What has mostly stayed the same about young people across two decades of research, and what's vastly different
• What Gen Alpha needs from adults, and how their faith formation is taking shape
• Whether the data points to a genuine revival among young people, or something more nuanced
• Screen time and what it's doing to our kids
• Whether teens today take fewer risks than past generations
• What kind of intergenerational relationships Gen Alpha is actually looking for and how they're a benefit to all
• How to have more formative conversations with the young people in your life (and the scripts to get you there)
• What it's like to study faith formation for a living, and how it has shaped Kara's own spiritual life
• Whether some of the anxiety adults feel about this generation is really about the adults' own viewpoints
• How Kara is being formed personally

Resources Mentioned:

• Fuller Youth Institute — and their free weekly email
• The free Gen Alpha report, from the Fuller Youth Institute
• Growing Young — Fuller Youth Institute
• Future Focused Church — Fuller Youth Institute
• The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt
• Like Dew Your Youth by Eugene Peterson
• Chap Clark and the 5-to-1 ratio
• Dallas Willard
• Dietrich Bonhoeffer, on seeing oneself as the chief sinner
• Dave Wang, Fuller Theological Seminary

About Formation:
Formation is a podcast that explores the science and soul of spiritual formation. Each episode brings together the ancient wisdom of the contemplative tradition and the best of modern research. John Ortberg sits down with some of the most rigorous and honest thinkers working at the intersection of faith and human flourishing for extended, unhurried conversations about how we are being shaped. New episodes every other week, wherever you listen to podcasts.

Connect with Formation:
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Socials: @formationjohn

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