I was sitting at a table surrounded by high-profile people, celebrating the 97th birthday of a close friend — an iconic figure in local ministry. The room was warm. The speeches were kind. And at one point, someone stood up and said something about legacy.
I looked around the room and thought: these people don’t know what’s coming.
Not in a doomsday way. In a “the world is shifting under your feet and most of you haven’t noticed yet” way.
A decade passes in a flash, but the Christ-centered community I once knew is barely recognizable. The churches that shaped me — the ones where accountability was real and love was embodied — are either gone, rebranded, or running on fumes. What replaced them looks more like content platforms with worship bands than covenantal communities where people actually know each other.
I sat in that room and felt two things at once: deep gratitude for the man being honored, and deep grief for what his generation built that mine is failing to carry.
Because here is the truth nobody at that table was saying out loud: most of the people in that room had already lost the next generation. Not to atheism. Not to rebellion. To irrelevance. To institutions that couldn’t answer their questions. To churches that offered certainty instead of depth.
This isn’t a eulogy. It’s a wake-up call.
If your faith tradition can’t survive contact with an honest question, it was never as strong as you thought. And if your community can’t hold space for doubt without treating it like betrayal, it’s not community — it’s compliance.
That man turning 97? He gets it. He always has. The rest of the room? I’m not sure.
A decade passes in a flash. The next one will too.
What are you building that will still be standing?
