Excellence

I'm reading the first George Barna book that I've ever read. Here's an excerpt: "One of the legacies of the Baby Boomer generation is the unwillingness to put up with irrelevance. Boomers are infamous for demanding excellence in everything they encounter. Entitites that fail to live up to the standards of our largest and richest generation are quickly dismissed. The post-Boomer crowd has mutated that perspective. Excellence is less meaningful to them because it sometimes reflects the slickness of exploitation and manipulation. The pet peeve of the younger generations is irrelevance: they quickly abandon anything that is not wholly germane to their personal passions." I was talking to someone recently about what we do at The Gathering and what I hoped it would be like in the coming months and years, and one of the ways I described it was "excellent, but not slick," which I think reflects what Barna is saying. One of my goals in my ministry is to be relevant, and excellent, but always a little irreverent. Always willing to poke fun at myself. Always willing to go with the flow. I think that there is a certain playfulness to this generation that previous generations could do without.