Put away those books on Millennials (or Gen Y, or Mosaics, or whatever generational term you have been taught to call people that were born from the late 80’s to the early 2000’s). It is time to pick up a book on Gen Z (or Homelanders, or Pluralists, iGeneration, or whatever generational term you have been taught to call people born since approximately the beginning of the millennium). 
The Millennial generation is now out of college. A few graduate students remain, but Gen Z has taken the field. FSU is bringing in 6,000 of these Gen Z’ers – the largest class that Florida State has ever had. They are students that have never consciously known a world in which the World Trade Center stood. Instead, the scar of terrorism has been something they have always felt with TSA scans at airports, explosions at things like the Boston Marathon, and suburbanite school shootings as a matter of course.
Gen Z has never lived in a world where there was no internet. Most of them will give you a confused look when you speak of “dial up.” This is the generation in which the laptop has become solidly a work tool (again). For a while with Gen X and Millennials, it was also a playground with music and games – but now, you can get all of that on your phone.
More of them grew up going to church than the previous two generations. But that church attendance was qualified differently. Church attendance in the world of Gen X and Millennials largely meant at least 3 times a week. For Gen Z, “regular church attendance” means monthly. The Netflix comparison has been made that Gen Z “binge watches” religion – downloading and experiencing, but then dropping until the next binge.
They are more risk averse because they grew up in a world in which violence was no longer a problem just for the disadvantaged. They struggle to have face to face conversations and dating is a nightmare for most of them. They are used to a world that has always given them a platform to speak. Phones used to be for one to one communication, but now they are more for a connection to the public sphere, something that is like “the cloud” for human relationships – accessible, but not palpable.
Wanna meet one? You’ll have a chance if you’re a University Lutheran. Freshmen show up in just under one week for Fall semester. They’ll start trickling into worship services on August 26th. If you feel like you’re not ready – that’s ok. We want to train you to have a conversation – and it will have to be you that starts the conversation because the average one doesn’t know how to (really, I cannot stress this point enough). So stick around for 15 minutes this Sunday. Take our “Portals” training this Sunday after worship, and start getting ready to know someone that God has put in your path.