This Bible Verse Predicts Cultural Collapse—and the Only Way to Reverse It
Historically, the church has never successfully integrated the generations.
That’s why, in town after town in the US, you find beautiful old church buildings that are either empty or scattered with a handful of people in their 70s and 80s. When it came time to embrace the emerging generation and the necessity to change their methods, the older generation fought for their preferences instead of their own children. The Church is the only place where parents have literally forced their own children out of their lives. Parents who would do anything to improve their children’s natural lives tragically turned their hearts away from them spiritually.
God’s Plan to Accelerate His Church
The churches of the past didn’t intentionally plan their decline. When those once thriving congregations of godly people were building their buildings and reaching their generation, they never could’ve dreamed their influence and impact would die with their generation. They never dreamed buildings once teeming with multigenerational life would become aged relics.
But this is about an emerging move of God that will change that picture. This generation isn’t necessarily more spiritual or wiser than previous ones. The Church was blind to the devastating outcome of their narrowness. Only God can bring the kind of light that can rescue our generation from this same pattern of separation and darkness.
The year was 1982; I was 22 years old. I sat in front of a panel of six seasoned pastors as they interviewed me for potential ordination. I really had no idea what to expect. What happened devastated me.
Instead of questioning me about my understanding of Scripture and ministry, they began to attack me in unison. They drew a multitude of assumptions about my beliefs without asking me what I believed. They did not like the Bible school I had attended and began to accuse me of heretical beliefs. I really didn’t know how to respond. When I finally spoke, I told them, “I know the Scripture tells me not to rebuke an elder, yet I don’t know how to respond to you. I do not have the beliefs you suggest I have.” One of the older ministers yelled at me and commanded me to stop lying and just be truthful. I sat frozen in my seat, filled with fear and bewilderment.
One man on that panel, Geno DeMarco, spoke up and rescued me.
Let me first say, this movement was made up primarily of Italian-Americans. All six ministers, including me, were Italian-Americans. The fact that we were all Italians, may help you understand why the volume in the room was elevated. Italians have a way of mixing volume and emotion with our communication. It wasn’t their volume that shook me, but rather their unrelenting attacks and assumptions about my life, beliefs, and character. I wasn’t being examined, I was being verbally assaulted and demeaned. My examination became an inquisition. So when Geno spoke up, he was shouting.
“Stop this!” He yelled, “Why are you doing this to this young man? It’s this kind of behavior that has driven young men like him out of our churches and movement. You are killing our movement! This insanity needs to stop!”
Geno then looked directly at me and said, “You need to get out of this movement before we kill your spiritual life and ministry!” And with that, my ordination “inquisition” ended.
I didn’t know if I was being ordained or thrown out of the movement. Ultimately, they did not ordain me. Instead, they gave me a license to preach, a step toward future ordination.
These men, unrelenting as they were, had accurately observed me as an extremely spiritually immature young man. They were not wrong to have concerns about my fitness to be immediately ordained or my need for deeper understanding of Scripture. The decision to not immediately ordain me was actually a wise one. The problem was that instead of fighting for me, they fought against me.
Instead of:
Encouraging the call of God upon my life, they berated me.
Helping to nurture and mature me, they demanded that I blindly submit to their incorrect assertions about my beliefs.
Accelerating the call upon my life and enabling me to start on second base, they relegated me and others in my generation to starting over at home plate.
This blindness in them set my generation up to make avoidable mistakes and suffer unnecessary pain. They had the power to accelerate my life and calling but instead poured water upon the fires of God that burned in my heart. They never would have done this had their eyes been opened to the power of generational unity. If not for the gracious light of the Holy Spirit, I likely would have followed in their darkened footsteps. It is this light, I hope to explain.
It wasn’t long before this ongoing and destructive environment
drove me and virtually everyone else in my generation out of their movement. I’m so grateful Geno permitted God to turn his heart to the next generation. Sadly, he was the exception in his generation, not the rule. Geno and a few others like him would be a foreshadow of a move of God that will unite the generations and accelerate the Kingdom of God.
Defining this emerging move of God’s Spirit is the very reason for this message. Geno did this for many other young ministers. He fought for us when others found reasons to reject us. Geno is now with the Lord, but the residue of his ongoing love and encouragement remains with me to this day.
I long to introduce you to an outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon generational unity—one that will accelerate the mission of the Church. I believe it will stir your heart and ignite a passion in you, just as it did for me.
Appropriately, my initial presumption was, God is just dealing with me personally about my life and calling. But over the past six years, I’ve seen this understanding unfold to an ever-expanding and sovereign move of God’s Spirit upon the earth. The message here is not specific to those older or younger. It is a multigenerational message, for a multigenerational move of God. What began in 2018 is now unfolding around the globe.
The focus here is not pastors and their churches; they are just the starting line. While the starting line will begin in the church, the finish line will live completely outside of its walls. I want to help each of us discover our part in God’s blueprint for generational acceleration. It provides a practical application and pathway for everyone from the CEO to the stay-at-home mom to fulfill this God-ordained mandate of acceleration.
Find Your Place
This is an open invitation for you to find your place of obedience in this outpouring. It’s about asking God where He’s called you to be to do your part in the future multigenerational work He’s planning for His people.
So, we are laying out the pathway forward for us as the Church, the big “C” Church—the entire family of God, the body of Christ. This is God’s plan of acceleration. I think you would agree that it doesn’t take a cultural genius to see that our world is in a death spiral. Things are so chaotic that it’s almost impossible to exaggerate the extent of the degradation. Yet, if we don’t see and cooperate with God’s plan, like the generations before us, we will suffer. My prayer today is that the Holy Spirit helps me share what He’s shown me, how it applies to each one of us—no matter your age or your vocation—and reveal how vital you are to His purpose and His plan coming to pass.
When I think about how the trajectory of my life and calling could have been accelerated by those men in the generation before me, it saddens me. Their inability to father me left me exposed and vulnerable. I could have avoided so much heartache, if they had only fought for me, rather than against me.
The High Calling of Fathers
Let me state something straightforward and hopefully obvious—fathers matter. I know it’s not a message we hear much in our culture today. More often than not, fathers are portrayed as the butt of the joke in sitcoms or reduced to absent figures in narratives about broken families. But if you take a good, hard look at the pain in our world—at the chaos in homes and communities—you’ll find it often traces back to one thing: the absence of a father’s presence and heart.
More than just my opinion, this truth is biblical. The final verses of the Old Testament deliver a prophetic warning and promise: “He will turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the land with a curse” (Malachi 4:6 NKJV).
God ties the fate of the land to one thing—whether fathers turn their hearts toward their children and if the children reciprocate. It’s the hinge on which the well-being of families, communities, and entire nations swing. It’s the very foundation of what will accelerate the work of the Kingdom of God in the emerging generation. This is why Satan has sought to destroy the nuclear family and replace it with every imaginable form of brokenness and desperation.
God ordained fathers to be sacrificial leaders who reflect His love and strength. Of course, that doesn’t mean mothers aren’t leaders too. But God designed fathers and mothers to work together, each bringing their unique strengths. When fathers abdicate their role or are absent, the fallout is devastating.
Statistics back this up. Almost one of every four children is without a biological, step, or adoptive father at home (17.6 million) according to the US Census Bureau.
Children without a present and engaged father are more likely to struggle in school, battle emotional and behavioral issues, and face higher risks of poverty and incarceration. It goes beyond being present physically—fathers must be present with their whole heart.
We must take the practices and love-driven sacrifices necessary to raise our children in our homes and intentionally transfer this determination to the Kingdom of God.
God’s heart for acceleration demands that spiritual fathers and mothers love, nurture, and mentor the next generation. This will supernaturally accelerate them. In fact, it is this very thing that will cascade into the redemption of the fractured and broken natural families in our nation.
Movement in the spiritual realm always precedes changes in the natural realm. This is true even of creation itself. Hebrews 11:3 (NLT) states, “By faith we understand that the entire universe was formed at God’s command, that what we now see did not come from anything that can be seen.”
