Vision Week Radio Special - Part D

Today we continue Vision Week on Connect with Skip and our in-studio guest is Nate Heitzig. Nate will talk about the challenges of being a pastor's kid, his take on the state of Christian music, and his thoughts on the trend of deconstruction by younger Christians. It seems like today people are no longer just post-Christian, they are anti-Christian. They don't just leave the faith, they become very, very ardent supporters of others leaving the faith. They become part of the supporters of how destructive and damaging the faith was because of purity. Culture, I'm sorry that we didn't let you get pregnant and get AIDS when you were in high school. I'm so sorry that we hurt you by telling you that you should remain pure because the Bible said that you should. It's just ridiculous.

It's a ridiculous trend, and it's really, really sad and alarming to see. Now, let's join Nate Heitzig in studio for a conversation with Chip Lusko on Vision Week. Well, Nate, welcome to the program. Great to be on here. Good to have you here. I was thinking on the way over, you're one of the few humans on earth who your entire life experience includes Calvary of Albuquerque.

Yeah, you know, I think that that's probably the case for a lot of PKs, at least those who choose to go into ministry afterwards, but it's very true. My entire life and ethos is Calvary Church, New Mexico. I was the first baby dedicated in our current building, and we're still in that building. So I've literally been here since I was born, which is pretty crazy. That's really an honor, a privilege, but also a challenge, yeah?

Yeah, definitely. I think it's always unique stepping into a role that people expect you to look or act like your parents and trying to find your own identity and who you are and operate within your giftings. And this isn't exclusive just to the church.

This is, I would say, any business where a son or a daughter is stepping into the shoes or the place that their parent has built. You have these unique pressures that I think no one else has, but also a unique privilege of carrying on and stewarding a legacy. I've got to ask, what's your first memory of being here at Calvary? Oh, man, I was thinking about that question. You know, I don't have, some people can remember it like being in their crib and they can remember all these specific memories from being a very young child. I can't remember those. I don't have any specific memories that I could tell you a date of this happened, but I have fond memories. I was thinking the other day we're planning our annual Fall Fest. It used to be called Hallelujah Festival, and it was our alternate to Halloween. This was the era when trick or treating was evil. And if you trick or treated, you'd probably get possessed by a demon.

At least that's what we were all led to believe. But I have fond fond memories of being a kid and being in the campus and being inside the various rooms in the kids ministry and doing pie walks and and doing games and winning prizes. I have a very specific memory of being a young kid and they set up almost like a putt putt or an arcade. They set up a prize booth at all these different prizes from small to large, hanging on the wall, some on counters. And if you won enough tickets at the games at Hallelujah Festival, you could come in and you could get one of these prizes from the Hallelujah Festival arcade area. And I remember I really, really wanted an inflatable electric guitar.

They had an inflatable electric guitar and I got enough tickets and I got my inflatable electric guitar and I was so pumped for like a week straight until it popped. And so that's probably one of my earlier memories, fond memories of being on campus. Well, you did mention that the pagan invasion series was showing over the third grade room. Yes. Yes. It was. I mean, it wasn't just it wasn't just Calvary. It was the satanic panic. That was the era when Oprah was doing TV shows.

Backward masking. Yeah. I mean, there was things about there's going to be razorblades and apples and all the candies poison.

And so there was a great fear of Halloween in that era. Guilty as charged. Ask my kids. Anyhow, let's move to a more serious topic, Nate. Recently, we've commemorated the 20th anniversary of 9-11. So you are in that generation.

Yeah. What are your recollections and observations? Yeah, I was 15 years old when 9-11 happened and I was on my way to school with my dad.

We lived in the East Mountains at the time, and he would drive me down to Hope Christian School. And I remember driving in the car and he got a call from my mom and my mom said a plane has hit the World Trade Center. We had just left the house and he said, Oh, my goodness. We didn't know what happened that point. We hear one plane. We think at first it's an accident. And then we're driving.

My dad says, Well, keep me updated. And then we hear there's another plane that hits the World Trade Center. My dad pulls over on Passale Del Norte, pulls over on the dirt on the side and we stop and turn the news on and just sit there for about 10 minutes, 15 minutes listening to what's happening as more and more news is coming in. Other planes are hijacked. We realize it's an attack on American soil. And this was so unique because this was the first attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor was the first time that we had been attacked by another country.

I mean, it was it was the first time this has happened. So it was my dad told me that moment in the car. He said, You're going to remember this for the rest of your life, just like I remember the day that John F. Kennedy was shot. Those were his words to me, just I remember that exactly where I was sitting when I heard that JFK had been shot.

You remember this day for the rest of your life. That's a great point, Nate, because your dad is a product of the Jesus movement. Yeah. And you're a product of a whole different world view and how you see things. Yeah, it's interesting. You know, we talk a lot about generational differences. I'm right on the cusp. And actually, there's some generation scientists or whatever you call them that, that talk about Gen X and then the millennials.

There's this in between generation called the exennials, which is like they're part Gen X, part millennials. And so it is interesting, though, how these different perspectives, how you were raised, how you grew up, alters the way that you view things and alters your perspective on what's happening in the world and current events. And we're seeing a trend, I consider it troubling, where major Christian leaders are deconstructing from the classic faith.

Yeah. You know, it's interesting as I've examined this trend of deconstructing, it seems like it's a trend that's only in a younger generation of Christians. And I really believe, I agree, it's incredibly troubling.

It's very startling. I think so much of it has to do in the culture of church that was created in the mid 90s to early 2000s. There was a culture that was created in the church. I think that has to do with it. I think parenting has a large part to do with it. And I think the trend of not teaching the Bible, but teaching messages that make people feel good has a huge part to do with that. And I think those are three of the big three of the big trends that really contribute towards that.

But it really is very startling. It's very sad to see that these people with platforms are not only leaving the faith, but they're encouraging others to do the same. I was talking to a friend the other day, it seems like the world that we knew, you know, in the 90s, there was a lot of anti Christian rhetoric and movement. But it seems like today, people are no longer just post Christian, they are anti Christian, they don't just leave the faith, they become very, very ardent supporters of others leaving the faith, and they become ardent supporters of how destructive and damaging the faith was because of purity culture. I'm sorry that we didn't let you get pregnant and get AIDS when you were in high school.

I'm so sorry that we that we hurt you by telling you that you should remain pure, because the Bible said that you should. It's just ridiculous. It's a ridiculous trend. And it's really, really sad and alarming to see.

I'm really trying to wrap my mind. This is not drifting. This is totally defecting. Yeah. And as you say, Joshua Harris, who was the poster child for don't date and just be pure, you know, is, is really totally pivoting from that point. And we're seeing that in people that we discipled. It's not just to say that I'm questioning my faith. They're rejecting their entire mindset.

Yeah. And I will say this, I think it's really, really, really easy for an older generation to jump on a bandwagon and say, look at what's happened to the younger generation. It's their fault. Why are they leaving the faith? Why are they doing this?

What's happening? But I think so much of it really is rooted in the systems and the culture that our previous generation created for us. It's related in again, we just talked jokingly about Halloween and how we had a generation of people saying that Halloween was so bad. And then as we get older, we realize, wait, why is this bad?

This really isn't bad. And then all of a sudden we, oh, well, it's not bad anymore. And then we, I mean, take things like alcohol in the church for a long time. It was very, very frowned upon it. I mean, I remember growing up in a culture that was like, if you sipped, if alcohol touched your lips, you were going to hell.

I mean, that was, that was what it felt like. It wasn't what was said from the pulpit, but it was what it, what was felt like. And we created these systems. I would really say systems of hypocrisy that then you have a younger generation sees this and they say, I don't, I, what's wrong should always be wrong. What's right should always be right. What's right is never wrong. And what's wrong is never right.

That's I think a biblical perspective. So we take something like abortion. Abortion is always wrong.

It's never, there's never gonna be a day and age when we as the church should look at that and accept that and say, oh, this is okay. This is right. But we take things like Halloween or alcohol and we say, well, this is wrong. This is wrong. This is wrong. And we realize later on when we get older and read the Bible, this actually isn't wrong.

It's not a sin. And all of a sudden we have this paradigm where we're calling what's right, wrong, what's wrong, right. So we, we, we, we get things swapped around a little bit. And then I think when you compound that with the parenting structure and style that raised a lot of these millennials and you take that combined with the technology age and era, where all of a sudden, all these kids are growing up with devices and social media and getting news rapidly. They're no longer getting news and connection from their friends when they show up to church from the radio, they're getting news instantly from a perspective that fits their perspective and ideological political worldview.

That's the only news they're getting is from people that agree with them because of the algorithms and you, you really create a structure world to no fault of their own. These kids are really being led astray because of the structure that's been created around them in a sociopolitical concept. And that has carried into the church as well.

Let's see what you think about this because I'm seeing people who were spent 20 years growing up in a Christian environment wore the t-shirts, went to the concerts and whatnot. And now they're like, totally, not just drifting, but dark. You know, Shakespeare said, me think thou doth protest too much. And sometimes I think they're firing for effect. Yeah.

Well, I mean, Chip, think about it. This is nothing new. Part of this is rebellion. Your generation grew up with your parents, very, very clean cut, white picket fence. Everything's the perfect American family, but inside there was abuse. Husbands were beating their wives. Husbands were alcoholics and drinking from the second they got home until the moment they went to bed. And so you have all of a sudden a generation, your generation comes out of that and says, okay, my parents said marry one person, but their marriage was miserable. It was a farce and we paid the price being kids. Now we're going to go into free love hippie generation. If my parents said that we need to only have one spouse, but I'm gonna live this way.

And again, hypocrisy is what they saw. The younger generation says, well, we need to, the answer to that then is free love. We just need to be able to go, you know, to the desert and listen to music and do drugs and have sex with whoever we want to. And that's what we need. And so we pivot to the, to the full opposite. And then we see after this, you have that generation and then it kind of centers back to, okay, well, that was a little extreme. Maybe we shouldn't have done that.

Maybe we should be here now. And now we need to put in more rules, more, you know, so you come out of the hippie generation, all of a sudden parents are putting more rules than the Bible even has because they want to keep their kids from going out and doing drugs, having sex all their lives. And then you have this now generations rebelling against that. And so it's constantly this ping pong pendulum, kind of like presidents. No one can do the job, right? So we constantly try one guy who's the exact opposite of the other guy. You have one guy who talks really calmly and clearly, but he's really boring. And the next guy we're like, you know what?

I want somebody who drives 85 and goes through stoplights and I just want to have a blast. You know, it's kind of how we operate as human beings. We kind of go back and forth. Darrell Bock Let's talk about some of the distinction from the generations. And the huge one is this right here, the smartphone. I mean, that didn't exist even when you were, you know, coming of age.

Justin Perdue Yeah. I mean, internet didn't really even exist. I remember when internet first came out, I was in like junior high school. I was in elementary school. And I remember AOL and having to sit there for five minutes while you hear the, you know, and then all of a sudden, welcome to AOL.

You've got mail. That whole entire thing is the generation I grew up in. And again, I find we all want to blame shift in this. And I find the younger generation wants to always blame the boomers. Oh, it's the boomers.

Oh, boomer, boomer. And then the older generation wants to blame the younger generation. The term that's been thrown around for so long is millennials.

And we always want to blame millennials. Now, millennials are people born between 1980 to 1994. So realistically, when we look at this day and age and a lot of the stuff that we don't like, it's really the latter half of that millennial generation going into the Gen Z, what they call the iGen. Now, the iGen are people born between 1995 and 2012.

So this is your young 20 to mid 20 year old. That's who this generation is. This generation grew up with cell phones.

They grew up with technology in their hands. They grew up with the experience of what this social media generation world has been characterized as. Now, generation, we look at millennials and a lot of the terms that are thrown around for millennials is entitled narcissistic, lazy, self-interested. And so what happens is you have this boomer generation that doesn't know how to handle this latter half of millennial slash Gen Z iGen. And so they ask the millennial generation, well, what do you want?

There's all these problems. What do you want? And the answers are always, well, I want a job with purpose. I want a job that makes a difference.

I want to make an impact. And I want free food and I want nap pods at my place of business. And they give this list of things, but they're not happy.

They get those things and they're still not happy. And so there's something missing there. And so this is where I say, I think there's this big ball that's been dropped by, you know, we need to steward this country and our world for the next generation. And I don't think that we've stewarded it the right way.

I think we've done things that we think will help, but they've actually been more destructive. And so there's this missing piece. And I think it has to do with parenting. I think it has to do with technology. As I said before, I think it has to do with impatience on the part of a millennial and a younger generation. And I think it has to do a lot with environment. And so there's a lot of things that are that are compounding here that cause this, this rift to fall apart.

Well, I like where you're going. Don't you think it's possible not to have the chasm between generations of boomers? I mean, ideally each generation would learn from the last generation and expand on that. I mean, I can't wait for the iPhone 13 to come out.

So you don't have to become dead in the water whenever your sweet spot ends. Don't you agree with that? I agree, but I just think the way that we need to do that is we need to speak honestly and transparently about the pitfalls that the previous generation experienced.

And I don't think we want to do that. I don't think anyone wants to say, this is where I've messed up. This is where I failed.

They'll then want to talk about, well, when I was a kid, I had to walk 10 miles to school and I didn't have a cell phone. And they just want to harp on the next generation rather than really, I found steward the next generation and give the next generation the tools they need to be successful and let the next generation know where they failed and how that might correspond to where this next generation is failing. You know, I think that as we work through this idea, there's a lot to be learned from the previous generations. We just need to be humble enough and we need to be real enough to talk about the successes and the failures. Well, it has to do with legacy and, you know, the scripture talks about moving from glory to glory really is talking generation to generation.

And you're a prime example. You're standing on the shoulders of an extraordinary work that happened here. And so you had the opportunity to expand that now, you know, maybe the previous generation might be a little irritated by the fact, but we should be encouraged by that. That's the idea. We hand the baton and the next generation goes further, faster.

Definitely. I think that's so important. And I think, again, this is so unique, Chip, and I think we see this through history as things change, as technology goes forward, negative impacts also come with it. And we have to be very mindful to mitigate against those. And I think a lot of what we're seeing with deconstruction is related to the problem of this millennial Gen Z, the way in which they were raised and the culture they were created.

So, let me give you a couple of instances. Before we talk about the millennial generation, let's go to like the boomers and even before that, the greatest generation before that. So we have this huge breakdown we see now today in 2021 of the family. Now that can be rooted, not necessarily to the era of the 60s, but it can really be rooted back even further to that, to the founding of the automobile. So when you had the Great Depression and that happened in American society, destructive, terrible time. What it caused to happen, just like 9-11, is it caused Americans to rally around each other. It caused society to become focused on what was important rather than what wasn't important. And all of a sudden you had men who were getting jobs and working for 25 years sweeping the streets.

Why? They were sweeping the streets, they were doing this job, not because they felt called to the job, but because they felt called to their families. They felt called to raising their families. Their purpose was found in their kids and their wife.

And so it didn't matter what job they had to do because family was what was important. Then you have this rise of the automobile and you have people start commuting to work. It used to be that to get to work, you would either take public transportation or you would we would live within walking distance of your work so you could get to work quickly and easily. But what happened when the automobile started to explode and when this whole entire automobile craze started to come across America, you had people now living in the suburbs and they were commuting to work.

But what happened, scientists have found out that for every 10 minutes that you commute, you're 20 percent less likely to have a meaningful conversation with someone that day. So what happens is you have people living 45 minutes from work. They get up in the morning.

They kiss their wife. They get in the car. They drive for 45 minutes. They work all day long.

Don't talk to people in their office. They're just in their cubicle doing work. They get back in their car, drive 45 minutes home. They're not seeing their neighbors because they're not shopping the same grocery stores because they have cars. They're not making friends with people.

They're just living their lives in this car cubicle home. And so it becomes this cycle. Then what happens is when the family unit starts to break down and you have the free love of the 70s and the 60s is all of a sudden now family isn't as important as it was before. So now people are getting jobs and they're saying, well, what do I feel called to do?

Because I don't feel called to take care of a family because I don't want a family because I saw my parents family and I saw what that was and I saw how how much of a train wreck that caused. So now I don't want anything to do with that. So it creates this pendulum effect, something really great. Cars, an incredible invention, creates this pendulum where it slowly goes down. And now we see the negative effects and the breakdown of the family that can really be rooted to this breakdown of society in how something good led to something bad.

And I think we see this in so many aspects. Cell phones is one of the biggest ones today. What an incredible device we talk about in church all the time. Could you imagine if Paul the apostle had this in his day and age? Well, I'd be actually kind of terrified to know what would happen if everyone had this in their day and age because they all would have been glued to their screen. They wouldn't have been as focused on the Great Commission or what they were called to do.

Now, some companies are using this for great purposes, but I would say the majority of people are just so sucked into these devices that it's causing more negative effects than it is positive effects. Very perceptive. So let's transfer to an area of your expertise and really your gifts that you have is creative and worship music. What's your observations about the state of Christian worship music? Oh, man, that's a big question.

And in some ways, it's a loaded question. Again, I think that the tendency of every generation is to remember the music that they latched on to and emotionally hit them and always look to that as that was what music should have been. So it's funny, I'm only 36, but I already have that music. You know, I grew up and I really got exposed to worship music that I related with in the late 90s, early 2000s.

So it was delirious. And it was Chris Tomlin and David Crowder Band. Before David Crowder Band was David Crowder, it was University Baptist Church. And it was this music that I really related to and grabbed onto. And then music changes and Hillsong United comes on the scene and Passion expands.

And then you have now Hillsong Young and Free and expands to more and more and more. I think that God gave us creativity, and that creativity should be expressed in different ways based on how the generation responds to creative arts. I think that's the beauty of it. And I think what related to somebody in the 1800s, the 1900s, the 1950s, and today is very, very different. And I think it's the responsibility of worship leaders and of pastors to figure out what's happening in the culture and don't compromise the message, but change the means in which the message is conveyed to reach a new generation.

And that's hard to do. I find myself already getting into that place where there'll be a new song that comes out. I'm like, Oh, what is this music?

This is terrible. We need to start singing these songs again. And it's always our tendency to want to do that, because we each and every one of us with the arts, arts, music, food, these are things that they create a trigger in your brain that causes you to associate these arts with a specific memory in your life. And so it's nostalgia. We hear a certain song and we're like, I remember when I sang that song in church 20 years ago, and it was so good. Oh, it makes me feel so good.

What is this stupid music they're playing now? And immediately it causes us to have this averse reaction. So I think it's really important that we recognize that. But I also think it's really important that we continue to write songs and create art that has depth and meaning. And if there's anything I see in this day and age is we run the risk of wanting to have songs and music that doesn't have depth, but it just has dazzle. It just has this vibe.

Oh, do you hear that energy in that beat? Okay, but what is it saying? Well, it says God. It just says like, God is awesome.

God is awesome. That's not what it says. But that's kind of the gist of a lot of the music that's out there today. There are great bands that are still writing music. One of the things I love about Hillsong United and Hillsong as a church is they have on staff, they have a theologian who has to prove every song lyric in the song before it goes out and it gets published.

I don't know if they still do this, but at one time they did. And it's fantastic. And it keeps their songs theologically rich and full. And so you hear a lot of the even recent Hillsong worship songs. They sound like hymns. They're just beautiful. There's that song, 100 million.

I don't know what it's called, but 100 million something. It just beautifully walks through this theological view of who God is, how he created the universe, how he loves each and every person, how he died for their sins and how each and every one of us needs to sing until the Lord returns more or less. Just beautifully, theologically rich song. But it's because the young creatives are working in unison with the older stewards of the theology, the doctrine and the meat.

And I think when you can meld those two together, you get some beautiful things. That is Nate Heitzig in a conversation with Chip Lusko as we continue Vision Week on Connect with Skip. There was much more to this talk with Nate and we have posted the entire interview online at connectwithskip.com. Join us next time when Chip will be talking with Lenya Heitzig. For regular listeners to this program, we want to thank you for your support.

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