RiverLife 2034
What will RiverLife look like in ten years? When today’s third graders will be graduating high school? Join us as we share our vision for our church's future in serving next-gen Hmong and beyond.
You and me – 10 Years from now
What will your life be like in 2034? That’s ten years from now.
How old will you be?
What will your job be like?
Will you be single, married, divorced?
If you have kids, how old will they be?
Don’t just pass over these questions. Let at least one of them sit with you and blow your mind.
For me, it was this: In ten years, I will be one year away from retirement. That’s right; I will be 64 years old. That makes my head hurt. But don’t worry, I don’t plan on retiring nay time soon
Now, think about the next ten years, not just for you, but also for your kids, grandkids, nieces, and nephews. Will they still be following Jesus and thriving in community at RiverLife?
Churches dying
A lot can happen in ten years. A church can go from flourishing to stagnant to dying. The Twin Cities is filled with churches that lost their spiritual effectiveness. In fact, both of our campuses were once thriving churches reaching people with the gospel.
What happened to them? Here’s an overly simplistic explanation: An aging congregation resists new ideas, holding onto traditions that feel comfortable to them. Meanwhile, younger generations desire different things in their faith. This creates a generational disconnect, and the church loses its effectiveness with the next generation.
New Mission
How can we prevent RiverLife from becoming one of those churches?
When I returned from my sabbatical in August, I asked the leadership team some questions: What will RiverLife be like in ten years? More importantly, What do we need to do to be as effective at reaching the third and fourth-gen Hmong as we have been with the second-gen?
We shared answers and brainstormed on Post-its. Eventually, this led to talking about our mission statement.
Our current mission is: To bring hope, healing, and growth to next-gen Hmong and beyond.
Pang Foua and I chose the words "hope" and "healing" a year before we launched the church. We saw them as a biblical answer to the pain and despair we heard from so many second-gen Hmong believers.
At one of our team meetings this Fall, we were talking about the “why” behind our mission statement, and Tommy, our youth pastor, said something prophetic: “What if hope and healing aren’t what the next generation needs most?”
It stopped me in my tracks. That’s when I knew we needed to update our mission statement.
There’s an old saying in ministry: What got you here won’t get you there. What if our beloved mission statement wasn’t compelling to the third-gen—our kids, youth, and young adults—because it was created for their parents?
What Gen Z and Alpha Want
Thankfully, I had been doing a lot of research into what Gen Z and Gen Alpha want in their faith communities. Here are just a few things that Gen Z and Alpha desire in their faith and their churches:
Genuine relationships and connections
Welcoming and inclusive environments
Meaningful spiritual experiences
Transparent leadership
Social impact
Spiritual engagement
What would a mission statement look like that spoke to these needs and desires of the next generation?
We spent weeks exploring this question and crafting a mission statement for our future, not our past. Through God’s grace, we think we have something.
RiverLife’s new mission statement is: We are a next-gen Hmong church experiencing God together. For the rest of this series, we’ll unpack that statement. By the end, I hope you’re as excited about it as we are.
Bible teaching
But today, I want to explore how the Bible talks about generational transference of faith. You have already heard and witnessed one example of it—our child dedications.
Listen to the contrast between these two verses. These are in your bulletin under the “Sermon” section on page 7.
Judges 2:10 – “After the whole generation had been gathered to their ancestors, another generation grew up who knew neither the Lord nor what he had done for Israel.”
2 Timothy 1:5 [From Paul to Timothy] – “I am reminded of your sincere faith, which first lived in your grandmother Lois and in your mother Eunice and, I am persuaded, now lives in you also.”
One tells of a generation of children who lost their faith due to their parents’ complacency, stubborness, and compromises. The other tells of three generations of faithfulness, resulting in Timothy, Paul’s apprentice, planting churches and pastoring congregations.
How do we as a church, or you as parents, aunties, uncles, or grandparents, become more like the Timothy verse than the Judges verse?
Psalm 78
To answer that, we’re going to turn to Psalm 78, which you heard in today’s Scripture Reading
This psalm is primarily historical, telling stories from Moses to David, focusing primarily on God’s marvelous works across roughly twelve generations. But it begins with eight verses emphasizing the importance of talking about our faith to our kids.
Let me read verses 4-7.
4 We will not hide them from their descendants; we will tell the next generation the praiseworthy deeds of the Lord, his power, and the wonders he has done.
5 He decreed statutes for Jacob and established the law in Israel, which he commanded our ancestors to teach their children,6 so the next generation would know them, even the children yet to be born, and they in turn would tell their children.
7 Then they would put their trust in God and would not forget his deeds but would keep his commands.
In these four verses, there are:
Two things we need to pass on to the next generation
Five reasons why
What to Pass On
I love that the first thing the psalmist says to tell our kids is about God—“the deeds of the Lord, his power, and the wonders he has done.” Imagine if we showered our kids and youth with stories of God’s power, his faithfulness, his goodness, and his wonder. These are stories of God’s character and his relationship with the Israelites, and in turn, his relationship with us.
Then, verse 5 tells us to teach God’s “statues and law.” These are the commands of what it looks like to follow God—the things we should do and the things we shouldn’t do.
Notice the balance here between God’s story and God’s commands. Both of these are essential. Here’s how Biblical scholar Marvin Tate describes it, “The commandments and practices need the tradition of God’s active love to give them life and to set them in context. Torah [Old Testament Scripture] is a combination of story and commandments; the commandments are understood in the context of the story and the story is incomplete without the commandments.”
This principle is perfectly illustrated in the next 64 verses. This psalm recounts story after story of the Israelites' failures and God’s faithfulness. It shows how God’s people repeatedly failed to trust Him and obey his commands, yet God never gave up on them. Now, that’s something the next generation needs to hear.
Why Tell Them
Why should we tell the next generation God’s stories and God’s commands? Our passage gives us five reasons:
Verse 6 gives two reasons: So that the next generation would know God’s laws and that they would tell their kids about them.
Verse 7 gives three more reasons: So that the next generation would trust God, not forget his deeds, and keep his commands.
This is what most Christian parents want for their kids. This is what most adults in churches want for the kids and youth in their churches. Why do so many churches fail at this? Is it possible that RiverLife could fail at this over the next ten years?
New Mission Statement
And that brings us back to our new mission statement: We are a next-gen Hmong church experiencing God together. Here are three reasons we’re making this change.
1. When adults keep the church focused on us, we hide God from the next generation.
If we worship in ways that are meaningful to us but not the next generation, we hide God from them.
If we engage in spiritual exercises we love but don’t resonate with our youth and children, we are hiding God from them.
When we want the attention, the programming, the events for us, we hide God from them.
2. I want every kid and youth to know they have a place here at RiverLife.
We believe this so strongly that we’re willing to redirect the mission of our church to help them experience God more and become fully devoted followers of Jesus Christ.
Adults of RiverLife, what kind of church do you want your kids, grandkids, nieces, and nephews to experience? A church that’s stuck in the past, or a church that is vibrant, alive, and where they encounter God for themselves?”
3. It allows the older generation to model humility and sacrifice for the sake of the younger generations.
Older parents, especially immigrants, make tremendous sacrifices for their kids. Unfortunately, church power usually isn’t one of them. By changing our mission statement from one focused on second-gen Hmong to third-gen, we are signaling a change.
We, the adults of RiverLife, are willing to lay down our power, preferences, and privileges so that you, our kids and grandkids, can thrive in your faith and this church in the future.
Closing
We are a next-gen Hmong church experiencing God together.
Imagine walking into RiverLife ten years from now. Our kids and grandkids are not just attending church but leading it. They’re serving, preaching, worshiping, and loving our community with passion and authenticity. Imagine the energy in this place, where four generations are united in the love of Christ.
RiverLife is not just a church for today—we are a church for tomorrow, a church for the next generation. As we lean into this new mission, we believe that God will do something miraculous among us.
We will experience God Him never before.
We will understand and obey him in ways we haven’t before.
We will be spiritually formed in community in ways we never could in isolation.
We are a next-gen Hmong church experiencing God together.