As a 6-year-old growing up at a time when Hal Lindsey’s “Late Great Planet Earth” was holding sway in Southern Baptist churches, Jerry Johnson was fascinated by the talk of end times.

He later earned three theological degrees that prepared him for service at Boyce College, Criswell College and his current role as academic dean at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, but Johnson still points to that early interest in eschatology as sparking his own desire to profess faith in Christ two years later at age 8.

A few decades later co-authors Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins provided their interpretation of end times through the popular “Left Behind” novels.

Today, younger generations are exchanging the doctrine of last things as viewed by novelists and their fundamentalist forbearers for what some of them prefer to describe as Kingdom-oriented living. Are they reacting against popular depictions of end times and what some described as the pessimism of dispensationalism or developing a more biblical interpretation of what the Kingdom entails?

Unlike their parents, many evangelicals in Generations X and Y (born between 1965-1976 and 1977-2002, respectively) are throwing their energies into community projects and Kingdom causes without explicitly connecting them to the eschaton.

But there is disagreement among those the Southern Baptist TEXAN interviewed about whether this represents a lack of interest in last things among the young or simply a rejection of “pop eschatology.”

Read the rest at: Baptist Press – END TIMES: Is there a generational gap? – News with a Christian Perspective.