United States (MNN) — As people across the United States and other parts of the world grapple with the killing of Charlie Kirk last week, Ron Hutchcraft with Hutchcraft Ministries wants us not to miss the spiritual response taking place among young people.
Hutchcraft has been in cross-cultural youth ministry for decades. He sees several reasons Kirk’s death has been so traumatic for Gen Z.
“Many of them — not all, but many of them — saw in [Kirk] someone they could trust. And trust comes hard to this younger generation. Then suddenly he was gone, violently, publicly. That has left them seeking. They really are.”
Hutchcraft recalls how America searched for answers in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks as well.
“[Something] I think God sees is a nation without answers. We are groping to [find out] ‘What’s wrong with us, what’s wrong with this world, what’s wrong with this culture?’” he says. “The public nature of what happened, the violent nature of what happened, the heart-wrenching way it happened, has reached all the way from college campuses to the Capitol.”
This time of national grief, debate, and clamor is causing people to look to God.
Charlie Kirk speaking with attendees at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. (Photo courtesy of Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0)
“The response as you look at social media has been many, many saying, ‘I’m going to church for the first time in my life.’ [Or] ‘I’m going back to church for the first time in many, many years,’” Hutchcraft says.
“There is a lot of God-seeking because, setting aside the political agenda of what Charlie Kirk may have had, he was a bold voice for his personal relationship with Jesus Christ and the fact that all of us need that relationship.”
If you haven’t noticed spiritual openness among the people in your life yet, be on the lookout for it. Be on the lookout for them and their questions, even as you ask your own questions. Remember the hope Jesus offers every person who comes to Him, and share it.
Hutchcraft points to Hebrews 6:19. “There is in the resurrected Christ — the conqueror of death — the end of our search. [That search] may very well be started by trauma, by losing some ‘earth hope’ that some may have placed their hope in.”
Header image is a representative stock photo courtesy of Joshua Hanks via Unsplash.
