IMO, it goes beyond the current generation of school-age children. The children of the baby-boomers (the present 20 and early 30 somethings), and possibly the younger end of the Baby-Boomer age spectrum (the 40 and late 30 somethings), do not have residual memories of church or of the Christian religion. The older Baby Boomers may have some residual memories, put there during their short periods of attendance at Sunday School in the 1960s and 1970s and/or attendance at school religious education sessions (even though the period of Sunday School attendance often was not complemented by a corresponding family engagement in church life).
As an aside, was the Australian disengagement with organized religious activity already underway in the 1960s and 1970s, as the Baby Boomers were growing up?
What that means is that an evangelical activity aimed at 40s and under cannot rely upon any existing knowledge base of the Christian religion or the Christian church. Those activities are starting with a completely blank slate. Yet from what I've seen of "evangelical programmes", for example Alpha, there is an implicit assumption in those programmes of some initial knowledge of religion, or of faith, or of the ways of the Church. Many parts of the Church have yet to grapple with the situation which they are in - that most Australians have absolutely no knowledge of Jesus, or of the Creative God, or of the Church.
When church congregations and church leaders tut-tut about things like the majority of 20 and 30 somethings who live together without bothering about marriage, those churchey types miss the point entirely. It's not that the 20 and 30 somethings have made a deliberate decision to "live in sin" and reject a "Christian way of life" - it's that no one has explained to them coherently what marriage is and what its benefits and values are, because no one has told them about the Christian view of life and what it can mean to them, in a language which they are able to understand.
And having failed completely to bring that message to the 20 and 30 somethings, the church finds (surprise, surprise!) that those 20 and 30 somethings do not come rushing back to the Church in apologetic despair when the church and its leaders point fingers at them and tell them that they are now living in sin and are affronts to the Creative God.
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