In many places today, younger generations face difficult living conditions. Sadly, many are dealing with deep hopelessness. But Christians aren’t called to judge the legitimacy of God’s purposes based on our personal situation. Whether in the age of Korea’s birth control policy or today during the fears of ultra-low fertility, God’s command is unchanged. My desire is that young Christians won’t give up on dating, marriage, and childbirth. 

About 10 years ago, when I was pastoring in the United States, I was invited to speak at a college student rally in Korea. After returning home, I received a question via email from a student who attended the event: “Have you heard of the ‘3-po generation’? What does the gospel mean for us living in such a generation?”
As someone who hadn’t been living in Korea for a while, I wasn’t familiar with the term. Essentially, this group (also known as the Sampo generation) was giving up on three things: dating, marriage, and having kids. Because of educational costs, rising inflation, and a difficult job market, young people in Korea were abandoning any plans for marriage and childbearing. 
Over the years, I heard more stories. The 5-po generation also gave up on the dream of a career and home ownership. Subsequent generations have apparently given up on human relationships, hope, and ultimately life. In Korea, this is known as the N-po generation.
I believe these terms are based on excessive pessimism, but they express the seriousness of our society’s problems. They also reflect the frightening reality facing the younger generation, and not just in Korea—so we shouldn’t discount them.
“PINK” Problem
From 2018–21, Korea had the lowest fertility rate in the world. And the trend is expected to continue for several years. Korea is now labeled as a “PINK” country, which stands for “poor income, no kids.” (Compare this with China’s “DINK” generation of double income, no kids.)
Analysts point out that the 1997 foreign exchange crisis was an inflection point where the low fertility rate began to appear prominently in Korea. The crisis led to large-scale corporate restructuring, significant unemployment, and a labor flexibility policy that motivates companies to eliminate regular employees in favor of temporary hires. Low wages are common among those who work for small companies or who are temporary workers, factors shown to contribute directly to low fertility rates.
Korea also holds the highest elderly poverty rate. Increasing suicide among the elderly intensifies people’s fears of falling into the low-income class. Meanwhile, the decline in marriage and fertility rates is accelerated by the high cost of living expenses, housing, and private education along with the costs associated with the shortened career of women who bear children.
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We need both the habits and the goal. On the one hand, there is a power in developing purposeful habits that we consistently practice over decades. On the other hand, many of our spiritual habits are without purpose or have lost their purpose. We need habits directed toward a finish line.

What plan do you have for your spiritual life? Where do you want to go spiritually? And how are you going to get there?
My hunch is that most of us don’t have a plan for our spiritual life. Most of us live hoping that we’ll drift into a better spiritual life. But that is a faulty assumption. Have you drifted into losing weight? Or becoming a better father? Or into your Master’s degree?
For some reason, we think that even though we make plans for improvement and we set goals in other areas, it’s not necessary or spiritual for us to set out these kinds of plans for our spiritual walk.
Jesus himself lived an incredibly purposeful life. If you pick up the gospel of John, you see that Jesus is very sensitive to discerning and following God’s purpose for his life. His purpose was not about self-fulfillment but self-giving at the cross. In John 17:1, Jesus prays, “Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you.”
How do we live a spiritual life with such purpose and awareness?
Just as we need a plan to study for a business exam, or to lock in our workouts to lose weight, so we need a plan for our spiritual life. So, what’s your plan? What do you want? How are you going to grow in your understanding of God’s Word? Or how are you going to grow in your prayer life? What current habits do you have? Do they need to be changed to grow? Do you need a shock to your system? Or maybe you need to expand what you’re doing?
We need both the habits and the goal. On the one hand, there is a power in developing purposeful habits that we consistently practice over decades. On the other hand, many of our spiritual habits are without purpose or have lost their purpose. We need habits directed toward a finish line.
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Thursday, August 26, 2021
We must always know that the kingdom cannot be fully inaugurated without Christ’s return, and even our very best attempts will be flawed before then. We must always stress the need to respond to Christ’s kingship to further bring the kingdom into the world.

We live in modernity, the source of all evil, according to some. I’m the sort of grumpy curmudgeon who thinks everything was better before the modern era, by which I mean the last 500 years.
This clearly isn’t true. Antibiotics, for one, are a gift we would not want to give up! What is true is that the current age had a particular set of challenges that are different to those of ages before ours; that the digital revolution in 2007 has changed the world in innumerable ways we have not even counted, let alone fathomed; and that there is something hostile to Christianity in our specific cultural moment.
Yet, if we look around at people’s desires and attempts to change the world we see that much of what people desire looks something like the kingdom of God.
Let me give you some examples:
After reading my post on acedia several friends sent me this New York Times piece on ‘languishing,’ which seems to be talking about essentially the same phenomenon. I rolled my eyes at the need to define a new term for something when there are rich resources in the great tradition for us to draw on, but what else did I expect? The nature of liberalism, and for now at least the NYT remains staunchly liberal, is to with dewy eyes reinvent the wheel. I get that there’s no gain when writing to a largely progressive audience to appeal to the great tradition, but it irks me.
(For the sake of clarity, I am using the term liberalism to mean liberalism, rather than to mean ‘left-wing’ as is probably more common in discourse).
It’s exactly the same approach that made everyone declare the Covid-19 pandemic ‘unprecedented’ until it became true by its repetition. Unprecedented in your lifetime, maybe.
The follow-up to that piece outlined ways to ‘flourish’ instead of ‘languish’. Broadly speaking they outlined the Sermon on the Mount.
At the same time the Guardian had this wonderful post-pandemic idea of inventing ‘lockdown days’. As numerous respondents on Twitter pointed out, they’d ‘invented’ humanity’s oldest law, the Sabbath.
A Kingdom
There’s a reason we keep seeing things that look a little bit like the kingdom, and there’s a reason they don’t look as good.
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