I Was Wrong To Think Youth Don’t Care About Prophecy (They Do & Here’s Why)

If you’ve ever concluded, “Prophecy is a waste of time. Nobody cares. We should only talk about Jesus,” I get it. For years, I thought the same. But that conclusion wasn’t rooted in evidence; it was born from my own wounds.

I had sat through fear-heavy seminars. I had watched presenters outrun the story of Jesus in a sprint to the latest headline. I carried church-hurt around Daniel and Revelation, and without noticing, I projected that hurt onto everyone else. I assumed the world felt exactly what I felt.

Then I stepped into secular mission.

I discovered my unchurched friends didn’t carry my baggage because they’d never been to our seminars. They hadn’t been chart-dumped or scare-tactic’d. They didn’t have a stomach full of religious trauma around prophecy. When Daniel or Revelation came up, they didn’t flinch. They leaned in. They were curious. They had questions. They wanted to know if these ancient visions had anything meaningful to say about the world they actually live in.

I had to eat humble pie. Because it turns out, secular youth do care about prophecy.

But there’s a catch.

OK, its not really a catch. It’s more of an important contextual shift we have to pay attention to. Younger generations do find prophecy fascinating, but this isn’t an invitation to pull out the old frameworks, cheesy powerpoints, and parrot the same points we’ve been repeating for over 100 years. If you do that, you will lose them… and fast.

Instead, this is an invitation to go adapt how we present Daniel and Revelation to the lived experiences and anxieties of irreligious, unchurched, secular generations. And while that might sound hard, in my experience it all begins with one simple shift:

Stop treating prophecy as prediction-proofs and start preaching it as protest.

Not protest for the sake of outrage, but protest in the most biblical sense: a Spirit-fueled resistance to dehumanizing systems—and a hope-filled announcement that a different world is on the way.

This isn’t a modern spin; it’s the original context. Daniel and Revelation were written under empire. They spoke in symbol because the censors were listening. They sustained courage in communities that were small, pressured, and tempted to give up. They taught ordinary people how to live faithfully inside a machine that didn’t love them.

Read Daniel through that lens and the stories click into place. Refusing the king’s menu wasn’t a diet plan; it was a refusal to be assimilated. The furnace and the lions’ den were the cost of resistance. The beasts from the sea were metaphors for imperial systems. The point was never “be smart enough to solve the code.” The point was “be faithful enough to remain human in a world dominated by beastly empires who crush in order to thrive.”

Read Revelation through that lens and the symbols come alive. The dragon and beasts are the spiritual metabolism of empire—political, religious, and economic power demanding absolute loyalty. The “mark” is what happens when complicity becomes habit and we stop noticing the small ways we sell each other out. Babylon is not a city on a map; it’s an economy that treats bodies as commodities. And right at the center stands the Lamb—power laid down, not power hoarded; victory by self-giving, not domination. That is protest and promise, together.

Walter Brueggemann once said the task of the prophet is “to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness of the dominant culture.” That is exactly what this generation is starving for: an alternative consciousness with flesh on it. They don’t want more outrage. They want a way to be decent humans when the pressure to dehumanize is relentless. They are asking whether faith has anything honest to say about wage theft, housing precarity, surveillance capitalism, ecological collapse, and the algorithmic exploitation of attention. When prophecy is preached as protest, we can finally answer yes—without baptizing culture-war rhetoric and without abandoning the text.

So how does this shift sound from the pulpit?

Start with their ache, not ours. Name what people carry into the room: the dread of starving kids in Palestine, the fatigue of being squeezed from above and below, the loneliness of being treated like data. Then bring Daniel or Revelation to the table as a companion text from the underside, not a weapon from above.

Translate the symbols without shrinking them. Keep your language simple and your imagination big. A beast is a predatory system. A mark is the normalization of complicity. Babylon is commerce that runs on bodies. The Lamb is power turned outward in love. You don’t need insider jargon to make that land; you just need to know how your audience talks about these anxieties. And then you talk like they do.

Prophecy isn’t about shoving fear or conspiratorial insights into your audeinces brains so they leave with a ton of info they can’t do anything with. At its core, prophecy moves us to live differently. Sabbath becomes economic protest against burnout. Hospitality becomes rebellion against isolation. Truth-telling becomes civil disobedience against propaganda. Generosity becomes a refusal to play scarcity games. None of this is flashy, but all of it speaks directly to the tensions secular young people are navigating every day.

Does this mean we drop Jesus and preach activism? Not at all. It means we preach Jesus by letting prophecy do what it was always meant to do—announce good news for those ground down by bad systems, expose the idolatries that dress up as common sense, and invite us into a kingdom where power is redefined by servanthood. When you preach prophecy as protest and promise, the young don’t feel manipulated. The unchurched don’t feel targeted. They feel seen. And that is where discipleship begins.

If you serve in Adventist spaces, here is the gift of this shift: it doesn’t erase our distinctives; it recovers their pulse. Our pioneers glimpsed the prophetic voice as a protest against imperial machinery. They spoke against church-empire. They ran underground railroads, advocated for the abolition of slavery, and passionately resisted the unification of church and state. Somewhere along the way, we let the spectacle of apocalyptic subterfuge replace the substance of prophetic prostest. We geeked over charts and dates, but were silent in the face of injustice. We made ourselves look clever and forgot to look like Jesus.

This is your invitation to reverse that trend. Preach the visions as protest that protects the human. Preach them as promise that refuses despair. Preach them as the revelation of Jesus and the new world he is building, a city in which true justice reigns. Drop the “Adventese” and the “Christianese” and speak in the normal, every day language of your audience with a promise that the new world of justice and equality they long for is not to be found in yet another political revolution, but in Jesus.

If you want help making this shift…

I’m hosting a live, practical workshop that walks through the frameworks, scripts, and storyboards I use to preach Daniel and Revelation in secular spaces. It’s $67 to join, and it runs September first (just a few days away). Register here!