Culture is throwing a lot of messages at people these days--messages about identity, gender, marriage and relationships--and the emerging generation is getting caught up in the confusion.

As inevitable questions arise, Axis has emerged, formed to help people navigate the tricky dilemmas and quandaries in this modern age--compassionately sharing God's design with all who'd listen. I talked with Axis Founder David Eaton about his organization, its mission, and his heart for clarity in blurry times.

For those unaware of what Axis is, tell people what you do and your overall mission as an organization.

Our mission is to build lifelong faith one conversation at a time, and what we do is culture translation. That means we live at the intersection of faith, technology, media, and teen culture, and we translate between parents and pastors and grandparents and the next generation. Culture translation is really where it's at, and it's at the intersection where we live that people find really helpful.

Give us an overview of the vision and how God led you to form Axis. Any particular moment solidify the vision?

Our vision is to see the next generation have a lifelong faith. So, I just think of all the students who are derailing. I think of all the students who are in church right now and who will leave soon, and in college, so often you see them surrounded in a marketplace of ideas. So many different people are discipling the next generation and when you go to college, it tests the quality of your faith. So we said, "Hey, can we help students move from just a basic, really childlike faith into a mature developed faith." 

As the years have gone on, that's really changed a little bit in that we want to help parents and grandparents do that as well. So our mission is to build lifelong faith one conversation at a time, and we want to start a quarter-million conversations a week at Axis.

One of the key moments that caused us to start was going to a college and hearing amazing people speak and not translate. So I went to a Christian school and it was great. They brought in amazing speakers who just didn't translate. Also, I was affected by having many friends that I'm on mission trips with and so many Christian rock bands who are no longer walking with Jesus and are either atheist or agnostic.
 
You've recently started promoting the Family Conversation Kit. How did that come about? Did this start out of conversations you had with your own kids?

My daughter's three-and-a-half years old, and a lot of what we do at Axis is driven off of feedback we get from students face-to-face when we speak to them. We speak to 30,000 students face-to-face with our live speaking teams. It's a team of four millennials: two men, two women. We just hear back from them different ideas, and of course all the confusion of gender and identity. 

Identity is a big question in high school. And so we said, "Hey, let's put together this kit in a simple way that will help parents." Especially parents who are Christians probably think, "Man, I have to talk to my kid about the birds and the bees, about body parts and how babies are made." But now, you have to talk to your kid about gender, so we said "Let's go after that." 

We integrate a lot of media into our presentations, so there was a lot going on in society at the time that we made it. So that's the goal of it is just to give parents kind of that ongoing conversation. And really, we're about one conversation with parents and their kids, and that is that 80-year conversation. Hopefully parents will have one conversation from when their baby can start listening to them--even if they don't understand it--all the way until their death. We want to facilitate that one conversation the parents have with their kids.

Talk about what's part of the kit, and how it helps parents.

We have four sections in the kit. We talk about gender and culture, gender and marriage, gender and identity. Really it's an 8- or 9-minute video with John Stonestreet (the president of the Coulson Center), Sean McDowell (the son of Josh McDowell), and the Axis team. We're facilitating this dialogue with incredible empathy and understanding, but also just is hopeful and looks at God's plan for marriage and gender and sexuality. You have to talk to your kids about that. If you don't know where to start, it's a great starting point.

What are some of the best things you've heard from people who have interacted with what you provide?

We've had people cry and just say, "I've been praying and need help with translation. I can't stay on top of it." School administrator says, "I'm always three apps behind." Parents have said to us, "I know what it feels like to be a teenager, but I don't know what it feels like to be a teenager today with a cell phone in my pocket." Those are some things that we've heard and they thank us for equipping them. So what we say to parents is outsource your culture translation to us so we can resource you for face-to-face discipleship for your kids. We want to make your life easier on that level.

How do you fight discouragement that could easily surface as momentum in the culture seems to be pushing away from biblical values?

How do we fight discouragement? I don't know. We pray and read our Bibles every morning together as a staff. We pray for perspective all the time to try to understand what priorities we should have, and when you think about all the negative things in the world, you have to remember that the Good News is amazing. It's life changing. Remember how it changed your life. Remember how it changed our life. We're just happy we're working for a mission that helps in an area like that.

How do you navigate these really difficult conversations without villainizing anyone? 

One is you should never judge a philosophy by its abuse, and so you really want to look at the source. And the second thing is you have to remember that ideas have consequences, and consequences for real people, and ideas have victims, and so if you ever divorce the truth from love, and love from the truth, you're going to be in trouble. You have to see both of those together. And in truly loving someone, the truth matters. And so to be passionate about the truth and at the same time understanding that if you're using that to control our power players, you're a Pharisee. And looking at Jesus and how he interacted with people--a lot of times he looked at people with grace first and then the truth.

What has God shown you about what's to come, and the unique role you guys have?

The culture gap between teenagers and parents is growing everyday. For us, we're excited that we get to be in that spot, and there's not that many people here. And there's tons of things for people with parents of children and toddlers and babies and, you know, elementary age kids. When it comes to teenagers, people turn and run; they're scared of it. That's where we live. And people come to us and say, "How do you stay on top of culture all the time?" Our answer back to them is, "We just do. It's who we are." And so we stay young. Our team's young. We love our parents, we love our grandparents. We love the next generation and we want to see them love God and flourish.