8 Beyond Fixing
8
Beyond Fixing
Christianity got over the difficulty of combining furious opposites, by keeping them both, and keeping them both furious.
Only the arrogant and dogmatic find paradox hard to accept.
In 1993, French electrician Emile Leray was stranded in a Moroccan desert. He was traveling through North Africa when he was stopped at a military outpost. He was told the area was restricted and he’d have to turn around. But when the patrol wasn’t looking, Leray put the pedal to the floor and drove into the desert, avoiding a lengthy detour.
Far from the outpost and twenty miles from the nearest village, the undercarriage of his car hit a rock, cracking the axle and rendering the vehicle totally inoperable, leaving him stranded.
With limited food and water, Leray considered the simple solutions at hand:
Start walking? He’d never make it.
Signal for help? There was no one to see it.
Fix the car? It was beyond repair.
“I put myself in . . . survival mode,” he said. “I ate less; I monitored my supply of water and food to make them last as long as possible.” But survival mode could last only so long. He needed a different set of options, a different solution, and he needed it quick. Against all hope, Leray did something remarkable.
He didn’t walk to safety.
He wasn’t rescued.
He didn’t repair the car.
Leray spent twelve days disassembling the car and reassembling it into a makeshift motorcycle that he could ride to safety. He asked a different question—because questions such as, “How can I fix the car?” or, “How can I make the water last longer?” would only delay inevitable death. Instead, he started asking, “What if?”
A New Conversation
It’s time for us to start asking different, unexpected questions about young adult ministry:
What if we stop trying to pull young adults back and instead follow where they’re going?
What if we invite them to lead the church into its next chapter?
What if we dare to believe there’s more to their story than we’re telling ourselves today?
It might be easy to assume that the solution to the problem of young adult ministry is to simply quit making mistakes, particularly the ones identified in the first half of this book, or maybe even fix the mistakes we’ve already made.
Naming our most common missteps is, of course, a fine starting point. But a focus on not doing the wrong things won’t get us out of the desert. Instead, we must build something entirely new, reassembling the problem into the solution.
The next eight chapters offer a way to think differently about reaching this generation of young adults and college students. To get there, we need to travel down the path of paradox.
The Six Paradoxical Priorities
As you likely know well, young adults are often defined by unpredictability and paradox. They want high incomes but are resistant to sacrificing the life side of the work-life balance. They prioritize meaningful work and a comfortable lifestyle. They seek honesty and regular feedback from their managers, but many don’t want to become managers themselves.
Whatever solutions we develop to the young adult problem will require the church to lean into the very nature of young adults and provide a paradoxical response.
Here’s a quick refresher: a paradox is a statement that seemingly contradicts itself or a combination of two statements that seem to oppose each other. For example:
A card says on one side, “The sentence on the other side of this card is true.” On the other side, “The sentence on the other side of this card is false.”
Can God make a rock so big even God can’t lift it?
Pinocchio tells you, “My nose will now grow.”
The phrase “Ignore all the rules” is a rule itself.
To the typical either-or question, the quintessential young adult will answer yes!
One author puts it this way: “Millennials have been taught to see the back story, that every upside has a downside, so they often want to balance two contradictory things to get its upside while minimizing its downside. They want both.” Young adults live in a world of the both-and. They live in a world of paradox, and embracing paradox might be the key to reaching them.
Christians have, of course, long embraced paradox. H. Richard Niebuhr describes it well in Christ and Culture: “In Christ all things have become new, and yet everything remains as it was from the beginning. God has revealed Himself in Christ, but hidden Himself in His revelation; the believer knows the One in whom he has believed, yet walks by faith, not sight.”
We receive life through death, gain through loss, honor through humility, power through meekness. Our faith inhales and exhales with the breath of paradox. I love that G. K. Chesterton reportedly said that, in Christianity, we don’t just have doxology so much as paradoxology.
As we unpack the second half of this book, I’ll introduce you to six paradoxical priorities that offer stepping stones to a thriving ministry with young adults.
Here’s a quick summary:
Paradox 1. Succeed by being willing to fail. One of our biggest roadblocks to success with young adult ministry is our own paralyzing fear of failure. It keeps us stuck doing the same ineffective things again and again, unable to find the kinds of ministry that will work for fear of working through the things that don’t. Young adults are taking the reins of leadership out into the world, and to effectively reach them in the church we need to find ways of giving them the keys and letting them drive us into the future. But that means we must take a different view of failure and embrace the trial-and-error nature of building a ministry with young adults instead of for them. Churches that begin to pursue repeated failure with young adults might find themselves stumbling into more and more success.
Paradox 2. Focus on young adults by taking the focus off young adults. Our most common reaction to the need for young adult ministry is to paint a target squarely on the backs of young adults and pour our money, time, and resources into attracting them with every trick (mistake) we can think of. But if we really want to attract young adults, we need to be crystal clear about the church’s mission. The more we focus on reaching our communities and our world, and the more effective we are at doing it, the more interested young adults will be in joining. We must think mission first, then young adults.
Paradox 3. Reach young people by gathering more old people. To really reach young adults, our goal needs to be bigger than trying to gather large numbers of them into a group. To build a sustainable young adult ministry, you’ll need a team of older adults working to deliberately connect with young adults. It takes a “village of gurus” to build the kind of ministry you want, recognizing the deep desire of many young adults to be mentored and connected to older generations. We must see young adult ministry as a team sport, not as work to be done by any single individual.
Paradox 4. Reach one young adult at a time through a system to reach them all. We’ve already talked a lot about the priority of making individual, relational connections with young adults. But your ministry will never stand up under pressure without systems and structures to undergird it. These systems ensure that your singular initiatives sustain their impact over time, continuing to build greater and greater momentum.
Paradox 5. Respond to lack of commitment by asking for more. Young adults aren’t devoid of options in their lives. The world is at their fingertips more than ever before. Perhaps that’s why many people see young adults as scattered, unfocused, and seemingly unable to keep their commitments. As a result, the typical church responds by providing more options and lower expectations. But as counterintuitive as it might seem, churches gain more traction with young adults by asking for more commitment. Strangely, the young adult who has no time for a thirty-minute, optional Bible study actually might give ten hours a week to a compelling vision they believe in. Our mission is to make sure we invite young adults into missions that matter, not thinly veiled marketing schemes designed to get them to attend.
Paradox 6. Attract young adults to your church by sending them away. One of the most difficult aspects of working with young adults is the reality that, because of career shifts, life transitions, or wanderlust, many won’t stick around forever. Rather than fight against their transient nature, we can build ministries that embrace this very quality and develop ways of doing ministry that aren’t thrown off course by young adult transience. The best ministry with young adults happens when we equip them for life beyond our church even if they do stay.
Maybe by this point your head is starting to hurt. But I hope you’ll hang in there for these next few chapters as we walk the path of paradox together. All along that road are young adults hungering for an authentic life in Christ, even when they express that longing in ways we don’t exactly expect.
The facts don’t lie:
There are the thousands of young adults who gather at Urbana every other year, the 20,000 who gathered in Kansas City for the International House of Prayer’s One Thing gathering, and the 40,000 college students at Passion Conferences. These events instill confidence that the next generation of leaders loves Jesus and is passionate about serving Him and making Him known among their generation. Not all of these worshippers are showing up at church on Sunday morning—at least, in this period of their lives—but their passion for God still burns strong.
Our solution to establishing thriving young adult ministries pushes beyond traditional either-or patterns and easy-answer thinking. Let’s begin down a paradoxical path designed for any church to implement.
Our car may have broken down and left us with little hope, but there’s a way out of the desert. Just keep reading.