10 Paradox 2: Focus on Young Adults by Taking the Focus off Young Adults
10
Paradox 2
Focus on Young Adults by
Taking the Focus off Young Adults
If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
I am always wary of decisions made hastily. I am always wary of the first decision, that is, the first thing that comes to my mind if I have to make a decision. This is usually the wrong thing. I have to wait and assess, looking deep into myself, taking the necessary time.
You may feel a little confused at this point, wondering how any of this information will get a single new young adult to stay in your church. If you have doubts, suspend your judgment for a few more chapters.
Here I’ll begin introducing you to a slow, sometimes tedious approach that actually works rather than a simple, impulsive one that almost never does.
I confess that I love impulsive buying. I see something, I want it, and too often I buy it.
I go shopping with no intention of buying a thing. Then a sweater (on sale, of course) appears in my bag. Maybe you go grocery shopping and end up buying at least seventeen items that weren’t on your list. Or, like a friend of mine, you walk into Home Depot to buy light bulbs and walk out with a riding lawn mower sophisticated enough to groom a PGA green. Whether or not you’re an impulsive buyer like me, I’ll bet you know exactly what I’m talking about.
Many churches have the exact same problem with young adult ministry. We enter the checkout lane, see racks full of quick and easy solutions for getting young adults in the church, and decide we must have them!
We respond to the challenge of young adults in the church (okay, mostly out of the church) by throwing ourselves into the first thing we can think of. We get a new logo, throw out a hashtag, or become active on social media. Maybe we switch to fair-trade coffee or hold a worship concert geared especially to young adults (bonus points for using a Hillsong-only set list).
But these kinds of shotgun attempts almost never create the fundamental change required for sustainable young adult ministry. Launching a thriving ministry begins when we change our orientation from doing programs for young adults to creating structures to work with them, when our imaginations are captured by their God-size dreams. But to make this shift, we need a laser focus on something beyond young adults themselves.
Shoes and Glasses
A contributor to Forbes magazine describes the profound, attractional power that mission—the drive to improve the world—has on young adults:
I have a Millennial-aged friend who only wears Toms shoes despite the fact these shoes hurt his feet, cannot be worn in the rain or cold, and fall apart within weeks, simply because he strongly believes in its mission of providing shoes to third-world children. Essentially, Toms’ values and charitable mission override his common sense. And my friend isn’t alone in spending his money at companies that do good over ones that offer good products.
Though there’s plenty of debate about the real social impact (or harm) of a missional marketing strategy such as the one used by Toms, there’s little doubt that this approach resonates deeply with today’s young adults. Could we be spending a lot of failed energy, time, and money trying to make a better shoe for young adults, hoping to entice them with our better product instead of supercharging the missional impact we already have?
Although some young adults certainly are less intentional about their buying choices, it’s undeniable that young adults have a strong attraction to organizations with a focus on doing good. In fact, according to Horizon Media’s “Finger on the Pulse” study, more than eight in ten young adults (81 percent) actually expect companies to make a public commitment to good corporate citizenship.
It’s time the church woke up to a reality that even for-profit companies are embracing: focusing on a mission automatically gets more interest from young adults. By comparison, most young adults see the church as a black hole that diverts money that might otherwise help people and uses it to maintain buildings and programs for its own members. To many young adults, church feels more like a self-serving country club that protects the status quo than an instrument for meaningful social change.
Churches that focus on recruiting and attracting young adults to increase attendance miss the fact that many young adults are significantly more attracted to opportunities to make an impact than to programs designed exclusively for them.
Many young adults are attracted to jobs at the Warby Parker eyeglass company. The reason? Cofounder and CEO Dave Gilboa reports the biggest reason young adults flock to his company is because of its focus on social mission.
For every pair of glasses Warby Parker sells, it delivers one to someone in need, and anyone who works for the company at least three years gets flown somewhere in the world to help administer eye exams and deliver glasses. A company exec confirms, “Having a prominent social mission helps us attract and retain these young, passionate employees.”
Maybe you’ve heard of the beer company that links the sale of its commemorative glassware to the mission of supplying clean water to Africa. Because mission matters to young adults, companies are learning that mission sells to them as well. But the church—with an unparalleled mission vision built into its very DNA—seems to have missed this point altogether, promoting instead warmed-up programs that look similar to what worked so well twenty to fifty years ago.
Beyond Prostituting Mission
I hope you’re ready to press the pause button.
Sure, an increasing focus on mission is central to attracting more and more young adults, but we must walk a careful tightrope when it comes to mission.
A ministry mentor once told me, “Never prostitute a friendship. Never build a relationship for the sake of some other goal, even a good goal like getting them to come to your church or even make a decision for Christ. Love people because God loves them. Never try to leverage the relationship for something else.”
That’s a wise warning.
The same could be said about engaging with mission for the purpose of attracting young adults. Do we feed starving children in Africa because it makes us feel good? Do we run a community-service day primarily to enhance our church’s reputation in the city? Do we lean into our missional values so young adults will be attracted to our church more than the church down the street?
Mission, in and of itself, must come before young adults, it must not be a clever tool for getting them engaged or to sell them on our church. We engage in mission first and foremost because it’s at the heart of what it means to be a disciple of Jesus.
Young adults are attracted to churches that engage authentically in mission, not as a means to simply grow membership. The call to live missionally can never be reduced to a marketing strategy. It’s at the core of any faithful church. The good news is that our call to engage young adults may actually have the effect of calling the church back to an appropriate focus on mission beyond its own walls.
Many churches may have a written vision statement that prominently highlights mission. But their functional mission statement, the one they really live by, the one demonstrated in their week-to-week priorities, is “avoid failure at all cost by continuing business as usual.” This is the kind of church the typical young adult wants to avoid at all cost.
When the church stands silent in the face of injustice, this generation tunes out. Young adults expect to see the church tip the scales of its focus toward a compelling mission.
When young adults—even deeply committed followers of Christ—don’t see a missional focus in the church, they look elsewhere to engage in a mission with the potential to change the world. And more often than not, they’ve come to believe that Toms and Warby Parker have a more faithful strategy for changing the world than the church does.
A New Center
By now you’ve gotten the message: most churches are organizing their young adult ministries around the wrong center. The unquestioned goal (whether assumed or announced publicly) is to get young adults to show up to our buildings or our programs and maybe even persuade them to give, volunteer, or join the church. We want them to listen to us teach and apply our wisdom to their lives.
We want young adults to experience God’s presence, walk more fully in the abundant life of Christ, and leave with a passion to impact their world. And we assume, quite logically, that our first step toward this goal is to get them to simply show up to our meetings. But before too long, the organizing marker of a successful young adult ministry becomes getting young people to show up every seven days.
I’m actually grateful for the ways the “nones” are waking up the church by their lack of attendance. But organizing young adult ministry around attendance is a dead end.
Missional church experts are helping us develop a different organizing center: “A missional church is simply any church that organizes itself around the mission of God in this world.”
As we reimagine young adult ministry, what if we spent less time trying to get them back into our pews and more time inviting them to join in God’s mission? What if we took the focus off young adults and put it on a mission in which they can engage side by side with us?
When I say “invite them to join in God’s mission,” I’m not talking about inviting young adults to a long series of meetings to help the church write (or rewrite) its mission statement. I’m not talking about inviting them to volunteer to help with the church’s youth ministry.
I’m talking about starting beyond our own walls. Before we redouble our frantic efforts to get young adults “in here,” let’s make sure our church is living out the call of Christ out there.
Here’s the odd and delightful paradox: when we faithfully focus on our out there mission first, we stand the greatest chance of seeing young adults worshiping alongside us. It’s as if Jesus knew what he was talking about when he said, “Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well” (Matthew 6:33).
Young adults who become partners in mission are much more likely to find mentors in the church and then create their own young-adult-specific programs.
Beyond the Dots
Figure 10.1. Puzzle of the nine dots
At some point, you’ve probably seen the puzzle of the nine dots. It goes like this: try to connect all nine dots in 
Figure 10.2. First possible attempt at solving the puzzle
If you’re like me and thousands of other rookie puzzlers, you’ll struggle, believing the solution is found within the square shape of the dots. Perhaps something like
Or maybe like
Figure 10.3. Second possible attempt at solving the puzzle
Figure 10.4. Solution to solving the puzzle
The solution to this puzzle (like the solution to young adult ministry) can be found only when we expand our focus beyond the self-imposed boundaries of what we expect the answer to look like.
Try this solution: start at the top left corner and go right, one squares’ length beyond the dot. From there, take a diagonal down and back to the left, go straight up and then diagonal down and to the right (see
Young adult ministry that works makes the focus larger than programs for young adults themselves. There’s a solution, but not if we stay limited within the boundaries of programming for them.
A New Kind of Softball
I was talking with a young adult couple who had started their church’s softball team the previous summer. The wife laughed, “It was the only way I could get him to come to church. Softball is his thing.”
For those of us who’ve been in the church all our lives, especially those over forty, we imagine softball as something the church members do for fellowship, not as a doorway into the life of the church. Most of us see mission the same way—something the people already in the church do to bless the community or the world.
But that’s not how young adults see it.
When it comes to young adults, particularly those outside the church, mission has become their thing. Mission may be the new “softball team” for young adults, a low-threshold doorway into a church community that gives them a chance to do mission collaboratively with all types of people from a variety of generations.
Embrace the paradox: we do our most focused work with young adults when we take our first focus off young adults and align our ministry to a mission that changes the world around us with the gospel of Jesus.