2 Mistake 1: Learn About Young Adults

2

Mistake 1

Learn About Young Adults

Any fool can know. The point is to understand.

Hi, I’m a millennial, and I am a monster.

Imagine waking up tomorrow morning, turning on the local news for the weather forecast, and hearing “Hodie tempestas 80s serenum erit medium in magno.” After breakfast, you grab your shopping list as you head out the door and read something in an undecipherable alphabet.

You’ll likely have no idea how to dress for the day or what to pick up at the store even though the message is clearly written—right there in black and white.

There’s a good chance you don’t happen to read or understand Latin or Old Norse (which is quite the gap in your education!). You likely read only English and maybe a few words of Spanish or French you remember from high school.

Many churches intuitively know that the young adult generation is speaking a markedly different language when it comes to church. Some churches have become fluent in the young adult tongue—buying books, reading blogs, and going to seminars about this language.

That’s a mistake—at least as a starting point.

Any church hoping to build sustainable young adult ministry can’t afford to make assumptions about what “all young adults are like.” They can’t afford to draw on their own dead language—based on their personal experience of “when I was their age”—to craft a picture of young adults today. They can’t simply study their way to understanding young adults.

Few people become fluent in a language from a seminar or book. Fluency comes from actually being with native speakers.

Beyond Here

You undoubtedly learned in elementary school about all the great explorers: Columbus, Magellan, Lewis and Clark. It was exciting to imagine their bravery (and sheer lunacy!).

But for today’s elementary students, another date exists on the timeline of turning points in exploration history: February 8, 2005, the day Google Maps was announced. It changed the modern world forever by placing exploration at the fingertips of anyone with an internet connection.

Since then, Google has produced countless iterations to its maps application, including satellite, terrain, and traffic views, as well as applications such as Google Moon, Mars, and Sky. Suddenly, seeing what it’s actually like to sail the ocean blue (and beyond) is a realistic possibility for us all.

But maps can be tricky. Sure, they tell us what is known, understood, and cataloged. They tell us where to go and how to get there. But by design, they also tell us what we don’t know.

Centuries ago, cartographers dramatically illustrated the vast, uncharted seas with dragons, sea serpents, and other mythical creatures, often with the words “Beyond here, there be dragons.”

In a 2014 TEDx Talk, Kelly Williams Brown introduced herself by saying, “Hi, I’m a millennial, and I am a monster” (not a dragon, but mighty close).

Those responsible for the cartography of young adult ministry know there’s so much uncharted territory in this field, so much yet to be mapped. It would be easy to take a “Beyond here, there be dragons” approach, as far too many churches do, and view these unknowable creatures as monsters.

On church maps, we’re all too familiar with the typography of classes, groups, studies, and events. And most churches have assumed that every problem can be solved using one of these common responses.

If the church is to have any hope of reaching young adults in a new territory, we must begin stepping beyond the landscape of what we already know, beyond the comfort of the well-worn programmatic maps we’ve used for at least the last century or so.

What We Do Know

Let’s start with what we do know about the gap between young adults and just about everyone else. According to many experts, the next generation is unlike any that has come before it. Discovery News reports, “The reality is that [the differences] run much deeper . . . and may signal a shifting culture.”

It’s easy, though, for the rest of us to understand young adults from our perspective as tourists in their world, as visitors in their zoo, seeing them only in caricature. We’ve grown comfortable with sweeping summary statements such as “They’re texting all the time!” and “They’re unbelievably entitled.”

We know millennials have now replaced baby boomers as the largest generation in American history. But it’s been much easier to give definition to the baby boomers or even Generation Xers than to millennials.

Millennials is one of many terms experts have used for this generation of young adults. Some use mosaics, some Generation Y, others Generation Next or the Boomerang Generation (because they so habitually leave home only to return again). Still others call them the Internet Generation because they and the World Wide Web grew up at roughly the same time.

Even millennials’ age range is hard to define. Some consider eighteen to thirty the young adult years. Some use twenty-somethings, while others lump eighteen- to forty-three-year-olds together into this single generational category. Some sources use the birth-year range 1984 to 2002, or possibly 1977 to 1995. For simplicity, I use the easier-to-remember “born roughly between 1980 and 2000.”

Like the individuals of this generation, millennials as a whole tend to resist easy categorization. They may be most alike in their vast differences from one another. Many—though not all—vehemently resist anything that feels like labeling or typecasting.

To offer some context, it’s helpful to see millennials against the patterned backdrop of American generations in the century before them. In Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation, Neil Howe and William Strauss present a fascinating side-by-side comparison of the generations. Here’s a summary:

The Greatest Generation (or G.I. Generation, for its role in World War II) numbered about 35.2 million people. They came through the Great Depression and were foundational in the formation of modern America. Born from 1900 to 1924, this group lived through most of the twentieth century, experiencing the advent of everything from automobiles and television to personal computers and smartphones.

The Silent Generation (also called Traditionalists), born between 1925 and 1945, numbered about 50 million. They grew up in the shadow of the Great Depression and McCarthyism. The combination resulted in an identity of caution and withdrawal. In 1951, a Time magazine article used the term Silent Generation to refer to people born during this time frame. The name stuck, owing in part, at least, to the lack of a single, vocal leader (or US president) coming from that generation.

The baby boomers were the first to be born post-World War II, from 1945 to 1965. They were named for the explosive growth in US birthrates, numbering approximately 80 million (more than double the Greatest Generation). Boomers were by and large raised by stay-at-home moms typically much younger than the mothers of millennials. They experienced the Vietnam War and Woodstock, developing a mistrust of authority characterized in the iconic slogan “Never trust anyone over thirty.” Baby boomers’ fierce independence from their parents’ generation contributed to their high-flying affluence and materialism in the 1980s. Until the millennials arrived on the scene, boomers held the record for the largest generation in US history.

Generation X has about 40 million members (about half the number of baby boomers) and generally includes people born from 1960 to 1980. The term captures this generation’s antiestablishment ideology. Gen-Xers grew up wary of the dominant boomer culture and as a result created a variety of underground subcultures. Individualistic to the core, they exhibited a general pessimism about the world and a deep mistrust of government. Their negative worldview earned them the label “Slacker Generation.” Gen-Xers’ antiestablishment thread showed up in trends such as skateboarding and punk-rock cultures.

The final generation of adults in today’s America is the millennials, comprising a record-breaking 89 million people. They’re a paradoxical bunch, with both an unapologetic narcissism and a passionate civic-mindedness. They want to consume all the world has to offer and make it a better place. Having experienced both Iraq wars, they’ve grown up with a global mindset, made possible by their perpetual connection through technology. The internet has been a foundational metaphor (and reality) for defining how young adults understand the world and interact with it and each other. They are multitasking entrepreneurs, having been raised by helicopter parents in ways unprecedented from other generations.

Millennials, in general, distrust and are suspicious of organized religion. They tend to be moral relativists, and the cultural narrative of limitless options has created for them unprecedented identity crises.

At the same time, millennials often seek mentors from older generations. They are marrying less often and creating families later but building communities earlier. They’re driven toward a customized, individualistic approach to their world yet desire deep connections with people around them. Millennials are hopeful and optimistic, in part because so many options are available to them.

Enough of the broad brush. It’s time to actually meet a real young adult.

Meet Charlie

Charlie was born in 1982. At the beginning of the millennium, he started college. He moved into a dorm and later into an apartment with friends. He dated, held a series of jobs, and completed his degree in four and a half years.

During the summers and in between semesters, Charlie worked at a Christian camp, sensing a clear calling to full-time ministry. After college he became a youth pastor.

So far, so normal.

By traditional standards of adulthood, you’d expect that by Charlie’s thirtieth birthday, he would have

But Charlie was zero for five.

In 1960, an estimated 77 percent of women and 65 percent of men had passed all five of these markers by age thirty. By 2000, fewer than half of women and only one-third of men—including Charlie—had completed these tasks by age thirty.

This list of tasks to become an adult has been the agreed-on standard for many generations. But young adults today barely recognize it.

Instead, the Clark University “Established Adult” poll from 2014 found that the top-three markers for adulthood are:

Not only are young adults achieving adulthood later in life, but the language they use to describe adulthood is changing as well. Here’s how the New York Times Magazine paints the shift (with an admittedly broad brush):

It’s happening all over, in all sorts of families, not just young people moving back home but also young people taking longer to reach adulthood overall. It’s a development that predates the current economic doldrums, and no one knows yet what the impact will be—on the prospects of the young men and women; on the parents on whom so many of them depend; on society, built on the expectation of an orderly progression in which kids finish school, grow up, start careers, make a family, and eventually retire to live on pensions supported by the next crop of kids who finish school, grow up, start careers, make a family, and on and on.

The traditional cycle seems to have gone off course, as young people remain untethered to romantic partners or to permanent homes, going back to school for lack of better options, traveling, avoiding commitments, competing ferociously for unpaid internships or temporary (and often grueling) Teach for America jobs, forestalling the beginning of adult life.

Charlie is just living out the new normal for young adults, right? Around age thirty, he moved back in with his parents, leaving the world of full-time work to pursue a graduate degree.

But if you took time to actually have a conversation with Charlie, you’d learn he isn’t choosing to wander or to delay moving into adulthood. He’d be quick to tell you it’s not like he decided not to get married. In fact, he says, he desperately wants to be married and is actually a little nervous he won’t find someone.

Charlie would explain that his church became strapped for cash in an economic downturn and was about to eliminate his position. Considering the lack of alternatives, heading back to school was a good option. He’d let you know he wanted to buy a house but couldn’t qualify for a mortgage in a neighborhood he’d like to live in.

From Charlie, you’d learn that the trends don’t fully reflect reality for young adults and how they move through the world.

The Explorers Method

The successful explorers of old didn’t have complicated approaches. Their basic method often boiled down to “just keep going.” That isn’t a bad starting point for charting our own way through the new territory of young adult ministry.

Being successful explorers in this field requires that we follow the lead of Dory of Finding Nemo and “just keep swimming,” moving (respectfully) into young adults’ lives and letting them impact ours as well. We have to begin building actual relationships with them. We do have an advantage, though, that people working with young adults in previous generations didn’t: young adults are deeply interested in connecting with other generations. They may seem disinterested in the church, but they aren’t disinterested in people like you. They’re eager for older generations to take steps toward them rather than simply observing from a distance.

Here’s what Angela discovered.

Angela is in her midfifties, with two sons, one almost done with college and the other soon to have his first child. She’s passionate about her faith and her church, leading Bible studies, starting women’s ministries, and leading the missions committee.

Angela had every reason to claim a full plate. But recently she started helping with her church’s new ministry for young adults. To gather information, Angela thought it would be helpful to visit the college campus. “That was my first mistake,” she says with a laugh.

She now frequents the campus for lunch or coffee meetings and mentors a group of young women in their twenties. Angela even got a membership to the university’s athletic facility and does her daily workouts right next to students. In fact, she met Jenny running on a treadmill.

After seeing Jenny a couple of times, Angela struck up a conversation. Eventually, that conversation revealed Jenny’s passion to become a missionary and a desire to engage that passion more in her life. Angela invited her to church, and soon afterward Jenny actually joined the church’s mission team and began providing a voice for college students in the church’s leadership.

All that happened because Angela chose to live inside the young adult world rather than expecting young adults to show up at church because of a new contemporary service or a Facebook account.

Beyond Today’s Map

When we rely on articles, newscasts, headlines, and books (including this one) to inform our map of young adult ministry, “learning about young adults” is really “making assumptions about young adults.”

Even churches that study the problem of young adult ministry quickly place them into known categories, assuming that their development and engagement will (and should!) follow more or less the same road map that previous generations traversed.

You can hear the assumption in comments such as:

These mistaken perceptions are predicated on the idea that of course this population will come back as soon as they start having children. This mistake excuses our neglect with the blind confidence that, if we do nothing, young adults will be back. It’s a way of staying paralyzed with inaction.

Therefore, one of the first signs that a church is actually ready to do young adult ministry is when leadership finally realizes, “They ain’t comin’ back.”

Unfortunately, the natural next step is to study about young adults, usually in circular, anxious conversations. We read a few trends, watch a few YouTube videos and TED Talks, read a book or two, and then implement simplistic solutions using the exact same categories we used with previous generations. We travel the well-worn path of programs, studies, and events even when those paths are leading us in exactly the wrong direction.

Travis helped me see this mistake for what it is.

Meet Travis

You can learn a lot about frogs by dissecting them in biology class. You can pin them down, cut them open, and learn all about their organs and biology. But you’ll never really know the frog’s life—its favorite lily pad, its favorite fly, or what time of day it loves to sit in the sun. To know those kinds of things, you’ll need to learn in an entirely different way.

Travis was my frog. He embodied so many young adult stereotypes. At the time of this writing, he’s in his midtwenties and recently married. He doesn’t plan to have kids anytime soon and never made it through college.

I met Travis when he was nineteen. He’d dropped out of college after a single semester. He had tried to do “what he was supposed to do,” get a degree and become a real adult. But he said it just wasn’t for him.

Travis didn’t have much use for the church either, though he was involved in youth ministry as a teenager. By his midtwenties, the church wasn’t even on his radar.

Then one day our music team needed a guitar player at the last minute. We offered Travis fifty dollars to play one Sunday morning, and he never left. In the process, he’s become one of my closest friends.

What’s surprising about Travis is that beneath his ambiguity about the church is a raw, driving passion for the church to actually matter. He gets frustrated with “the show” of Sunday morning worship. Ironically, now as a worship leader, he’s concerned that music becomes the focal point of worship more than it should. He’d much rather the church feed homeless people and give them a place to stay than focus first on the quality of the Sunday morning experience.

More than once I’ve seen Travis personally pick up a panhandler, buy him a meal, and put him in a hotel on his own dime. He cares deeply about the church, but he feels that so much about it is a massive exercise in missing the point. He wants to see the church live out its message, not just package the message so people will come to hear it.

Travis is a young adult, and now he’s a leader in our church. Sure, I’ve had to steer him back on course a few times and even hold him accountable when he’s dropped a ball or two. But right now, nothing is more important to him than the ministry he’s involved in. Travis isn’t what you might expect from a young adult if all you read is the stats.

You also might not expect that he has more relationships with older generations than with his own demographic. Travis hangs out regularly with baby boomers (who love him, by the way) and Gen-Xers. He’s eager to learn from them. He isn’t trying to push older generations out of the way so he can get what he’s owed. He’s an incredibly hard worker who highly values learning from and being in relationship with older people in his life.

Simply study Travis in a laboratory and you could certainly place many young adult labels on him. But spend time with him and you’ll find a picture far more nuanced and profound. You might be surprised and at the same time see something to give you hope for the church’s future.

Steering Is Harder Than You Think

Last summer was my first real sailing experience. It didn’t take long before I had a major realization: I hate sailing.

A friend who owns a sailboat offered to bring me along on a little expedition. Before that trip, I’ll admit my notion of sailing was a bit romantic—some combination of Christopher Columbus and Captain Jack Sparrow.

The reality was more than a little disappointing. Extreme heat, close quarters, and zero attacks by giant squids made this simple out-and-back journey less than the adventure I was hoping for.

I admire that my buddy enjoys such a sophisticated hobby; I really do. But every time I’ve gone out with him on the boat, I’ve spent far too much time with my head hanging over the side, losing my lunch.

This time we’d driven from New York City down to Chesapeake Bay with no air conditioning on one of the hottest days of the year. After hours on the road, we were all eager to get the boat out on the water.

The four of us were cramped into a tiny sitting area, knees touching, under the blazing sun. I certainly could have gone below deck if I’d wanted, but it was an Easy-Bake Oven down there. We spent the night on the boat in temperatures so hot all we could do was lie on the deck and try not to melt before falling asleep.

I did learn two useful things on this journey:

Piloting a sailboat, I learned, is quite different from driving a car. In a car, I point the vehicle at the destination, step on the gas, and—barring interruption from traffic lights, pedestrians, large animals, or other vehicles—I’ll eventually arrive at my destination.

But sailing isn’t simply a matter of setting a target and locking in the cruise control. Sailing requires constant adjustments. The wind blows you in one direction but is constantly changing its force. The waves and current move beneath you and pull you, often in a different direction altogether, making steering anything but easy.

Without making continuous adjustments, the boat will miss its target by a mile. Building a young adult ministry requires something similar. With the conditions between you and your destination always changing, you can ill-afford to assume anything and set your ministry on cruise.

This reality is more challenging than we might think. Churches aren’t necessarily famous for making adjustments. We’re accustomed to setting programs on cruise control and expecting them to get us to our destination. But when the Spirit blows in new directions, doing what comes naturally to us will likely result in drifting farther and farther away from the ministry we’ve dreamed of.

David Kinnaman of the Barna Group is right when he says:

The current state of ministry to twentysomethings is woefully inadequate to address the spiritual needs of millions of young adults. These individuals are making significant life choices and determining the patterns and preferences of their spiritual reality while churches wait, generally in vain, for them to return after college or when the kids come.

It’s no longer realistic to simply point the ship vaguely in the direction of young adult ministry. We need an elegant, agile solution capable of making constant adjustments based on changing conditions. And one of the first adjustments must be to stop learning about young adults and actually build relationships with them.

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