5 Mistake 4: Start by Creating a Young Adult Program
5
Mistake 4
Start by Creating a Young Adult Program
The church had decided they wanted a college program to reach out to students in the area. The congregation wanted a college program. The elders wanted a college program.
The staff wanted a college program. But in the end it was a lot of rhetoric, and no one really wanted to invest in a long-term strategy. When we restructured our ministry eighteen months later, they eliminated my position.
No one really thought about [young adult ministry] as a real investment that needed a five-year plan.
People who are good with a hammer treat everything like a nail.
My wife is on a new kick. She wants to go on a family vacation to the Grand Canyon. When she says “family vacation,” she’s talking about an old-fashioned road trip in our minivan. Actually, she’d like it better if it were a ’72 station wagon with wood paneling and no air conditioning.
But I digress.
We live in Michigan, so we’re talking three days on the road—each way. Apparently, my wife believes long hours of monotony in a cramped space with young children somehow equals “vacation.” She says getting there is half the fun, and the journey is more important than the destination. You get the idea.
When I mention all the things about this trip that could be potentially miserable, my wife doesn’t see problems. She actually gets excited about what she calls the “hard parts.” She wants to prohibit us from taking the quick route. That’s right: she prefers the long, endless journey and endless games of I Spy. She may find the idea nostalgic, but I find it torturous. Thanks, but no thanks.
My plan would be to get on a plane, arrive in a few hours, stand atop the canyon, snap some pictures, make sure our kids notice there’s a big hole in the ground, and then hit the hotel pool for the rest of the trip. Now that’s vacation!
In my saner moments, I know my wife is right. She wants our kids to have a shared experience with us. For my wife, seeing the Grand Canyon is fine, but the trip itself is what holds the promise of shaping our family.
Unfortunately, when it comes to ministry with young adults, most churches choose my vacation approach. They want to get to the destination as quickly as possible. They want to set up a program or two for young adults to flock to. Most churches that start a young adult ministry don’t even consider the slow route of developing a strategic plan of any kind. They’d rather push the easy button labeled “program.”
What’s Wrong With Programs?
Almost every church follows a similar startup cycle for young adult ministry that looks like this:
Step 1. Buy some pizza and invite college students or twenty-somethings to stay after a worship service to discuss how to reach their friends. Print an announcement in the bulletin to get young adults there.
Step 2. Launch some version of a college and career group designed to reach young adults. In addition, add a combination of get-to-know-you games, volleyball, and, of course, more pizza.
Step 3. Watch in utter amazement six months (or six weeks) later as the ministry fizzles out and the disappointed two or three active young adults wonder what’s wrong with them.
Step 4. Blame the megachurches and their seeker-sensitive approach. Blame competition from parachurch ministries. Blame the consumerist young adults.
Step 5. Repeat the same exact process in a few years or as soon as the church has forgotten the last attempt (whichever comes first).
Why, you may wonder, do churches keep going back to the same well, where there’s clearly no water? Because they assume providing better programs is the right answer to every problem.
For children, it was changing from boring Sunday school to Promiseland or Name-of-your-church Kidz. For teenagers, the church upgraded from young people’s societies and youth groups to events with youth bands and cool names such as Blaze, Ignite, and Fuel. (Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed how many youth groups choose names related to burning things?) When we had trouble getting teenagers in the door, we created events such as Pizza Olympics and Crud Wars.
And it worked.
Sort of.
At least our well-marketed and well-designed programming kept a critical mass of young people coming, even if the vast majority of older youth dropped out of weekly programming in their last years of high school. Our first approach to reaching young adults is often to create new programs because it’s what churches know how to do.
Pastor Matthew Marino questions whether this approach really was a success after all:
It was the drug everyone wanted: Parents wanted their kids to like church. Pastors wanted undistracted parents listening to their sermons. Worship leaders wanted to avoid the complexity of pleasing multiple generations. Youth pastors liked the numbers and accolades. Kids liked the band and shorter message. On top of that, donors were excited to write large checks to build expensive facilities with the promise of reaching lost and hurting kids. And if our metrics are seats filled and satisfaction surveys, it looked like it was working. But what are the long-term effects of segregated, program-driven ministry?
The long-term effects of this approach are staring us in the face as we look at the next generation. Why would the approach that couldn’t keep them around be the very same approach we take to get them back?
Young adults have “been there, done that” and got the T-shirt. And it’s not what they’re looking for.
The Wrong Question
The primary question churches seem to be asking young adults is, “What kind of program do you want the church to provide for you?” I think it’s time to ask a different question.
Young adults such as Rachel Sloan may help us get closer to the right question. She says,
We want churches that want to have a relationship with us.
We do not want churches to immediately advertise to us how great their contemporary service is, how amazing their young adult Sunday school class is, how sizable their group of young adults is, as if to say: “Of course we want you here! Just stay in your niche where we cannot see you and have fun over there while the rest of us run the church and make the big decisions.”
We do not want you to immediately shove us off to a part of the church where we will never be seen or heard from again. . . . Whatever your church does well, there is a faction of Millennials that wants to be a part of it. Is your church passionate about social justice, worship, or ministry to the local community? Do that, focus on that, and Millennials may end up at your church.
Then let us help you do that. We do not only want to attend church on Sunday morning. Many of us care and want to be involved in a church; we just have not found ones that will let us in.
We are not going to a church that does not care about our ideas, and we are not going to a church that is not willing to fully embrace us. Would you?
If not a young adult program, then what are they looking for?
Author Jen Hatmaker points out what the latest research reveals:
When young adults between ages eighteen and thirty-five were polled nationwide and asked, “What would draw you or keep you at a church?” they listed the following four tenets:
1. Community
2. Social justice
3. Depth
4. Mentorship
In short, young adults are looking for ways to connect and for opportunities to change the world with the gospel. They’re looking for roles integral to the mission of our churches. They’re looking for a place where they can make a difference. They’re looking for a seat at the table and for people and organizations to partner with in making an impact in their community.
What they don’t need (and, mostly, don’t want) is to be compartmentalized into an insular group that participates in, with nauseating familiarity, a polished-up version of youth group.
Young adults aren’t just looking to be attracted to your church; they’re looking to be connected to it. They’re looking for more than the hidden message beneath most young adult programming: “Warm bodies welcome.”
Programs specific to young adults typically provide young adults little opportunity to be woven into the fabric of your church or integrated into a church’s life and leadership. Age-specific programs do little to affirm people’s contributions to the church as a whole. The sad truth we’re afraid to face is that most age-specific young adult programming doesn’t even temporarily attract young adults, let alone engage the depth of relationship or mentorship they seek. It leaves most of them disinterested, disconnected, and undervalued.
If a young adult program is your starting point for connecting with young adults, you’ve missed the heart of what they actually seek from the church. Although your goal of reaching this generation is right on target, the strategy of starting with a young adult program shoots you in the foot from day one.
They Want to Change the World
I recently ran into a twenty-three-year-old friend named Thomas, who grew up in the same town I did. He was raised by upper-middle-class parents, enjoyed a Christian K-12 education, and was deeply involved in his local church.
Thomas was the classic church kid and a typical high school student. No great tragedies. No great triumphs. He was well-liked. He argued with his parents. He stayed out of trouble. He planned to attend a local private college after high school.
But a few years into that experience, Thomas decided to leave college and go to film school. He had found his voice as an artist and discovered a love for filmmaking. Thomas created his own film company to express his art and tell stories. But more than making good movies, Thomas wants to change the world—not by making more “Christian” movies but by being a Christian making movies.
During lunch, Thomas told me, “I’m at this point in my life where I’m excited about the film company I run and the projects I get to work on, but I really want to figure out how my business can make a real impact in this world for good.”
Thomas isn’t alone among young adults.
In a 2011 study on social change, Walden University reported that in the last year, 81 percent of young adults had “donated money, goods, or services as a way to actively take part in the betterment of their world.” An overwhelming majority of young adults profoundly embrace their role as change agents in the world.
Young adults such as Thomas long for the church to come alongside them and provide a platform for putting their faith into action in world-changing ways. They don’t want more games. They don’t want to sit in another chair in front of another stage. And they don’t need more pizza.
The church has a choice: we can work to figure out how to activate the eighty million young adults for the sake of the gospel, or we can watch from the sidelines as they change the world without the church.
Gabe Lyons, author and founder of Q Ideas, a learning community that mobilizes Christians to advance the common good in society, describes the subtle shift in emphasis in how young adults (what he calls “the Next Christians”) see salvation: “The Next Christians believe that Christ’s death and resurrection were not only meant to save people FROM something. He wanted to save Christians TO something.”
A first focus on “get them to show up to something they’ll like” programs is a fundamentally flawed approach. Sure, like every age group, young adults can be motivated by a big crowd. But their deep longings (and the focus most likely to keep them engaged) are connection, impact, and making change.
If you’re wondering how in the world your church can pull off something as nebulous as helping young adults make an impact, hang with me. In the second half of this book, I’ll set out a deliberate process to help you accomplish that very thing.
Putting Programming in Its Place
Let me be clear, lest you miss what I’m trying to say: a young adult or college program isn’t wrong, but as the starting place for young adult ministry, it is painfully problematic.
True to their paradoxical nature, young adults value relationships with older generations and are looking for intergenerational relationships, but they typically aren’t texting baby boomer friends on Friday nights to hang out. They’re also looking (sometimes desperately) for a place to enjoy and build healthy friendships with their peers.
Providing space (and, yes, programming) in your church for college students and young adults to find and connect to each other will be essential, eventually. Young adult programs aren’t without value; they’re simply not the place to begin.
Young adults send mixed signals to older generations about what they really want and need for a good reason: they need both. For them, it’s not an either-or choice between a place to be connected to an intergenerational community or a place to be with peers. It’s a both-and experience.
Later I’ll explain why starting with intergenerational relationship systems almost always results in expanded peer relationships and why a steady diet of peer-based programming alone typically results in neither.
Although life-stage programs may scratch the itch we have for a quick fix and offer us a comfortable starting point for young adult ministry, in the long run this approach almost always fails to give them (and us) what we’re looking for.