Jim Tonkowich
June 17, 2010
Read this article in its entirety on the byFaith Magazine website.
“We’re really quite happy that our church doesn’t attract any young people.”
It’s a good guess that no one says things like that at your church. We all want young people because to exclude them represent an ecclesial suicide pact. Without young people congregations literally die out.
Having said that, however, you may have noticed that it is no small task to attract young people, particularly twenty-somethings. That is because, as sociology professor Christian Smith, director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Notre Dame has written, “Most of the cultural and structural features of emerging adulthood [ages 18-29] tend to undermine or marginalize serious, committed religious faith and practice.”
To put it another way, most young people cannot imagine why they would want to attend at your church or any other. And those who come tend to have ideas about what a Christian life looks like that are out of synch with most PCA congregations.
Christian Smith’s research is vital to understanding this generation and to developing a wise and winsome approach to outreach.
The “Adrift” Generation
Five years ago, Smith published Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers. Now he has published Souls in Transition, a look at the same cohort now that they are between 18 and 24. This is the first half of “emerging adulthood,” a distinct developmental phase comprising 18- to 29-year-olds.
According to Smith, emerging adulthood is the result of factors such as the expansion of higher education, delayed marriage and childbearing, and parental support that often lasts well into the 20s. As Scott Seaton, pastor of Emmanuel Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Arlington, Va., remarked, “Everyone is either in graduate school or will be.”
Smith writes that while there may be similarities with the generations that have gone before it, the world of emerging adults is “more complex, disjointed, confused, and unstable compared to the same ages in previous generations.” As a result, they live tentatively, trying one thing and then another. While they believe they will one day have “real jobs,” marriages, families, and homes in the suburbs, they are certain that there is no hurry. They can seem adrift because they are adrift.
The preeminent cultural fact working against serious Christian commitment among emerging adults is an individualism, so extreme, that it rejects any authority beyond, “What seems right to me.” […]
Read this article in its entirety on the byFaith Magazine website.
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