New Voices: By and about young adults

It’s fascinating how timeless our deepest human doubts are. When asked to share their deepest faith questions, for instance, my high school students generally list some classics:

• Why would we trust that something as confusing as the Bible is “God’s Word”?
• How do I know that the religion I was born into is more than just the religion I was born into?
• Is it honest to say I have faith if I’m partly just doing it to please my parents?
• How can I believe in God when horrible things can happen to the good and faithful people I know?

The language may change from student to student and generation to generation, but I’ve started to wonder if most of our deepest Christian insecurities (or at least our modern/postmodern Christian insecurities) are simply a version of one of these four questions.

But while the questions don’t seem to have changed much, I’m increasingly convinced that the answers we give, at least within the Menno­nite context, are more important than they’ve ever been.

For generations, these might have been the questions we wondered about, but they weren’t necessarily crucial to our decision to stay committed to our faith.

They were simply the things you wrestled with as you maintained your almost-inevitable commitment to the church you were born into.

Sometimes the questions were voiced, and often the questions were silenced, but the questions rarely made or broke one’s faith.

That is no longer the case. For millennials like me (those born after 1979), there is nothing inevitable about a commitment to church or faith.

Ask us why, and you might, among other things, get a version of the above list of faith questions. The tone will range from tentatively inquisitive (more likely when we’re still teens) to aggressively assertive (more likely as we get older).

Whatever the tone, we’re not giving you the whole reason why. Sure, we’re being honest, sincere and vulnerable. But if these are the same types of questions you and your parents wondered about, surely something else is at play here. We just don’t see it.

Fortunately, Rodney Stark’s book The Rise of Christianity explores some of what we don’t see when it comes to religious commitment.

Among other things, Stark’s sociological studies have demonstrated that religious commitments are strongly tied to interpersonal attachments.

Stark found, for example, that “conversion … occurs when, other things being equal, people have or develop stronger attachments to members of the group than they have to nonmembers.” In other words, when it comes to religion, people often stay or go based on their personal attachments.

Once it’s been stated, it’s obvious. Mennonite millennials are more integrated into their broader society than any Mennonite generation before them. They have more friends and connections outside the church than any of their Mennonite ancestors did.

And the more you make meaningful connections outside a group, the less you’re going to feel like you need that group to find what’s meaningful.

On top of this, Stark’s research also demonstrates that once you’re torn between two groups—in our case, the Mennonite church and non-Mennonite society—you’re going to feel a need to resolve the resulting tensions.

You’re going to feel like your membership in each group is compromised by your membership in the other, and you’re going to, in Stark’s words, “attempt to escape or resolve [that] marginal position.”

It’s these two “unseens” that make millennials’ classic faith questions more potent. It’s also these two “unseens” that make the church’s answers so crucial.

When these questions were asked in the past, it was usually within some pretty solid Menno-centric group ties. Whether we consciously recognize it or not, when we ask them now, it’s because we’re deciding if we can stay. We want to know if you have answers that can make sense for us in both groups: the church and beyond it.

If this all sounds a bit too pessimistic, there’s at least a silver lining embedded in it. One of the best ways we can build the attachment we need lies right here in these questions that threaten us. I won’t lie; my generation needs answers that are resilient.

We need answers that make sense beyond our church’s doors. So yes, the church has some hard work to do. But luckily, that’s just step two. Step one is to just listen, affirm and connect over the questions we all share.