New Voices: By and about young adults

Four months ago, I wrote an article on young Mennonites that gave me the small thrill of what it might feel like to go viral—at least in the Mennonite world. It showed up on Facebook walls other than my partner Shanda’s. It showed up on friends’ parents’ Facebook walls. It even showed up on a childhood crush’s Facebook wall.

And just when I asked, May I call this ‘Mennonite viral’? (Shanda, for the record, answers no), it was linked by a respected blogger, a discussion group of some of my most intelligent former students and some self-proclaimed Mennonite heretics. I even got an email from a Lutheran minister and a great uncle I’ve always aspired to write like. He wanted to make sure we could chat at the next family gathering about what I’d written.

The message many seemed to take from the article was, Young adults are failing their hard-working church—which is definitely part of what I think. But the strange thing about writing a column is that few of the readers are your uncle. You won’t have a chance to sit down with them over dinner to listen and add your other—sometimes even contradictory—thoughts on the matter.

Many of my further thoughts are questions for the church, some of them rhetorical and some of them not. I ask them because I don’t think we ask them often enough. Or if we do, we don’t seem to have found a way to address them with concerted individual, congregational and conference efforts and strategies. Here are four of them:

1. How many of our resources are we investing in efforts that directly address our loss of young adults? Over the past decades, we’ve developed an approach that invests a lot of capital in our youth and in our institutional programs. For some reason, though, we’re seeing fewer and fewer youth make the leap from their youth groups to our institutions. Are we adapting to address that? Do we have conference staff with a significant part of their mandate dedicated to bridging that gap, or are young adults simply something we add to the side of our already busy youth staffs’ positions? Furthermore, when young adult groups spring up to work on this themselves, are we prepared to give them the resources they need to make a difference?

2. How radical are we wiling to be? It’s been well-documented that our society is going through a major shift in its attitudes toward many things, especially religion, and that Millennials (those born after 1980) have some major differences from Baby Boomers. When we picture our future, is it one where we protect the Baby Boomers’ vision or where we embrace the opportunities (and address the new challenges) facing Millennials? Are we making ourselves more agile in order to be ready for change, or are we digging in our heels?

3. Are we building a church that truly reflects the challenges and opportunities of the changing society around us? Our neighborhoods, schools and workplaces are increasingly diverse. For young adults, building community with people from different backgrounds and realities is no longer just optional; it’s essential. When we come to church, are we finding a community that includes and explores that landscape with us or one that just tries to minimize its jagged edges?

4. Are we investing in the expertise of our Mennonite elementary, middle and high schools? I recognize that this may seem to contradict #1, but Mennonite schools have always been on the front lines of our efforts to give our young people a foundation they’ll never want to leave. They’ve been honing these abilities for decades, and they’re constantly adjusting to the shifting needs and attitudes of new generations. When we choose where our children go to school or where our donation dollars go, are we valuing these institutions as much as we should?

As a high school Mennonite studies teacher, I try to focus my students on the question, Do you want to be the generation that loses this faith community or enhances it? When I leave the classroom, however, I’m sometimes disheartened by the task I’ve thrown at them. Are the rest of us even prepared for them to say yes? Are we asking the hard questions, studying models that could answer them and making a plan to move forward? Or are we quick to “like” an article about their need to take responsibility but still a bit slow to take our own?