New Voices: By and about young adults

By now it seems self-evident that accountability isn’t really my generation’s forte.

You’ve heard it before: We want the church to change, but even if it did, we probably wouldn’t show up. We expect you to listen sensitively, but we expect to be independent.

Surely, it must sometimes feel like we’re a bunch of spoiled, entitled brats.

And maybe we are. But here’s the reality: Like it or not, we are your spoiled, entitled brats. You raised us, after all.

Consider three of the guiding principles that most of us were raised on. They’re far from the only principles you raised us on, but I think they hold some of the keys to understanding our differences. They are:

1. You can be anything you want to be, if you just put your mind to it.
2. Always be true to yourself, no matter what.
3. Never, ever forget the Golden Rule.

They’re great principles, for the record. They’ve served us well. They explain our creativity, our entrepreneurial spirit and our commitment to social justice. But they also explain why we can be so excruciatingly difficult when it comes to accountability and church.

Let’s start with the first principle: You can be anything you want. Out of the three, this one may indicate the biggest improvement from previous generations’ parenting. At the same time, it may also be the biggest lie. While on the one hand it represents the beautiful ways you gave us nearly unlimited opportunities, it’s also something we couldn’t live up to. Sure, we’re mostly fine with our teaching, nursing and carpentry jobs, but we could have been the next Gandhi—if only we’d put our minds to it. So we avoid criticism and with it accountability because we’re already terrified that we’re not living up to our potential.

While the you-can-do-it principle left us overly sensitive to accountability, the second—always be true to yourself—has sometimes left us wondering why we need your version of accountability at all. Again, we’ve reaped huge benefits from this principle. We tend to have strong moral compasses. We tend to pay attention to those compasses and feel the need to follow them diligently.

On the flip side, though, we’re also accustomed to doing what is right because it feels right, not because someone else says we should. We don’t do or commit to things because we’re supposed to. That feels insincere to us, and, if we’re being insincere, we’re certainly not being true to ourselves.

So, in that sense, we see accountability differently from previous generations. Your version of accountability—accountability to the community—strikes us as guilt-laden obligation, and obligations, to us, feel dishonest. In fact, I think we often feel like we’re lying to you simply by showing up for church when we’d rather be sleeping in.

The third principle, admittedly, is as old as morality itself. We’re far from the first generation to be raised on the Golden Rule. Still, in the context we’ve grown up in, it’s produced unique results. While I assume the Golden Rule used to be applied to your little brother, your actual neighbor and maybe a needy person you passed on the street, we tend to apply it to larger social justice issues.

We’ve grown up in a post-civil-rights society that measures someone’s integrity by his or her treatment of underprivileged populations. Since the church hasn’t always had the greatest track record with some of these issues, we’re already uneasy. On top of that, our be-true-to-yourself ethic makes it hard for us to feel good about any discrimination-related compromises. So, where the church uses a process of mutual accountability to move slowly and deliberately through tough issues, my generation feels guilty committing to an institution that sees those issues as debatable at all.

Despite how different we can be across this generation gap, these differences also stem from our connection to one another. There are values and ideas we both share. We’re just embodying some of those ideas in ways you may never have expected. As sensitive and self-conscious as we can be, we’ll probably need to know that you understand this before we can take our first (and, in my opinion, desperately needed) baby steps back toward community accountability.

Luckily, the principles that guided you as parents, even if they didn’t always produce exactly what you expected, have shown you to be more than gracious enough to offer understanding.