Why We Are Losing Ground with Young Adults
By Marty J. Cauley
I have the amazing privilege of working with spiritually sensitive and passionate young adults from across the southeast. I am also charged with understanding why the church is losing ground with young adults. After hundreds of conversations with young adults, I have identified some common strands running through their decisions to leave the church, or at least our version of the church.
One reason is the perception that worship is passionless. This is not because young adults do not care for traditional worship or liturgy. There is actually resurgence in older forms of liturgy among young adults, but the churches they flock to for this type of experience do it very well and are clear about why they do it. Young adults just will not tolerate watered down, unexplained ritual or poor quality, half-hearted worship. This generation desires to experience God in wholly different ways than did their parents – with their hearts as well as their heads.
Young adults desire clarity in a world filled with uncertainty. The lack of a clear, unified vision for our churches is a stumbling block. We must find a way to clarify our vision and renew our commitment to making disciples and changing our world. The abandonment of our heritage’s commitment to balancing social justice with evangelism leaves us without the needed bifocal emphasis that would be most appealing to young adults.
Since their birth, this generation has been told they can change the world, and they intend to do it. But many are disgusted by what they see as the incongruity of spoken values and lived values in the church and the culture. To see a Greenpeace bumper sticker on a Suburban really bothers this generation of revolutionaries. They are also perturbed by constant political in-fighting within the denomination. The church’s tendency to make mountains out of molehills seems ridiculous to this highly practical and pragmatic generation.
Another thing that drives young adults from our doors is criticism of things of little consequence. Churches that balk at having a young person with blue hair or a pierced nose as part of their congregation are essentially assuring their absence. This generation is striving desperately to identify who they are and where they fit into community. If that accepting, loving community is not found in the local church, they will find it elsewhere. Does it really matter how many piercings or tattoos they have?
Finally, the church’s token attempts to reach young adults are actually alienating rather than attracting them. They see it as hypocritical when the church states how important their presence is but develops program for them but not with them such as “90’s style” praise services. This is a generation of “doers” and not “watchers.” They do not want to send money to missions as much as they want to be part of a missionary endeavor. They desire to put their hands where their hearts are. They also perceive the incongruity in rhetoric about wanting young adults in our churches at the same time that funding is cut for ministries with college students.
There is, however, hope. Young adult Christians can flourish in places where the focus on spiritual formation is sharp; where they can worship with complete abandon in services filled with symbolism and depth; where this generation of Myspace® users can tell their own stories of how God intersects their lives and be listened to; where they are welcomed into positions of influence and responsibility and empowered to live and lead boldly into the future; where the vision is clear; and where local mission and a global vision seek to change the world.
There are several important steps the church can take to reestablish connection with the next generation of leaders:
- Validate youth and young adult ministry as a primary calling. Those on the front lines of young adult ministry – youth workers, campus ministers, camping directors – have been made to feel that their ministry is not as important as that of other ministries. They often feel little connection and support from those who stand to benefit or suffer greatly from the fruitfulness of their endeavors in the years to come.
- Bridge the gap between church youth groups and college ministry. Pastors need to make contact with campus ministers at colleges where they are sending their youth. And these interactions must be substantive – not just completing a form. Then, the campus minister needs to take pastoral responsibility for these new members of their “flock.” The lines of communication between local churches and their college students must reinforce the importance of spiritual connectivity.
- Reinvest in ministries with college students. This may mean capital improvements to outdated facilities that have deferred maintenance due to fund shortfalls. Salaries for campus ministry must be comparable enough to be attractive to the best and brightest.
- Plant emerging churches to reach young adults. New churches are more successful than established churches in reaching young adults. These churches may require greater investment than some church plants, but the returns can be tremendous in lives changed.
The Rev. Marty Cauley (mcauley@sejumc.org) is director of Ministries with Young People for the Southeastern Jurisdiction of the United Methodist Church.
Becoming a Praying Congregation
Becoming a Praying Congregation
Alban author and seminar leader Jane Vennard talks about her upcoming Alban seminar “Becoming a Praying Congregation: The Art of Teaching Spiritual Practice.” July 15–17, 2008 at the Inn on Broadway, Rochester, New York. (length: 8 minutes)
Ministry Together: Governing Boards & Clergy
June 17, 2008 – June 19, 2008
Techny Towers Conference and Retreat Center , Techny, Illinois
Facilitator: Dan Hotchkiss
Click here to view a movie clip of Dan Hotchkiss talking about his upcoming event.
Have you had it with board meetings?
While most board members of congregations hope to contribute to their community’s long-term success, the reality of board service is that too often it frustrates and exhausts both board members and the staff who work with them.
This seminar is designed to help congregations to move beyond frustrating and ineffective ways of managing the work of boards, clergy, and staff. It draws on provocative proposals such as those made by John Carver, governance guru of the nonprofit world and author of Boards that Make a Difference, who challenges boards to quit most of their current work and start ‘making a difference’ by articulating the organization’s basic rationale for being and setting limits for its staff and volunteers. A Carver board spends most of its time thinking not about what the organization is doing but about why it should exist at all.
Dan has a very inviting and relaxed demeanor. He is knowledgeable and a good presenter.”
Dan Hotchkiss’ approach is based on the conviction that the art of governance in congregations is about creating a balance between ministers, staff, and the governing board or vestry. It is about the partnership tools needed for ministry together. A healthy governing body in a congregation:
• Starts with clearly defined roles and authority
• Succeeds when lay and professional leaders lead do ministry together, collaboratively, as partners.
You will learn specific practices and principles that will help your governing board streamline its decision-making, maintain clear limits, and keep the congregation’s mission at the center of its ministry. By discovering how to set clear policies and behavioral covenants, you will find that you can trust others to make their own decisions, give up micromanaging, and make space for holy conversations.
About Dan Hotchkiss
When congregations seek guidance for discernment and dialogue around issues of planning, visioning, and governance, Dan Hotchkiss is a valued partner for his creative approaches and sensitive understanding of the human and institutional dynamics within congregations. His next book is tentatively titled (of course) Ministry Together: The Art of Governance in Congregations.
more thoughts on Web 2.0
With all the talk about Web 2.0 these days, web technology users in all walks of life are learning many of the same lesson. One of the most important of these is how important it is to let an organization’s mission drive its use of this technology rather than vice versa.
Corporate users simply are usually a bit out ahead of non-profits in their experience with the Web — they are both earlier-adopters of technology, but also ahead of nonprofits in what they are learning about being effective adopters, as well.
Anne van Dusen, my colleague at Congregational Resource Guide, just sent me a post from searchcio-midmarket.techtarget.com — a blog for Chief Information Officers in business settings. Although it’s actually two years old, she sent it as a graphic reminder that nonprofits still need to learn in 2008 what corporate Web users were realizing already in 2006, that “the real … value” in Web 2.0 “lies in what the technology enables: better collaboration among users.”
It’s one thing to add Web 2.0 interactivity to an organization’s Web-presence. It’s another to “know how to … encourage the social interaction that is integral to the concept” of Web 2.0, by both attracting users and encouraging them to contribute content, and thus “to build intellectual capital.”
Here at Alban, for example, we’re currently experimenting with Ning, an inexpensive online site that allows virtually anyone to build a simple FaceBook-type social network that is either open to anyone or protected by login-procedures that allow users to decide who can and cannot take part in ongoing collaboration and conversation on a subject. For more about the possibilities, check out the comment on the NingBlog.
What we must not forget is that the point in going to the effort to learn how to use something like Ning is that our mission as a learning organization pushes us towards finding ever more effective ways not just to deliver information but also to encourage interaction among the very people who depend on Alban’s online presence to put them in touch with the best available resources for sustaining congregational vitality and leadership-excellence.
We hope you will join the conversation about the very best in online learning for the leaders of today’s and tomorrow’s congregations.
Technologies for Learning
Alban Weekly feature article, May 19, 2008
Wayne Whitson Floyd, Education Department Manager
At Alban we take seriously our educational mission to provide an independent center of learning that creates spaces where people from different denominations and faith traditions can work toward their goals and learn from one another in an atmosphere of respect and collegiality. Whatever the style of an Alban Learning event – keynote address, seminar, online webinar – in every case our intent is to examine the questions, challenges, and opportunities that face real congregations in today’s world, focusing on the needs of their leaders, both clergy and laity. The growing number of possibilities for using Web-based technologies for learning makes it even more crucial that we know our educational mission first, and then ask whether and how specific technologies may help us accomplish that mission most effectively.
We are discovering that there are Web-based learning technologies that can contribute significantly to the quality of your continuing education and that can allow you to do more of it at your own pace and schedule. These technological tools are commended to you here not for their whiz-bang ingenuity—although there is plenty of that—but for their ability to help us fulfill our goal of transforming congregational leaders so that you can accomplish your own missional objectives most effectively.
How adults learn
One of the least discussed topics in adult religious and theological education seems to be the distinctive
qualities of adult learners. How adults learn simply is different from the way we learn at earlier ages; yet so much about our approach to adult-education has been drawn from the models of ‘education’ that we learned as children and youth.
Among the adult educators who have taught me the importance of attending to ‘how adults learn’ is Marcia Conner, who has held such nifty titles as “information futurist” for PeopleSoft (since merged with Oracle), senior manager of worldwide training at Microsoft, and blogger writing the “Learn At All Levels” for FastCompany.
Her website AgelessLearner has a number of helpful links about adult learners, including her brief, interactive Learning Style Assessment as well as a detailed article that is the title of this post, “How Adults Learn,” and an interesting reflection, “Introduction to an eLearning Culture.”
I’m interested in knowing what resources you have found most helpful for understanding how adults learn in distinctive ways, with unique challenges.