Discovering What Young Adults Want
I hear (and participate in) many discussions about what young adults want from the church, usually in the context of asking why the youth and young adults don’t attend church services or the events we put on for them. I’ve arrived at an age where waitresses at restaurants ask me if I want my senior citizen discount (I recently turned 55!), and I sometimes even get one. The interesting thing is how few of the discussions of what young adults like ever include any young adults. I may feel young, but I’m not in touch with the twenty-something or even thirty-something crowd.
I recall being in a church committee meeting where we discussed what we should do with the church services to get more young people to attend. After more than half an hour of ideas, I felt constrained to point out that there was nobody in the room under 40, and maybe only one or two under 50. The rest of us were in our 50s. Isn’t there are problem with this sort of discussion?
But when I read Dan Dick’s Beyond Label or Cateogry, I felt much more sympathy (or perhaps empathy) with the girl in the story than with my friends of a similar age. My first reaction was that listing the contents of her purse seemed like a violation of privacy. (I note that some time after I read the post, but before I wrote this, another commenter noted the same thing.) But then I thought that this was an effort to discover her identity, and nothing personal was revealed.
I too have struggled with labels. I can’t just join a group, in many cases, because I’ll be on their side on one issue, but not on another. People in groups tend to expect you to be on their side, at least most of the time. But despite my own difficulties with labeling, I can get lost in trying to follow the various commitments of those younger than I am.
So please read Dan’s article and give some consideration to flexibility. Is our complaint that young adults don’t like faith? Or is it, rather, that they don’t like all of our extraneous commitments and our expectation for conformity?
