Four Central Themes for an Emerging Adult Ministry Program

Scot McKnight
Karl A. Olsson Professor in Religious Studies
North Park University
Chicago, Illinois

What the Church needs most when it comes to ministering to emerging adults is reliable data, and this collection of essays in the Changing SEA project contributes that sort of data. The studies, for instance, of Conrad Hackett, Casey Clevenger and Wendy Cadge, Penny Edgell, Jennifer Tanner, and Gerardo Marti provide solid footings for pastors who want to comprehend emerging adults. For too long “experts” in ministering to postmodern, emerging adults have made claims and offered ideas and proposed wholesale changes based on the slenderest of anecdotal evidence and the flimsiest of personal theories and the largest of theoretical frameworks. I run on evangelical paths and we have been bombarded in the last decade or so with unreliable data.

It was only with the publication of Gabe Lyons and Dave Kinnamon, unChristian, that actual data was put on the table – and not all accepted the reliability of their reports. At about the same time Dan Kimball, an amiable and charismatic pastor, published They Like Jesus but not the Church. His book was rooted in coffee shop conversations with postmoderns but should probably not be considered reliable information because his “evidence” was not tested with statistics. His pastoral sensitivity and careful listening, however, showed he was on the same wavelength as the Lyons-Kinnamon project. But both of these projects aimed to show that unless the Church wakes up it may well lose the postmodern generation. I tended to believe them because I am not trained in the social sciences and neither do I have access – or know how to have access – to national scientific surveys.

Four recent studies, however, have given all of us firmer footings when it comes to knowing what is “really” going on. It began with Robert Wuthnow’s After the Baby Boomers, which study convinced me that churches need to awaken to the reality of a new demographic: twenty-somethings or emerging adults. Jeffrey Arnett’s Emerging Adulthood, while it does very little analysis of the faith of emerging adults and what it does is not rooted in broad studies, convinced me even more that emerging adulthood is not only a new demographic but churches must cease setting their youth free at 18 and begin to develop pastors of emerging adulthood. Then I read the anecdotally-charged but scientifically-rooted book of Jean Twenge, Generation Me, and her follow-up with Keith Campbell, The Narcissism Epidemic. Anything that says young adults are narcissistic is likely to appeal to Boomers and older groups, but at least her studies show that there are reliable trends that pastoral ministry will need to consider seriously. Finally, Christian Smith’s Souls in Transition cut to the chase and undercut the unreliable reports and basically contended that, with a hat tip to Mark Twain, the reports of the death of Christianity at the hand of emerging adults is exaggerated. In fact, Smith convinces me that the Church is holding its own. But that does not mean the landscape is not shifting, for it surely is.

The studies in the Changing SEA project take these four studies to a new level because, while broader than religious faith and therefore deepening these images, these studies convince me that educators, seminary professors, pastors and parents now have available to them most of what they need to assess the landscape and map strategies to minister to young adults. If I could fashion an emerging adult church ministry program, these would be four central themes:

1. Develop the Imagination of Life’s Possibilities,
2. Guide those Possibilities by the Kingdom Vision of Jesus,
3. Focus on a Deeper Moral Vision, and
4. Foster Community in the Shape of a Local Church.

Possibility Overload and Hope

Whatever we think of emerging adults and the sometimes zaniness of their instability, an instability that is prolonged more than many parents prefer, one thing characterizes many of them: life is full of possibilities. One of my college students told me she sometimes suffers from “possibility overload.” This was her expression for “too many great things to do and too little time for one person to do them all.” She graduated from college, having spent one summer in Africa and one semester in France, found a German boyfriend, and then spent most of her first year after college serving in a social service youth work in Germany. She’s back in the States now but she’s still full of possibility overload.

Emerging adults see the world before them, the tasks they are challenged to undertake and the world’s tragedies and they want to do something. In the ChangingSEA studies, one finds this element of possibilities in Casey Clevenger and Wendy Cadge’s study on volunteering and community service, while they also note that civic and religious leaders need to take a more active role in recruiting emerging adults into specific service opportunities. And James Youniss and Hugh McIntosh put this trend into historical and social perspective. Emerging adults want to do something about the world, as illustrated in Robert Wuthnow’s newest book, Be Very Afraid. Emerging adults, if I may generalize without becoming insensitive to those who are mired in poverty or locked into a less than desired life, are a Can-Do-It generation. Whether we’d like to brush over their hues some realistic, if not darker, colors or not, and Joan Gray Anderson and Barbara M. Newman’s rather blunt sketch of realities make this obvious, facts are the facts: possibilities mark emerging adults. So, pastoral ministry can focus on what life can bring – and this focus can be tied closely to the Christian theology of hope, one species of which is the kingdom vision of Jesus.

The Kingdom Vision of Jesus

I’m not as convinced as many emerging adults, sparked as much by Bono as anything else, that we can end poverty and provide healthy food for everyone and end droughts or at least provide sustainable jobs that can provide bunkers during droughts, so it is important to guide the sometimes reckless imagination of emerging adults to a north star that can give them something to aim for.

My own suggestion, which emerges from 15 years of teaching college students, is to fashion Christian ministry around the kingdom vision of Jesus. My own favorite tack on this is to develop the themes in key texts in the Gospel of Luke. I begin with Mary’s Magnificat in Luke first chapter, where we find a powerful vision of justice and restoration; next I move to the end of the chapter to another poem sung in churches at Christmas, the Benedictus of Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist. While he does not advance much beyond what we find in Mary’s Magnificat, he does make it clear that he wants the Roman oppressors to be sent home to Italy. Two chapters later, in Luke’s third chapter, Zechariah’s son, John the Baptist, makes his public appearance by calling for “repentance.” This term has a bad taste for many since it can suggest Puritan groveling in one’s own utter pitiful sinfulness, but John’s notion of repentance is economic and social – he gets so concrete he makes Westerners feel uncomfortable. His idea of the kingdom of God, like Mary’s and Zechariah’s, is that society needs to be marked by economic justice. This leads us to three texts about Jesus: Luke 4’s inaugural sermon by Jesus, the Beatitudes of Jesus in Luke 6 and Jesus’ own response to John (who was in prison) one chapter later. These three texts add up to a vision of the kingdom of God that strengthens what we find already with Mary and Zechariah and John: the kingdom of God is God’s social vision for life on earth; it is not some ethereal heavenly existence; and it is profoundly justice-shaped.

And the moment one mentions “justice” one thinks of racism and classism and sexism in our culture. We could perhaps combine the ethnic studies of Gerardo Marti with the significance of friendship for emerging adults, studied carefully by Carolyn McNamara Barry and Stephanie D. Madsen, to re-suggest an old theory: forging friendship across ethnic lines is one sure path toward both communication and a society marked more by justice and equality. Marti, in fact, puts his hope in print: “The hope is that educated Americans of all backgrounds will participate in restructuring systems to create a less prejudicial, more equitable, and unavoidably more diverse future.” What pastors might think of is embodying that peaceable kingdom now – in a local way.

I find emerging adults taken with this kingdom vision of Jesus, and yes there are other elements of the kingdom teaching of Jesus that deserve to be on the table, but this sketch is enough for now. I’d want to encourage the imagination of emerging adults, but I’d want at the same time to guide it by the lights of Jesus’ kingdom vision. Possibility overload gains direction in the vision of Jesus.

A Deeper Moral Vision

Of course, sex emerges in any emerging adult discussion of morals, and the facts need to be recognized – and those facts are not just about sexual intercourse, but impinge upon the stability of marriage. The studies of Mark Regnerus, Maria E. Eisenberg (with Christiana von Hippel) as well as the research of John P. Bartkowski and Xiaohe Xu and that of Annette Mahoney have provided helpful sketches of profoundly realistic dimensions of moral issues at work for emerging adults. But reduction of morals to sexual ethics treats emerging adults as teenagers. And telling them “not to” isn’t morally profound. To stick with Jesus, I’d want to foster a deeper moral vision that is shaped by love and empowered by a radical commitment.

Morals, as I said, are more than about sex. My students are looking for jobs, and most of them are not thinking of church work. What they want is a morality that guides them in a business career, that shapes their vision for a vocation (even if they switch jobs half a dozen times in their 20s), that will anchor them in their search for mate and sexual behaviors, and that will sustain them for a lifetime. What Jesus says about love provides that moral guidance.

Love is always the focus, but love for our culture has been shaped more by courtly love or romantic love – the theory of being in love with the feeling of being in love – than it has by the conditions that make a life work in relationship with another person for the long haul. Denis de Rougemont, in his Love in the Western World, has catalogued this history well, so we can press on to a definition of love that emerges from the Hebrew Bible and finds expression in Jesus, who himself reduced the Law to loving God and loving others (Mark 12:28-32). God’s covenant with Israel establishes how Israel understood love, and that covenant love (often expressed in the Hebrew term chesed) found its way into a formula: “I will be your God and you will be my people.” Covenant love, then, involved two commitments: God will be “with” his people and God will be “for” his people. Thus, covenant love is to be construed as a resolute, even formal, commitment to be “with” a person as someone who is “for” that person. To be sure, some of this being “with” as a “for” now takes place through various media, as sketched by Jill Dierberg and Lynn Schofield Clark, and this will mean as these authors suggest that pastoral ministry needs to adapt to these new media. Connections like these need to be seen as how emerging adults forge friendships and develop in their ability to love their neighbor.

Love was central to Jesus’ vision and the apostle Paul raised love to the highest of ethical virtues (1 Corinthians 13). I would want to foster a moral vision that is shaped by a radical commitment to love of neighbor and enemy – as a morally sustainable vision for life. Christians have struggled with understanding love, knowing far too often more about what it is not than what it is. One of the finest places to begin with understanding the Christian moral vision of love is Aristotle’s famous book eight in Nicomachean Ethics, glossed as that vision can be with things like Cicero’s letters. Friendship opens up all kinds of insights into both a moral vision and a community life, and this is why Carolyn McNamara Barry and Stephanie D. Madsen’s sketch of the significance of friendship for emerging adults is so valuable for pastoral ministry.

Foster a Local Expression of that Vision

Finally, a pastoral vision requires this vision to become concrete and local. Emerging adults are independent and free and they foster small groups and friendships where they find much of their identity forming. Furthermore, as can be seen in a book like Josh James Riebock’s My Generation: A Real Journey of Change and Hope, where the wounds and pains of emerging adults are explored, local expressions frequently make emerging adults acutely aware of the struggles of other emerging adults. Jennifer Tanner’s research puts these problems into focus and perspective.

This acute awareness of the needs of others doesn’t prevent another observation: it is not unusual for an emerging adult to announce that she is going off to Africa – on her own – to save the world. Someone else in that same circle of friends may head off to save seals while another one into the inner city to work with impoverished and undereducated youth. While I applaud the vision and the courage, I find something lacking: local manifestation and rootedness and what Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove calls the The Wisdom of Stability.

Imagination, possibilities, and vision is each present, but the focus of a church ministry is on a church. I can hear the 20-something raise some cynical questions and even deconstruct the whole approach, but it is not without significance that Jesus’ followers formed small groups and lived in community or that the earliest followers in the decades that followed his life formed themselves into little groups called ecclesia – “church.” The term’s connections were not missed: it referred to political groups in Greek cities. Their vision was for local community rootedness and expression.

The fundamental vision of Jesus and the apostles contrasts, I’m suggesting, with what passes for commitment and vision among emerging adults. It seems wildly visionary and profoundly problem-solving for a young adult to go to Asia or to Africa or to South America but it is hardly an experience to go next door and do the very same deed of compassion and justice. The vision of the Christian church is that the vision of Jesus needs to find shape in a local community of local people who care about the local community in local ways. This is not about how best to “build a church” so much as how best to contribute in love to our world. Doing it locally is less sexy; but local servants are far more influential than foreign rich kids who are often enough motivated to help for a while but not stick around long enough to make change sustainable.

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