Ministry and the Social Needs of Young Adults

There is an emerging discussion at pomomusings (not "emergent") regarding the church and young adults. I have raised a couple of questions that I thought I would reiterate here for a wider audience to see what others think.

It seems that we have to look at various sources of data to ask the question of how to meet the needs of young adults in the church. Reading the National Study of Youth and Religion at UNC on the one hand and the results from the Pew Study on the other are two current major studies that give us a similar snapshot of this population from different approaches. Taken both together along with the various studies on church attendance that do regress the cause and effect variances (see various articles by Chavez, Roozen, Hout & Greeley, Regnerus et. al., Hoge, Sherkat, etc.), it seems that "church" has a function of a social meeting place not unlike the intent behind Facebook, mom's groups, Meet-Ups, etc.

Here is what seems to be a reasonable hypothesis: Religion and religious affiliation is a component of the social function of relating to others. Now we can argue that it has always been that way going back to the first house churches and how this over the course a few centuries became the town center. The difference now is that the church is no longer at the town center as the vehicle for the people's cultural and social norm construction – much like those house churches from the origins of Christianity. The church is rather very much relativized in importance to any other social grouping. The problem is that it continues to maintain this veneer of centrality in our culture which is not there anymore. While the buildings maintain their image of centrality (and some still do to be sure) it is a sign without a referent to an reality to match it. This seems to lend some explanation to the ease with which people can switch their religious communal commitments. These commitments are on the same level as any other which we can switch on and off as convenience dictates.

I do not see this as a theological competition or theological issue. I see the function of the church competing with various other social interests that people not only crave, but need as integrative structures. People crave social integration and if we can toss a little theology and deeper “meaning” in the mix so be it. But putting theological concern before social desire is where things can miss tackling the problem.

In my experience with so many young adults with whom I have tackled various religious questions in a post 9/11 world, the notion of "moralistic therapeutic deism" does seem to bear out. Religious commitment is personal and private. People should not be told what to believe and people believe different things. It is a higher value not to be disruptive in those matters than to "fight for" an understanding of a particular religious truth. Now there are instances where the opposite is the case and in those cases this borderline relativism actually reinforces dogmatic clarity. But the data reveals this is not in the majority of cases.

The main problem among young adults seems to be how to integrate emerging social roles which have life changing effects that have a permanence to them. Marriage, children, buying a car, buying a house, etc. are all high-stakes problems that effect changes for life. Freshman in college who are moving into their sophomore year tend to have the first inkling that they are now making life-altering decisions when they are forced by their program of study to commit to a major. Vocational choices are first made at that point and that is where the life changing decisions start happening that seem bigger than life itself. Not only do they get bigger in terms of importance, they get more fragmented, conflicted, and they multiply.

Therefore, if the church is a place that asks you to make further levels of decision-making regarding God, salvation, and the like, does it overburden the system? Does the church thus add to the problem rather than help foster its integration? The question is how the church can meet what I am hypothesizing to be a need for social integration on varying levels of interaction between young adults as they face big life questions such as vocation, marriage and children (which translate into the three main causes for divorce by the way – money, sex, and kids – yes it's a link to Wikipedia, but it bears out beyond that source).

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