Last Sunday morning, we studied the Lord’s Prayer, and we never made it past the first word. Those simple three letters, O-u-r, in the prayer that Jesus taught us invoked a half-an-hour discussion on community and our spiritual lives. Because the nature of community is shifting radically in our culture, we had a great deal to talk about. A man in his forties seemed puzzled when he said, “I work with people who are under thirty, and they think of cyberspace as a real place. They think of chat rooms as actual rooms and people who meet on the Internet as friends.”
“Yes,” I smiled. “I’ve married couples who had a long Internet relationships before they ever met face-to-face.”
The nature of community is evolving, with a vast crop of social networking sites and blogs springing up every moment. It’s not too surprising, considering the larger context in which young adults live. People in their twenties and thirties, change jobs every 2.7 years. Often, they have to move to urban settings, away from their hometowns and families of origin. In the midst of this displacement, they long for community and social action. The Internet allows them to keep in touch and reach out in amazing ways.
I know these things because I’m a 35-year-old pastor who’s been serving Presbyterian churches for almost ten years. In that time, I had an aching sense that something was off kilter in our denomination. I couldn’t find many adults in their twenties and thirties within our churches and it bothered me greatly. It was like a picture over my sofa that kept tilting, and I wanted to know why.
When I read books about ministering to a new generation, much of the material seemed to say that we needed to throw out the baby, the bathwater, and the tub itself. The church was irrelevant, inauthentic, and everything had to change to make a way for the always illusive and utterly indefinable Post-modern era.
I scratched my head at that news; it was not what I was feeling. I grew up in the evangelical megachurch movement where bigger was always better. Yet I came out of it, longing for spiritual tradition and meaningful community. While I read that my generation wanted keyboards and drum machines, I yearned for medieval monastic chants. I kept a prayer book next to my MacBook, just so the words of Christina Rossetti and Augustine were never too far away. I longed for deep meaning, sought divine direction, and practiced spiritual disciplines.
I assumed that I was a cultural misfit. But then I remembered the congregations I served in Rhode Island and Louisiana. In both places, the churches slowly and steadily grew with an intergenerational mix of members, seeming to want the same things. I noticed the young adults who poured into the pews every Sunday morning at Western Church in Washington, D.C. When I stepped back, my eyes focused on a balanced picture, people of every age and circumstance gathered to worship God.
At Western, a new generation comes from every sort of spiritual situation, and many come without any religious background at all. Yet, they attend the church for the same reason I work there — they are drawn together by clear social justice outreach that connects us with our neighbors, intergenerational community that connects us with each other, and spiritual traditions that connect us with God.
I wasn’t alone, after all. Something important was happening.
I also wasn’t the only one noticing the shift. At the same time, Diana Butler Bass was busy chronicling amazing stories of transformation in her book, Christianity for the Rest of Us. And in The Practicing Congregation, Bass carefully tracks the worship preferences of my generation from entertainment-centered, programmed megachurches to “small to medium-size congregations with more liturgical forms of worship.”
That means the Presbyterian Church. For the first time in decades, many young adults are looking to attend churches just like ours. This is a vital moment for our congregations.
Of course, it would be tempting for congregations to throw up their hands right now, in the confusion of postmodernity. We could simply decide that we don’t have enough technological savvy to reach out to this generation, and give up. But let’s not lose heart, because young adults are not impossible to understand.
It may be difficult to imagine that a blogger would become a host of a nightly party, with online friends from across the world, but the underlying concept is simple. Young adults crave connection. They are attending small traditional churches for many of the same reasons, because they want to be a part of those things that our churches have done well for two thousand years: spiritual traditions, social justice outreach, and vital community.
I joined the Presbyterian Church when I was twenty-two, and I know from experience that entering the church from the outside is not easy. Even though all congregations want to welcome a new generation in their midst, in subtle ways, in ways they do not even know, they do not always allow space for them. That’s why I wrote Tribal Church: Ministering to the Missing Generation.
I use the metaphor “tribe” to describe the community that forms when people commit to walk together on their spiritual journeys, caring for one another. Within the book, I explore the context in which young adults live, especially the sense of isolation that results from generational divisions and economic instability. I look at specific ways in which people in their twenties and thirties can feel estranged from our congregations, focusing on the unfortunate consequences of our church’s exclusive beliefs, customs that cut off a new generation, and a hesitance to share power. And I draw attention to that rich place where the longing of young adults and the gifts of the church converge: the cultivation of spiritual guidance and the development of caring communities.
In this moment, there is great hope for our congregations. Even the smallest churches — especially the smallest churches — have the resources to respond to young adults in meaningful ways when they understand their contexts and make a place for them.
Carol Howard Merritt is a pastor at Western Church in Washington, D.C. She is the author of Tribal Church: Ministering to the Missing Generation.
