While the pastor and his wife played host, the congregation’s new minister for young adults began working the crowd, forming relationships, introducing people, and testing out her belief that young adults ministry must shatter all existing paradigms.
“It’s all jazz,” the pastor said afterward. By that he meant, not a musical style, but a free-flowing, flexible interplay of persons. It isn’t about Sunday morning, traditions of worship, or church dogma.
Something new is happening, he said. He can’t name it yet and doesn’t want to control it. He just knows this new generation won’t interact with church in any familiar way. Even as they age and form families, he thinks their participation in faith community will be unique.
They’re comfortable with virtual community, for one thing. Being in the one space on Sunday isn’t necessary. They don’t feel bound by inherited tradition: beliefs, customs, expectations. Their needs certainly are familiar — basic human needs like friendship, belonging, meaning, purpose. But they bring new skills, tools, and patterns for pursuing personal needs.
We’ve seen this before, of course. The post-war generation who flooded into mainline congregations in the 1950s with their dreams and young families weren’t like the Depression survivors who welcomed them. They required classrooms for their children and social activities for settling into new homes.
On the one hand, congregations were happy to welcome these veterans and their energetic families. On the other, I think we now realize that congregations didn’t truly adapt their ways to this new post-war generation, but rather expected the new to adapt to them. When “boomer” families began drifting away in the 1960s, the settled did little but watch them leave.
The pastor who entertained forty young adults said this time the church must adapt. “They are our future,” he said.
Tom Ehrich is a writer, church consultant and Episcopal priest based in New York. He is the author of “Just Wondering, Jesus,” and the founder of the Church Wellness Project.
