Dear Beloveds in Christ, This past week as I was scrolling through Facebook on my cellphone, checking all of the usual church-related accounts to see if there was anything timely to repost to Canterbury Club’s Facebook page, I came across a workshop offering titled, “Serving Millennials: Fostering Young Adult Engagement in the Church.” With my missioner interest piqued, I clicked on “See More” to read the entire description for the event. It started out rather predictably – date, time, basic description including a blanket statement about getting young adults engaged in the church – but when I reached the second paragraph, there was a line, that when read through a second time, caused me to experience substantial cognitive dissonance. Much like a pebble rolling around in your shoe, which is rather innocuous and judged not worth the effort to remove at the start of a walk, but by midway has become the sole thing on you mind. The line read, “This event is particularly geared to those in adult groups who are concerned with recruiting future members to carry on their longstanding ministries of worship, study, service and fellowship.” [i] At the outset, I think we can all agree that this is a legitimate concern of The Episcopal Church, an “aging church” as I’ve heard it referred to in multiple conversations. But as this sentence rolled around in my head I had to wonder, is this the prevailing mindset when thinking about inviting young adults, Millennials and older Gen-Zs, into our pews? How misguided is this approach? I feel that the stated aim above misses a larger and more joyful truth.
Accepting their gifts, what they bring to the Church and our ministries, can be, well … intimidating. And maybe not for the reasons you suspect I’m about to list. Yes, they tend to be more progressive. Yes, they tend to prefer a less formal approach to liturgy. And yes, they would love a good debate at coffee hour in an attempt to shake loose some of the dust of our doctrine. But that’s not the intimidating bit, not really. See, when young adults come into our churches and campus ministries, they come with questions: about God, about the world and society, about themselves and where they fit in. They are still growing into their authentic selves, on a rebound from the parental influence on faith and wider worldview. It’s also been my experience on college campuses that by the time these young adults reach college after exiting an increasingly rigorous school system where their value is measured by GPAs and test scores that many of them also deeply doubt their self-worth in conjunction with questioning faith. They come questioning their belovedness. If we’re questioning how to bring more young adults into our churches and encourage their engagement, then we must move away from the mindset of “recruitment.” This mindset is a numbers game and as I’ve learned (particularly through campus ministry) life-giving, loving ministry is not about numbers. It is about inviting young adults to come to the knowledge that they are God’s Beloveds, first and always. We, those already in the pews, are called to share with them our stories, our experiences, our doubts, and our joy in coming to the knowledge our own belovedness as children of God and followers of Jesus Christ. Inevitably, we must ask if we are comfortable with being emotionally available as we evangelize. Do we, on an individual level, believe that we have arrived unquestioningly at a “true belief,” doctrinally sound and overwhelmingly stagnant, or can we openly admit that we are all still striving to remove that in our lives which separates us from God and neighbor? Are we willing to admit that we, as Episcopalians, don’t have it all “sorted and squared away” in our churches and are willing to grow in faith alongside our young adults as we navigate the questions and answers which reveal the truth of those things which we have done and left undone? I would venture to say that some of us, maybe most of us, aren’t there yet. That is the reason it’s intimidating. There is joy in realizing that you don’t have to have all the answers (that’s God’s area). There is joy in rediscovering your belovedness as you enter into authentic conversations with young adults who are searching for some semblance of an answer to tough questions like, “What is sin?” or “What does it mean to say ‘God is with us in our suffering?,” coming to know again and again that even in our unknowing we are unquestioningly loved. There is joy in entering into these relationships that lead to us more ably meet them where they are, not where we’d like to recruit them to. When our focus shifts away from a recruitment mindset, when we come alongside our young adults in this way, we are better positioned to understand their needs and our own as the Church. It is this joy that is the gift our young adults bring to the Body, a gift that encourages us to grow past a comfortable Christianity as we examine and reaffirm our beliefs and what living out our Baptismal Covenant truly means. To further illuminate my point, in an article from the Association of American Colleges and Universities which reports on a 2019 study conducted by the Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice, it was found that “more than 60 percent of students [had] experienced food insecurity within the past thirty days or housing insecurity/homelessness within the past year.”[ii] Prior to reading that last sentence, did you know that this need exists? Surely, in following the path of Jesus set before us, we are first called to help feed these students and to worry about institutional maintenance later. We may not have answers as to why this suffering (or any other) exists in the world, but in coming to know their needs and rising to meet them to the best of our God given ability – when we as a church feed our young adults in body, which then also feeds them in spirit – is it possible that our concerns about an aging church (and the recruitment mindset rooted therein) could abate and our congregations be better off for it? I believe that if we can share with young adults how we are still striving to understand our belovedness both inside and outside the walls of our churches, then our congregations would begin serving as wellsprings of empowerment for our young adults thereby leading them into ministries that they are passionate about, ministries perhaps yet envisioned that meet the needs of all of the Body. So, are you wondering where to find these young adults and begin turning to this work? Just ask your campus missioner. Your Fellow Beloved, Shelley
For more information about Canterbury Club, you can find us on Facebook and Instagram at @canterburyaugusta. Also, check out our short video from The 199th Convention of the Episcopal Diocese of Georgia here.
(I’d like to acknowledge that not everyone chooses to attend college and that all life paths are valid and necessary for our growth in relationship with God, but for the purposes of what I write here I’m staying with reflections from my work directly engaging with college students.)
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