A few weeks ago, the leadership team for the Young Adult and Graduate Student Ministry at Shadyside Presbyterian Church met to discuss what talks we wanted to give in the Fall 2013 semester. Our leadership team is a pretty typical representation of the Millennial Generation, even though most millenials hate being called typical. Millenials, or Generation Y, is the sociological term for men and women born between approximately 1982 and the early 2000s.
What are millenials? Let me describe our leadership team. We're a group of men and women ranging in age from 23-35ish. We all have undergraduate degrees in something that didn't lead to full-time employment. We're making it work with a combination of part-time jobs, graduate school courses, parents if we're lucky, and massive debt if we're not. Most of us are single. If we're married we're too broke to even think about having kids. Most of us have moved in the last year. Everyone's moved in the last three years.
Despite our issues, we're an incredibly educated and articulate bunch. Ours is the generation that spent middle school teaching ourselves how to use the internet while our parents rallied around the TV waiting for another bomb to drop. Speaking of our parents, we think they're pretty rad. We knew from infancy that we mattered, because our parents spent our entire childhoods catering to our every need. When our softball team came in sixth place in a tournament, they displayed our "thank you for participating" ribbons on the mantle with pride.
Every moment of our childhood and adolescence was supposed to lead us to the new American Dream: a college education.We learned to internalize the lie that character no longer matters, so long as you earn a degree from a "good" school. Parents, teachers, and coaches looked the other way as AP students, and later undergraduates, exhausted from three extra-curricular activities, a part-time job, and a happening social life, slept through class, so long as they maintained their 4.5 QPA.
These cultural forces lead us back to our YA/Grad leadership team discussion of the other night. What do we believe young adults need the church to remind them of? This lead to a fascinating discussion of how to deal with the disappointment of being a 20-something in the church today.
Why are the 20s becoming such a time of disappointment in the lives of young adults? For many of us, we're experiencing the "real world" for the first time. Our employers don't care that we were president of our university's campus ministry; as the newest hire, we're going to be the ones photocopying fliers, and doing community outreach on Saturdays. We're working harder in our early 20s than we ever did in college, and we no longer have grades to quarterly reinforce the grunt work.
We're also disappointed relationally. It's harder to make friends when you're not living withing walking distance of thousands of people like you. It's also difficult to invest in romantic relationships when you don't know where you, or your partner, will be living next year. Maintaining good relationships is an important part of identity formation, and the lack thereof is a gaping hole in the lives of most young adults.
So how do we, as a church, support people in this new and strange state of life? Here are the three things we came up with:
1. Admit that young adulthood is a challenging state of life.
2. Work to build community as a group, and integrate that group into the life of the church.
3. Remind young adults that Jesus, and the church, loves them, even if they've screwed up.
If you're a millenial reading this, I'd be curious to hear if any of this resonates with you. What issues of our generation do you find the most compelling, or frustrating? What would you like the church to remind you of?
-R
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