Before I get into Wuthnow’s conclusions in After the Baby Boomers, I’d like to offer a few thoughts on the challenges of forming young adults into diverse Christian community. That last part is crucial.

1. As I noted earlier, young adults (college, young professional, and young married) are among the most ignored demographic groups in the local church. Most churches tend to cater towards the “family”–in my estimation, this can be dangerous. Partly because it ignores the diversity to which the body is called, partly because the gospels don’t allow the family to be privileged over other folks. More people are single than are married in the U.S. If that does not serve as a warning, I don’t what will.

Having said the previous, I believe there’s a way to passionately pursue young adults while also equally passionately pursuing families. It’s not easy, but it’s possible.

2. Mobility. Young adults are, even by high U.S. “mobility” standards, incredible mobile. Mobile per relationships, jobs, housing, weekly schedule, responsibility, church loyalty (many young adults spend equal time at 2 or more congregations). When dealing with middle-class or upper middle-class young adults, the ability to travel makes one even more mobile. Who wants to commit to regular community (so boring!) which requires weekly accountability when one can get away for a reasonably cheap price?

3. Form and Function. When I worked for Rochester Church, I decided early on I would resist the attractional/come-and-see model. I don’t think it’s anti-gospel, heretical, or sinful, I simply did not think I personally had the personality or energy to pull off an event driven ministry. I had my critics as a result. I was convinced that I’d rather form young adults in more intentional ways, even (or especially) if that meant I would replicate myself in smaller ways. In ways, I hope, that last beyond the big events, or dramatic activity. There are a lot of things I wish I would have done better, but I feel good about what we tried to accomplish.

BTW–I am aware of some churches who are able to form young adults in ways that bridge the attractional/missional impulses–but it’s very difficult and very rare.

TJ McCloud (our young adult minister at Otter Creek Church) has some great ideas moving forward. The bottom line for churches trying to integrate young adult’s into the larger community (not doing church for young adults only–that’s a different project I know nothing about but am in awe of those doing it well like my friend Dave Clayton at Ethos Church)–it’s hard work. It means we’ll fail. Try. Fail some more. Learn from each other, keep going.

I’m doing some reading/research on young adults in the U.S. and the relationship of Christianity. Many point to Robert Wuthnow’s book, After the Baby Boomers, as the definitive work on the subject.

Having just moved from a job in which I worked closely with college students, doing a doctorate degree on the relationship of religion and culture (largely being shaped by 20-30 somethings), and serving as minister for a young church (Otter Creek Church might be the youngest congregation I know of in Churches of Christ)–I’m committed to thinking about the manner in which churches are reaching young adults.

I’ll write more in a later post regarding specific research. For now, I want to delineate between three groups who comprise the young adult demographic.

1. College students. Though a college degree is probably equal to a high school diploma 25 years ago, the reality is that most Americans still do not attend college. So, by college, I mean “college age” to encompass 18-23 year old’s who may or may not actually be in college.

2. Young professional (single, divorced, singe parent). College grad’s, hard-working men and women who are focused on making ends meet and making meaningful relationships. If the average U.S. citizen waits to marry until 27, this group is become a larger demographic unreached by churches.

3. Young married. 25-35, these young couples are married, working hard, trying to pay the bills (like group 2) while also navigating the tricky waters of marriage.

The challenge is to integrate these three into the larger life of the church, a challenging endeavor for all three groups (especially college students). I’ve long believed that young adults, save the elderly, are the most neglected age demographic in churches. They also tend to be the most difficult group to form spiritually (more on that later).

My greatest fear is that the generations ahead of young adults (Boomers, Silent, GI to use one linguistic model) is unwilling to create a church that speaks to young adults in a fresh and challenging way.

When an author writes, he/she often feels compelled to explain the “why” behind the substance. Here’s why I wrote The Feast. (NOTE: This was written before I changed jobs, moving from Rochester to Nashville).

For the last several years I’ve been teaching religion courses in Spirituality, New Testament, Gospel and Culture, and Christian Faith at Rochester College (Michigan) in the department of religion. I’ve also served as the teaching and young adult minister for a large local evangelical church. During this time, I’ve struggled to connect the power of the Jesus Story to people who, perhaps for the first time in American history, are learning what it might mean to be Christian in a post-Christian context. These students come from all segments of American Christianity: Catholic, Protestant (mainline and evangelical), and even some Anabaptists (though they might not use this word). And yet, together we’ve discovered that as real as the differences might be, the similarities are even greater.

As nationalism, apathy, idolatry, and indifference runs rampant, I’ve become passionate about the project of connecting the world of Scripture with today’s world. This book is written out of my struggle to live in the world of Scripture. The realms of this struggle include academia, preaching, teaching, and personal study, as well as my own journey as a person trying to figure out what it means to be a Christian, following the ancient teachings of Jesus in a modern and complex society. The Bible reminds me that the word for this is disciple.

I am convicted, as I listen to various thinkers (including my students), that Christians are in the midst of  re-imagining the  meaning of sacred words like gospel, salvation, church, justice, sin, worship, grace, evangelism, and faith. Christians do not play according the rules of the world, for we are people of the Way and we take seriously the opportunity to embody the teachings of Jesus in our particular time and place. We choose the other option, the path “less chosen.” The name the church has given to us for this other way is incarnation. We don’t wage war, oppress, acquiesce, flee, or compromise—filled with God’s Spirit, we are committed to enter into the world redemptively. One of my professors at Columbia Seminary, the legendary Hebrew Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann, once said in a class lecture, “The church always appears to be dying. When’s the last time the church wasn’t in crisis? That is the context into which we enter to do the work of God.” If he’s right, I hope The Feast will awaken heads, hands, and hearts to the imaginative vocation of being the church for the sake of our neighbors and our world.

I recently started preaching/teaching through the Gospel of Luke @ Otter Creek. This past Sunday I worked through the first four verses of Luke’s Jesus Story. Here’s a paraphrase of Luke’s introduction (really, it’s his disclosure for motivation).

Various men and women have used their creative abilities to capture the events just as those events had been transferred by people who were present at the time of Jesus’ remarkable life, telling that story to everyone who would listen. Because I’ve done my own homework, surgically combing my way through stories, testimony, examples, and evidence–I was compelled to join in the creative process of retelling the Jesus Story for my good friend (your love for God is refreshing). I’m telling stories of Jesus as a part of The Story so that you will continue to be drawn into a deeper trust of the events you’ve been immersed in.

Luke realizes that he stands, two generations after the death of Jesus, in a long line of witnesses who believe that, in Jesus, God had forever rocked the world. The world would never be the same. Death, sin, poverty, power, oppression–they would all be turned upside down.

Barbara Brown Taylor once wrote that Jesus forever changed the history of human civilization and yet, remained in a square area of that of the state of New Jersey. Why? How could that happen? “All because people talk,” writes Taylor.

Some people believe that stories are fragile, untrustworthy, weak. But to be Christian is to be enrolled in a story.

My friend John York has influenced me profoundly in this manner. In a sermon he preached a few years ago, he said: Some of you have heard me tell the story before that I originally heard from Fred Craddock. It’s the story of Scott Momaday, a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist and poet, also a Professor of Literature with a Ph.D. from Stanford, and a Kiowa Indian. When Momaday was a small boy, his father waked him early one morning and said, “I want you to get up, go with me.” His father took him by the hand and led him to the house of an old Indian squaw and left him; said “I’ll get you this afternoon.” All day long the old squaw of the Kiowa tribe told stories to the boy, sang songs to the boy, described rituals to the boy, told the history of the Kiowa to the boy. How they began out of a hollow log in the Yellowstone River, of the migration southward, telling the story of wars with other tribes, the great blizzards, the buffalo hunt, the coming of the White Man, the pressure and the war and the moving south, Kansas, privation, starvation, diminished tribe, finally Fort Sill, reservation, confinement. About dark, his father came and said, “Son, its time to go.” Momaday later looked back on that experience and said, “I left her house a Kiowa.” Craddock tells that story and then asks the question, “When children leave our church buildings do they leave Christian? Because to be Christian is to be enrolled in the story and anyone who can’t remember any farther back than his or her own birth is an orphan.” Anyone who can’t remember any farther back than his or her own birth is an orphan. When our children leave our church buildings do they leave Christian? Is this where they learn who they are?

These quotes grabbed my heart Wednesday night during our Vespers gathering (Thanks to Phil Wilson for sending these to me).

Your life and my life flow into each other as wave flows into wave, and unless there is peace and joy and freedom for you, there can be no real peace or joy or freedom for me. To see reality–not as we expect it to be but as it is–is to see that unless we live for each other and in and through each other, we do not really live very satisfactorily; that there can really be life only where there really is, in just this sense, love.

(Frederick Buechner)

The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn’t have been complete without you.

(Frederick Buechner)

Compassion is sometimes the fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else’s skin. It is the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too.

(Frederick Buechner)

In the entire history of the universe, let alone in your own history, there has never been another day just like today, and there will never be another just like it again. Today is the point to which all your yesterdays have been leading since the hour of your birth. It is the point from which all your tomorrows will proceed until the hour of your death. If you were aware of how precious today is, you could hardly live through it. Unless you are aware of how precious it is, you can hardly be said to be living at all.

(Frederick Buechner)

Over the next several weeks, I’ll post excerpts from the book I just wrote, The Feast.  In the meantime, here’s what Brian McLaren wrote about the book. You can purchase the book here.

Harvey Cox, in his new groundbreaking book The Future of Faith (Harper, 2009), talks about Christian history in three eras. First came the era of faith, a relatively short period of profound and powerful confidence in Jesus and his message. Soon, the era of faith gave way to the age of belief, where correct beliefs about Jesus took precedence over dynamic confidence in Jesus. We’re now coming to the end of that age of belief, Cox says: the age of the Spirit is dawning, and in many ways this new chapter in Christian history has more in common with the first era than the second.

According to Cox, in the era of faith, to be a Christian was to follow a way of life as one in this world but not of it. In the era of belief, to be a Christian was to adhere to a system of belief, codified in creed and confession, argued in proposition and polemic, enforced by inquisition and heresy trial. In the age of the Spirit, he says, we rediscover our faith as a way of life again. As central as the concept of orthodoxy was to the age of belief, spirituality is to the age of the Spirit. And that’s what makes Josh Graves’ new book so important and worthwhile.

As I read The Feast, I felt I was being given a window into the soul of Cox’s era of the Spirit. As the subtitle makes clear, Josh Graves knows that the soul’s hunger is not satisfied by right beliefs alone. People crave spirituality, and not just a wishy-washy, airy-fairy, this-and-that spirituality, either. They want a robust, lifelong, dynamic, profound, and deep-rooted (or radical) spirituality that is focused, not simply on “my needs” or “my feelings,” but on Jesus and his mission in our world. They seek what Graves calls “the Real Jesus,” and they want to be led by the Spirit of the real Jesus to engage with this world‘s messiest realities: injustice, racism, economic inequity, hate, fear.

That’s why I believe that young adults will be especially drawn to this book: it deals with the messy world in which they are coming of age. And of course, older folks who have grown tired and disillusioned with religion-as-usual will also find a feast in these pages. Drawing from top scholars like Walter Brueggemann and N. T. Wright one moment, from pop culture like the “Truman Show” the next, and from his own life experience in between, Josh Graves speaks as a native in the Age of the Spirit.

Brian McLaren, author/speaker/activist
Laurel, Maryland

This article captures the culture/ethos of Otter Creek. When people ask me how I could move from Michigan (where I had a great job, near family) . . . I tell them, Otter Creek Church is that special.

This article is one glimpse into this community of faith.