No More Business as Usual: Changing Realities for Young Adult Ministry

Paul Jarzembowski
Executive Director,
National Catholic Young Adult Ministry Association

Young adult ministry is a difficult outreach effort for any church, but it is one we dare not avoid. Unfortunately, too few congregations spend time or money on this essential mission of reaching men and women in their twenties and thirties.

Reading through the essays of the Changing SEA Project has provided this young adult minister with a welcome oasis amid a sea of tasks and to do lists. It has allowed me to think beyond the everyday and see the bigger picture -- to focus not just on the urgent tasks, as Steven Covey describes in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People[1], but also on the important tasks – the ones I might neglect but which are essential to my effectiveness in ministry.

When urgent tasks accumulate and busyness overwhelms, I fall into two bad habits: working out of anecdotal experience and relying on long-held assumptions with outdated evidence. These are weak foundations upon which I, and perhaps many other young adult ministers, attempt to build a ministry outreach.

The straightforward essays of the Changing SEA Project, however, have led me to reevaluate and change the way I do “business as usual.” What follows is a brief look at three major implications I have gleaned from this project.

The first implication arises from several of the essays and is often talked about today: the economic landscape of young adults. Several project contributors, Joan Gray Anderson and Barbara M. Newman in particular, point to the struggle emerging adults have with inflation, college loans, living arrangements, low pay, lack of benefits, and an unstable job market. It seems that many decisions of young adulthood (with regard to relationships, education and career choices, housing, time management, media use, sexuality, civic engagement, and spiritual growth) are increasingly dictated by money and its absence. Particularly troubling is Anderson and Newman’s report of the rising proportions of young adults who are unemployed and under the poverty line. Those ministering to young adults, like those who worked on the 1992 presidential campaign, must repeat daily: “It’s the economy, stupid!”

This has changed what I do on a daily basis. Knowing how much the economy has affected young adults, my focus has shifted from activity-driven programs to pastoral care and social justice. Emerging adults are really hurting in this global economic crisis – and to follow in the footsteps of Jesus, my ministry must tend these wounds. If we ignore the pastoral cry of young adults in this recession, we can be sure that these young men and women will seek solace elsewhere (as Conrad Hackett’s essay explains, young adults comprise 22% of the adult population, yet fewer than 10% of adults who attend church). More of my time, then, needs to be spent addressing economic uncertainty and its impact on emerging adults. Support groups, financial assistance, and pastoral care for those suffering the financial crunch are as essential to my young adult outreach as devotions and catechetical instruction. And most importantly, my ministry need to include social justice, since the face of the poor has changed – and now includes many of the younger adults whom I have been called to serve.

A second major implication of Changing SEA involves the growth and importance of diversity among young people today. Gerardo Marti’s essay on “Racial and Ethnic Dynamics among Contemporary Young Adults” highlighted the prominence of interracial relationships, while Penny Edgell and Elizabeth M. Lee noted increased diversity in the workplace and on college campuses in their respective contributions. I was particularly interested to read in Hackett’s essay that congregations which embrace multi-racial ministry attract the most young adults. From my experience in the Catholic community, the fastest growing U.S. demographic claiming Catholicism is Hispanic immigrants. I cannot ignore the growing diversity of young adults any longer; this reality has captured my attention.

Despite this influx of immigration, however, many of us struggle to reach and minister to non-White[2] populations effectively. In a recent study, researchers found that 45% of the emerging adult Catholics were non-White , while most Catholic young adult programs and outreach draw a predominantly Anglo audience. I have vowed to be more intentional about my outreach efforts with Hispanics, African-Americans, and Asian-Americans in my context. I am re-evaluating the resources we have for worship, catechesis, spiritual growth, and community, asking if they speak to audiences other than my own and welcome all races and ethnicities. And I am spending more time on the enculturation of young adult ministry that incorporates and honors diversity, for this defines the very nature of emerging adulthood in the twenty-first century.

A third implication of these essays lies in recognizing the rising importance of the peer community to young adults – in the area of friendships, cohabitation, dating, and marriage. Carolyn McNamara Barry and Stephanie D. Madsen, in “Friends and Friendships in Emerging Adulthood,” report that many emerging adults now view friendships as the new family. As young adults step into an increasingly global marketplace, as more young couples live together before marriage, and as social networking allows connections across vast distances, the old ministry model of an entrenched, geographically-rooted, and singular family community must make way for a new model that engages overlapping communities of peers and families residing in multiple places. Some aspects of these new communities will trouble churches and traditional assumptions of ministry – but present trends indicate little possibility of reversal and make imperative our need to reach out.

In decades past, churches saw themselves as providers of ecclesial watering holes. That is, safe places where singles would gather, with faith-filled communities, friendships, and marriages emerging. But no longer are congregations places where young adults gather. I bring this up because too often, we focus our attention on the development of young adult “groups” in local churches, while in the rest of the world, new patterns of community are now established. This means that I need to change direction – from creating and maintaining “groups” to building a presence on social networking sites, offering a pastoral response to cohabitation, assisting young adults seeking to marry, and helping couples successfully navigate marriage’s early years. And it means that I must address the root causes that feed relationship anxieties: loneliness, financial troubles, family crises, and shallow understandings of vocation. Even though young adults may no longer seek new relationships in our congregations, we can still be a place where they are nurtured and are embraced by a vibrant faith community.

The sobering reality is this: emerging adults have disappeared in droves from our pews. The Changing SEA Project has helped me see that our longstanding methods of reaching younger generations needed revision and refinement. Irrelevant activities, young adult groups, and culturally homogenous programming must now make way for pastoral care, social justice, celebration of ethnic diversity, and proactive engagement with the multiple communities contemporary young adults inhabit. Most importantly, though, these essays remind us that young adult ministry, no matter how difficult, is something congregations can no longer avoid. Effective young adult ministry is both the urgent and important task of our age.

Notes

1   The concept of important and urgent tasks was outlined in two of Steven Covey’s works: The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People: Restoring the Character Ethic (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989) and First Things First (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994).

2   The most recent data on the growing Hispanic Catholic population was featured in American Catholics Today: New Realities of Their Faith and Their Church by William V. D’Antonio, James D. Davidson, Dean R. Hoge, and Mary L. Gautier (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2007), pgs. 165-171.

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