Reaching Young Adults

In 1994, a commission convened by the Center on Addiction and Substance 
Abuse at Columbia University, with Joseph A. Califano, Jr. as chair, 
issued a rather alarmist report, "Rethinking Rites of Passage: Substance 
Abuse on America's Campuses."  The report invented the phrase “binge 
drinking.”  It noted that one in three college students drinks primarily 
to get drunk.  In a curious perversion of the Women's Movement, the 
number of women who reported drinking to get drunk more than tripled 
between 1977 and 1993, a rate now equal to that of men.  The Califano 
report noted that college students spend 5.5 billion dollars a year on 
alcohol, more than on all other beverages and their books combined.  The 
average student spends $446 per student on alcohol per year, far 
exceeding the per capita expenditure for the college library.  Not 
surprisingly, the beer industry targets young adults as its best hope 
for increasing sales.  These trends have continued unabated. Thus NCAA 
basketball is brought to us by Anheuser Busch.

For youth off campus, the picture is equally disturbing.  The rate of 
violent crimes by youth in the United States rose by 25 percent over the 
past decade.  The teen-age suicide rate has tripled over the past three 
decades.  Suicide is the second leading cause of death of 
15-to-19-year-olds.  The image of our nation's best and brightest, 
mindlessly consuming large amounts of alcohol, is not an attractive one, 
yet it is an image which accurately portrays an important aspect of 
today's young adults.

I have sometimes called today's Twenty-Something crowd "The Abandoned 
Generation".  Today's young adults have the dubious distinction of being 
our nation's most aborted generation.  After scores of interviews with 
them, Susan Litwin called them "The Postponed Generation," those 
children of the children of the Sixties who were raised by parents so 
uncertain of their own values that they dared not attempt to pass on 
values to their young.

Here is the way in which Yale's Allan Bloom put the problem:
... the souls of young people are in a condition like that of the first 
men in the state of nature -- spiritually unclad, unconnected, isolated, 
with no inherited or unconditional connection with anything or anyone. 
They can be anything they want to be, but they have no particular reason 
to want to be anything in particular.

But the good news is that many of these young people are willing to 
listen, amazingly willing to sit still and to focus if we are bold 
enough to speak.  For what could a preacher ask but that?  My student 
generation of the Sixties was unable to hear words spoken by anyone over 
Thirty.  Our parents lied to us about Vietnam; they failed to be 
straight with us about Civil Rights.

I have found that today's "Abandoned Generation" brings a new curiosity 
and openness to the gospel as well as a willingness to hear what their 
elders have to say, if we will speak directly to them.  Therefore 
leaders of the church need to revise some of our conventional wisdom 
about the imperviousness of young adult hearts to the gospel.  Thomas G. 
Long says it well: 'There is a growing recognition that it is not enough 
for the community of faith to wait around for the "boomers" to drift 
back.  ....Conventional wisdom holds that there are three broad phases 
in religious commitment:  There is childhood, a pliable and receptive 
age religious instruction can and should be given; there is mature 
adulthood, when people, given the right incentives, can be persuaded to 
take on the responsibilities of institutional church life.  In between 
childhood and adulthood, there is the vast wasteland of adolescence and 
young adulthood, a time when most people wander, or run away from their 
religious roots.  The most that a community of faith can do in this 
middle period is to wait patiently, to leave people alone in their 
season of rebellion, smiling with the knowledge that, by the time these 
rebels arrive at their thirties, they will probably be back in the pews 
and may well be heading up the Christian education committee.
This conventional wisdom is wrong....'

Long feels that the contemporary church must take the religious 
wanderings of young adults with new seriousness, that the time is ripe 
for new strategies of evangelization and Christian education of a 
generation who, having been left to their own devices, religiously 
speaking, now needs to be addressed by the church.

Can we see the needs and problems of this generation of young adults as 
an invitation to proclaim the gospel with boldness, to beckon them 
toward a new world named the Kingdom of God?  If we can, we shall 
discover this generation as a marvelous opportunity for gospel proclamation.

William H. Willimon

November 2007
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Shalom/Salaam/Pax!                         Rowland Croucher

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