The Challenge of Connecting With Today’s Emerging Generation Part 1: Changes in how young people grow up Part 2: Changes in their perceptions of Christianity

Part 1: Changes In How Contemporary Young People Grow Up Useful Sources: Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, “Emerging Adulthood” “Spirituality in Higher Education:” A major continuing “study of college students’ search for meaning and purpose” (

A New Life-Phase Between Adolescence and Adulthood Began With “Generation X”  “Emerging adulthood” is a distinct new period of life between adolescence and adulthood (age 18-25). It has only emerged recently among the post- industrialized countries of the West, Japan, and South Korea. Not everyone experiences it (this life phase is less common among minority groups and the poor).

How Do You Measure Adulthood? The Criteria Young People Feel Are Most Important for Becoming an “Adult:”  Accept Responsibility for Yourself  Make Independent Decisions  Become Financially Independent All of these are achieved gradually.

Five Main Features of Life as an Emerging Adult  Identity Exploration  Instability  Self-Focused  Feeling in-between (in transition, neither adolescent nor adult)  It is the age of possibilities. Hope flourishes. You can transform your life and become who you want to be (as long as it’s different from your parents)

Factors Leading to the Emergence of “Emerging Adulthood”  Young people are waiting longer and longer to marry and have children (prolonged singleness = freedom to explore who I may become).  More people are spending more time in higher education.  Prolonged job instability.

Reasons for Delay of Marriage and Parenthood  Birth control  Less stringent rules of sexual morality  Marriage and family are seen as perils to be avoided (loss of independence, spontaneity, and possibility)  Single women are no longer seen as abnormal  Young people take their time to find the perfect “soul mate” (the #1 requirement).

“Shacking Up” Is Now the Norm  At least 2/3 now live with a romantic partner before marriage.  Some use “semi-cohabiting” to avoid conflict with parents.  62% of year-olds agree that “living together with someone before marriage is a good way to avoid eventual divorce.”  But cohabitation actually increases the odds of divorce.

Cohabiting Is Not Only Immoral, But...  “According to a substantial body of research, marriage has a variety of positive effects on psychological health, financial well-being, and emotional well- being that cohabitation does not.”

Prolonged College Experience  Now 2/3 of young people go straight from high school to college (though half of freshmen fail to graduate).  One-third of college graduates go straight to graduate school.  High school isn’t taken very seriously. Only 35% agreed that “My high school education prepared me well for the workplace.”

Prolonged College Experience  College is seen as at time for finding out what you want to do.  Satisfaction is measured in terms of personal growth.  Getting a degree is talking longer because of uncertainty over what to study, too much “beer and circus,” and financial struggles.

Prolonged Job Instability  The high-paying manufacturing jobs of the 50s and 60s have disappeared.  Adjusted for inflation, from 1973 to 1997, the average earnings for a full-time male worker under age 25 declined by almost 1/3.  Emerging Adults measure their ideal job in terms of how it clicks with their developing identity.

Prolonged Job Instability  The average American now holds seven to eight different jobs between age 18 and 30.  Many experience the “quarter-life crisis:” how to choose a job when I don’t know myself well enough to decide what I want to do?

Spiritual Trends Among Emerging Adults  Two main themes: Diversity of beliefs and determination to think for themselves.  Participating in a religious institution is unimportant to most of them, and most rarely or never attend religious services.  Openness to accepting all religions as equal.  Openness to reincarnation, witchcraft, occult, The Force, etc.

Four Categories of Emerging Adults’ Religious Beliefs  Agnostic/Atheist: 22%  Deist: 28% (spiritual but not religious)  Liberal Believer: 27% (I have a faith, but yours is O.K. too)  Conservative Believer: 23% (my faith is the one true faith)

Emerging Adults Discard the Faith of Their Youth  “Emerging adults’ religious beliefs have surprisingly little connection to their religious training in childhood and adolescence.”  About 60% of Emerging Adults had “high exposure” to religious training in childhood.  “In statistical analyses, there was no relationship between exposure to religious training in childhood and any aspect of their religious beliefs as emerging adults.”

Emerging Adults Discard the Faith of Their Youth  “Certainly, there are cases where children grow up to hold the same beliefs as their parents, but such cases are too rare to show up in statistical analyses of groups, because it is much more common for children to hold different beliefs from their parents by the time they reach emerging adulthood.”

Emerging Adults Discard the Faith of Their Youth  Emerging Adults see it as their personal responsibility to deliberately develop a set of religious beliefs that is uniquely their own. Participation in a religious institution is thus an intolerable compromise of their individuality. Carrying on their parents’ religious tradition would represent a failure in their responsibility to think for themselves.

Emerging Adults Discard the Faith of Their Youth  Emerging Adults’ wariness of religious institutions is also based on negative experiences which led them to view churches as bastions of corruption and hypocrisy. “For those who reject religious institutions, it is usually not because they are self-absorbed but because they doubt the morality of those institutions.”

Part 2: Changes in Our Culture’s Perception of Christians/The Church Useful Sources: Dan Kimball, “They Like Jesus But Not the Church” David Kinnaman (from the Barna Group) and Gabe Lyons, “UnChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks About Christianity.”

Dan Kimball’s Six Common Perceptions of the Church  The Church is an Organized Religion with a Political Agenda  The Church is Judgmental and Negative  The Church is Dominated by Males and Oppresses Females  The Church is Homophobic  The Church Arrogantly Claims that All Other Religions are Wrong  The Church is Full of Fundamentalists Who Take the Bible Literally

Dave Kinnaman’s Six Broad Themes of Negative Christian Stereotypes The first number is young outsiders; the second number is young churchgoers.  Hypocritical (85%; 47%)  Too Focused on Getting Converts (70%; 29%)  Anti-homosexual (91%; 80%)  Sheltered (72%; 32%)  Too Political (75%; 50%)  Judgmental (87% 52%) This is what a new generation really thinks about you and me!

 As Kinnaman says, “Christianity has an image problem.” And it’s not just with outsiders. Even Christian young people display the same skepticism toward present-day Christianity.  Today’s young people are inherently skeptical, savvy, and jaded.  They will not trust us to teach them unless we build sincere, safe relationships with them first.