How Emerging Adulthood Affects the Church

I have two experts with me here today. Jay Sedwick, who teachers here at Dallas Seminary, and Mark Matlock, who works with Youth Specialties. Did I get that right?

It says, “Social time tables that were widely observed a half century ago for accomplishing adult transitions no longer apply in the contemporary Western world. Adolescence now occurs earlier than in the past, moved up by the earlier onset of puberty, increasing relevance of peer relationships, and new cultural understandings advanced by child development professionals about age appropriate autonomy during the early teen years. The invention of middle school starting as early as the sixth grade when children are typically 11 or 12 marks the beginning of adolescence”– so before the teenage years in many ways.

That’s interesting because when I think about the structure of many churches, I’m not sure they necessarily structure themselves that way, but we’ll talk about that. “As the chapters of this book clearly show, the end of adolescence has become a protracted affair.” That’s really where the changes come in on the other end almost more. “Entry into adulthood has become more ambiguous, and generally occurs in a gradual complex, and less uniform fashion. It is simply not possible for most young people to achieve economic and psychological autonomy as early as it was a half century ago.” That’s a very important sentence. “Thus, the term ‘adolescence’ is becoming socially and psychologically inexact, including as it does 12 year olds and 20-something year olds who may still be living at home, and are economically dependent on parents.

There is an inclination to devise expressions like ‘emerging adulthood,’ or the term ‘adolescence,’ which was infelicitously coined by Tyre and other associates in 2002 in a recent News Week cover.” So that gives you the feel for what we’re talking about. I think the term that I’ve heard most common is extended adolescence. That adolescence is extended itself into the 20’s and early 30’s. We’re dealing with thing like boomerang kids, which I had. I had a daughter, my oldest daughter, went to college came back, got married, worked, and then her family moved in with our family.

We didn’t just get a child. We got a whole boomerang full. We got the husband. We got two kids living with us as well, and we did that for about four and a half years, and that’s not unusual.

Mark Matlock: It’s becoming incredibly common.

Mark Matlock: I think economics are big driving force, and I think it’s really important, his last statements about the different terms I think are really important. I think boomers, the boomer generation, those who were you know kind of born of the 60s, not born in the 60s, but you know were emerging as adults in the 60s, but I think that generation tends to think of extended adolescence, and they see it as a negative thing. I think that those of us who are squarely in more of the Gen X category of life tend to like and favor the emerging adulthood term, because I think what we’re seeing is that there really is a new way of becoming an adult. It’s not really that you’re still an adolescent anymore, this group of 20-somethings that are going through this period of time. There are defined stages that we’re seeing in that as well.

So I personally tend to favor emerging adulthood, because I tend to take a positive spin, because I don’t see it as this is fatal flaw of the generation, but it is economic, social, cultural things that are shaping the way this generation is responding to how they survive and stabilize.

Mark Matlock: And there’s a negative kind of association with that. A fear I think that older generations have of oh no. Will this generation ever be productive, and be able to produce, but when you look at what’s going on in the deep structural change of our society right now, what else should we expect from them, because they’re trying to figure out how do I stabilize? How to I find myself in an environment where you know it’s not working for the company, and retiring with the company. That doesn’t work anymore. There are no pensions. This is a whole different universe, and this generation is having to figure it out as they’re becoming adults. I don’t know if emerging adulthood will be a continuing phenomenon a decade, you know two decades from now, but right now it’s what is needed because of just the deep shifts going on in not just our country, but internationally as well.

Where parents and grandparents get to spend more time with their kids, and with their grandkids, and helping them in terms of their development rather than them 21 years old, and off to the other part of the country to try and make it in the world, and they’re floundering, and they’re having a difficult time where their stability, and their safety in that family structure that might be there. So that’s a positive spin to the fact that there’s a lot of these teenagers or young adults aren’t leaving. You know the failure to launch movie that was so funny and different things like that. So I think there’s other ways to positively spin it, but that’s just one.

You may have passed it on to generation, but the one generation may have established themselves, that kind of thing. Then this elongation, if I can say it this way, this emerging has happened more recently, because it’s just taking young people longer to get located. They’re marrying later. They’re taking longer to pursue their education. More people are pursuing education, they’re taking longer to do it, and then there’s just the economics of doing all that. That appears to be what’s going on.

So this isn’t just a little change in the year. I mean these are mega shifts.

Dr. Jay Sedwick, Jr.: Wow. If I can back track just a second, the whole concept of adolescence as a term, like you said, you reference 1904, G. Stanley Hall’s book Adolescence kind of launched the study of this time of life. It’s really a Western cultural phenomenon. We in fact created adolescence, and people say wait a minute. We’ve always said teenager, but many people believe that the Western culture created adolescence. This time of life where you’re not really a child any longer, you’re not really an adult any longer.

Many cultures in the world had rites of passage where you went from childhood to adulthood rather quickly, and now we’ve decided through several things that happened the beginning of the 20th century with the passage of child labor laws, and juvenile delinquency laws, and mandatory public schooling that we’ve created this period of time where children are like what am I? What am I really supposed to be? How do I fit in? What’s my role in this world? What’s my role in this family, this society?

We’ve kind of set them on the shelf where they can just kind of ruminate for a few years. Well that has gotten longer, and longer like we’ve called extended adolescence.

Mark Matlock: To tack onto it Darrell’s observation or maybe it was Jays about extended family, and community breaking down. You know you look at a primitive culture, or a culture we call tribal culture, or whatever label you want to put on it, but you know you go back to like a bride price, or whatever right? The whole idea there was I’m becoming a man. I have to now go to get married, and it cost me money. So I got to go to people –

Dr. Darrell Bock: We actually see vestiges of that when we get married today, because when you supply gifts to a married couple, the variety of gifts, etc., you actually establish their home. I mean I wouldn’t have had a couch to sit in had it not been going on. I would not have had this Waterford Crystal duck if I hadn’t gotten married.

Mark Matlock: Exactly it used to be you know all these things happen in Christian endeavor groups, or Young Life, or Youth for Christ, and the church has kind of worked alongside it. Well I asked the founders there, they along with a whole other collection –

The thing that I’m raising, and the reason I want to talk about this group is one we are seemingly losing many of this age group once they make the decision about whether they’re going to stay involved with the church. That’s part one, but part two is we’re also configured in such a way that our ability to connect with this group is struggling, not just because kids move out and they go to college, but because the length of the arrangements, and in most churches, at least the church that I attend, one of them, has struggled with this area, because they aren’t located near a college campus. They are located sort of close to a community college, but that’s kind of a different experience in a university where you’ve got dorms and that kind of stuff. So they have wrestled with what to do with this age group, because the kids that have been raised up in the church go to college, and go off to somewhere else. So they’ve lost the ones that they’ve nurtured just by the sheer geography of what it is the children have done.

So there’s this kind of double disconnect I guess is what I’m raising here in terms of how to pursue youth ministry, and particularly outreach and availability in such a way that when a person does move into your area where your church is ministering, you have the opportunity to capture back some of those who have come from somewhere else. So is that a good overview of the kind of the problem?

I was thinking about my own. I left right out of Biola, drove out here to Texas, and have lived here ever since, and if it weren’t for my church though getting behind my ministry effort as a community. You know sending me checks every week to keep it going, and such, it would’ve floundered in my early infancy of that. So I look back, and I go man my church community was way more significant to me than I realized at that age for helping me find my vocation, but I don’t know if churches today are helping in that same way, because I don’t know that they’re the same kinds of communities that they once were.

We send our kids off to school. We expect the school system to do the job that long ago the parents used to do. Well in the church we’ve kind of brought that same perspective in, and said well we’re going to expect the youth minister, and whatever people he can twist his arm into working with, we’re going to expect that guy, or that lady to do the job of what the parents are supposed to be doing in terms of raising, and discipling their own children, and we’ve kind of farmed it out in a way. That separates them from the overall community life of the church, which I think is detrimental.

The church, by its very nature, if you have received the holy spirit, you are a part of the body of Christ, and –

You know my church did that for me. When I was a young man I was given opportunities to spin the wheels with teaching, and speaking, and you know I got critiqued for it too. You know what I mean? It wasn’t all positive right? But I was given that opportunity to exercise my gifts in the body, and I’m looking at the kids that are making it through, and a lot of it is that they did get opportunities. Someone one in the church, an advocate for them, said we need to invest more in this person’s life. Unfortunately the rest of the students just got stuck with the program.

So how do we open up the imagination of our pastors and our leadership to think how are we including, and if they do that, and then as they go through that emerging adulthood, they are informing the church so that it doesn’t become stuck in its ways.

The teenagers at our church all sit together on the side pew as a group, and we occasionally in a message jokingly will turn, and address the teenagers group when something comes up that might relate to teenagers in a significant way, or when we’re informing the teenagers of something culturally that they would have no clue about, because of the difference in generations, and that kind of thing. The side show image comes to me, the side bar image comes to me very strongly in thinking about this, but where are they actually engaged? How much of the sermons, and this is another dimension of the equation, how much of the sermons actually address, have the senior pastor address issues and questions they’re dealing with, or is that all just handed off to the youth minister?

So that pastor is going to have to work in the education ministry of the church, and is going to have to work hard at making what they’re saying, and what they’re doing relevant to this generation.

That’s yet another feature that is a game changer. I remember, again, based on my own experience with my own kids. All three of our kids when to public schools, but the bulk of the Sunday school program at our church was made up of home schoolers, and the issues those two groups faced were sociologically so completely different that the youth minister really had a juggling act to perform.