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 re****t, "Rethinking Rites of Passage: Substance
Abuse on America's Campuses." The re****t 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 re****ted drinking to get drunk more than tripled
between 1977 and 1993, a rate now equal to that of men. The Califano
re****t 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 ****trays an im****tant 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 contem****ary 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 op****tunity for gospel
proclamation.
William H. Willimon
November 2007
--
Shalom/Salaam/Pax! Rowland Croucher
http://jmm.aaa.net.au/
(20,000 articles 4000 humor)
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