Not Done Yet

Reaching and Keeping Unchurched Emerging Adults

Beth Seversen

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780830841974
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Nones claim no religion. Dones have become disillusioned and left the church. Research shows many young adults are landing in one of these camps. But that's not the end of the story. Many emerging adults, ages eighteen to thirty-three, are tossing aside the none and done labels and are instead embracing a transformative Christian faith.Based on her extensive research, scholar-practitioner Beth Seversen outlines a model for how to engage and retain millennials and Generation Z in the life of the local church. Emerging adults are likely to experience spiritual transformation in churches that welcome them into community, provide meaningful opportunities to make a difference, and invest in their development.Whether you're a senior pastor or a youth minister, a parent or an educator, Not Done Yet will open your eyes to the generational barriers to vibrant faith while equipping you with insights to make your outreach to emerging adults more authentic and impactful.

To become adults, we take a long, winding road from adolescence to adulthood. The road metaphor aptly describes the journey toward forming an identity. And we can’t read much on young-adult identity without running into Jeffrey Arnett’s description of early adulthood. A professor of psychology at Clark University, Arnett coined the term emerging adulthood to refer to a unique and distinct developmental life phase between adolescence and mature adulthood, roughly from age eighteen to twenty-nine. During emerging adulthood, young adults increase in their independence from family and other support systems, experience seismic change, and explore the world, themselves, and endless possibilities. Arnett uses the metaphor of a long and winding road to depict this prolonged transitional period, which runs from exiting teen years to entering adulthood. Emerging adulthood is sometimes divided between younger (eighteen to twenty-three) and older (age twenty-four to twenty-nine) emerging adults.

Although not everyone agrees that emerging adulthood is a distinct developmental phase or that emerging adulthood happens at a certain age, most agree that there is a time period in which people transition from adolescence to adulthood. Obviously, it’s during this season of life that people make life-impacting decisions regarding education, vocation, life partnership, geographic location, housing, and community. First, let’s nail down some terminology before we explore a few of the characteristics of this life phase just before adulthood.

Sorting Out Our Terms

While emerging adulthood refers to the developmental stage that extends between adolescence and adulthood (usually ages eighteen to twenty-nine), the millennial generation refers to people born between 1981 and 1996, according to Pew Research. Postmillennials, also called Generation Z, were first born in the year 1995, according to Seemiller and Grace, or 1997, according to Pew Research. Scholar James Emory White marks the birth years of Generation Z as between 1995 and 2005. Designating generational years for cohorts isn’t an exact science; it is simply a way to describe people who were impacted by similar social, economic, political, and technological events or changes in history like the Great Depression, World War II, the Kennedy assassinations, the Cold War, and 9/11. Since there is no one authoritative body that determines generational birth dates for our purposes, let’s imagine the start year for Generation Z was 1995, and that they experienced 9/11 in kindergarten and arrived on the college scene as freshmen in 2013.

Combined, the two youngest generational cohorts make up about half of the US population, with Generation Z (25.9 percent) at one percentage point ahead of millennials (24.5 percent). For a time, the 78 million millennials made up the largest generation in American history and were the most racially diverse segment of American society. Generation Z has surpassed millennials in both size and ethnic diversity.

I will use the terms emerging adults, young adults, and young people synonymously. Frequently I will refer to Generation Z and millennials or to both of them as “emerging generations.” But my primary focus will be on emerging adults as a descriptor for people in their twenties and early thirties.

I won’t describe the differences in the two generations. Much already has been written on millennials—much of it negative. But you won’t find any millennial bashing here, only a deep appreciation for a generation seeking to find their place in the world. Generation Z may be less familiar and is the focus of much current study. For a quick primer on Generation Z, I recommend Generation Z: A Century in the Making by Corey Seemiller and Meghan Grace, and I defer to James Emory White’s summary of the defining markers of this newest generation: recession marked, Wi-Fi enabled, multiracial, sexually fluid, and post-Christian. He writes,

So who are Generation Z? They are growing up in a post-9/11 world. They are experiencing radical changes in technology and understandings of family, sexuality, gender. They live in multigenerational households, and the fastest-growing demographic within their age group is multiracial.

Rather I will focus on looking at these two groups collectively within the category of “emerging adulthood” as it relates to the heart of this study: churches reaching and keeping young adults. Neither of the newest emerging generations attend church much. Only two-fifths (41 percent) of Generation Z attend weekly religious services, while only 27 percent of millennials attend weekly services once or more. This book is about Christian churches that care about those dismal statistics and are pointing these emerging generations toward Christ.

In the face of the general decline in religious attendance among emerging adults in North America, logical questions emerge: How are churches reaching the small minority of dones and nones among emerging adults who are increasing in religious Christian faith and church attendance? How are churches reaching the least-reached, least-churched generations, especially the younger eighteen- to twenty-three-year-old group? Let’s start by taking a quick stock of what we know about young adults through a developmental lens.

The Characteristics of Emerging Adulthood

Much of the literature proposing the concept of emerging adulthood refers to it as a transitory stage with five common features also first identified by Arnett:

1. 1. identity exploration answering the question “who am I” and trying out various life options especially in love and work
2. 2. instability in love, work, and places of residence
3. 3. self-focus and figuring out how to manage life independently
4. 4. feeling in-between, in transition, neither adolescent nor adult
5. 5. possibilities and optimism, when hopes flourish and people have an unparalleled opportunity to transform their lives

The trail through emerging adulthood is confusing and complicated. For research I traveled to Burning Man, a self-expression arts festival held annually over Labor Day in Black Rock City, Nevada, and attended by some sixty thousand adherents. The following is an excerpt from an interview with a female millennial attending Burning Man.

I entered college as a statistics major, and I graduated with an accounting degree. I went to work for a Big Four. I hated it! I was miserable. So I got a new job. My boyfriend and I had dated four years, and we broke up for three and a half years. We just started dating again. I left accounting and went to recruiting, and now I recruit for a startup in San Francisco. . . .

Spirituality is a belief in something bigger, I think. That’s how I would define god too. I wouldn’t say god is Jesus. I would say god is just like a higher being. . . . I feel like I can always pray. I pray, like, every night. . . . I always believed in god, which I wouldn’t really classify as like a Christian God or anything. And I try to meditate a lot and understand my inner self, like Zen meditation. . . .

I like to party, fine. Doing drugs seven days a week? No. . . .

What am I looking forward to or longing for? I value my friends really highly, so good relationships. I’d like to settle down. Right now I live in San Francisco, and there is a decent amount of partying. I look forward to settling down a little bit more, having a house, a couple of kids, just enjoying myself, a good career. Sounds kind of boring, but is sounds really nice.

This twenty-seven-year-old woman explores her identity in terms of what company she will work for, who her life partner will be, and where she will live. Besides her identity exploration, we observe instability, self-focus, transition or in-betweenness, and an optimistic outlook toward a more stable future. Her story clearly fits the five distinctive marks of emerging adulthood and is illustrative of many young adults’ journeys.

Besides the religious and spiritual lives of emerging adults, Christian Smith, professor of sociology at the University of Notre Dame, and his research team also looked at the underbelly of young adulthood through interviews with eighteen to twenty-three year olds. They wanted to discover how broader cultural influences shape young people’s behaviors and relationships. In Lost in Transition they describe the dark side of emerging adulthood, also using five descriptors. Smith found some emerging adults are disposed toward many of the same morally misguided behaviors, addictions, and social problems their parents struggle with, including moral confusion, recreational sex, unlimited technology, routine intoxication, serious addiction to alcohol and drugs, and massive consumerism. The difference is young adults engage these destructive behaviors with a greater intensity than their parents due to wider exposure to and availability of contraceptives, information, drugs, alcohol, and purchasing ease while at the same time living in a much more morally relaxed society.

For instance, today’s technology gives young people far greater access to pornography and sexual stimuli than was available to their parents. And for many emerging adults, cultural shifts depreciate their sense of certainty and give them a universalist outlook. For many emerging adults, life in a postmodern context is more self-constructed, subjective, and morally relative than that of their moms and dads. For example, a bright eighteen-year-old student in my introductory course on the Bible this semester raised his hand and asked, “Isn’t sin a social construct?”

Delaying Adulthood As We Know It

Back in the day, yet not that long ago, adulthood was defined by the social markers of leaving home, completing an education, gaining financial independence, marrying, and starting a family—and for those of privilege, home ownership. But let’s be real: those conventional markers are now delayed for Americans for all sorts of reasons that have to do with the economy: job instability, access, and the need or pressure for higher education or specialized training, extended financial dependency on parents and family, and recreational sex due to easily acquired birth control. Young adults are for these reasons extending their transition to adulthood and suspending for an undetermined amount of time a career, marriage and family, and homeownership or even rental.

Social forces, particularly the global economy, undermine stable and lifelong careers. Cultural trends like increasing use of artificial intelligence, companies not replacing retirees, and needing more education or training to compete for employment in the job market contribute to a delay in fully entering adulthood. Many young adults are supported financially by their parents through their twenties to mid-thirties. Smith reports parents spend an average of $38,340 on each of their young adult children between their kids’ ages of eighteen and thirty-four. For all these reasons emerging adults statistically are not marrying or starting families as much or as early, compared to past generations.

Fifty-nine percent of millennials are not married. Eighty-three percent do not have children. These two factors contribute to delays in identity commitments and, I suspect, in delays in commitments to a religious identity. In the past, young adults stopped participating in church for a few years then returned once they had a stable career, married, and started their families. Think about it. Between 1950 and the latest census, the median age of women marrying for the first time rose from 20.3 to 27, and the median age of marriage for men rose from 22.8 to 29. The debate continues about whether or not young adults will return to church once they marry and start a family.

Today’s young adults take a nine- to eleven-year break from church after high school. Many who study the religious lives of young adults see the delay in marriage and family formation as the key reason they are not practicing their faith. Rodney Stark, an influential figure in sociology of religion, says not to worry about this too much. Young adults are simply sleeping in and learning to manage their lives on their own, like they always have. When they eventua...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Journeying: The Long, Winding Road to Identity Formation
• 2 Initiating: Walking Together Toward Commitment
• 3 Inviting: No Need to Believe to Come to Church
• 4 Welcoming: Open the Door and See All the People
• 5 Changing: Creating an Invitational Culture
• 6 Including: The Superglue for Emerging Adults
• 7 Involving: Contributing Before Committing
• 8 Investing: The Church Is Here for You
• 9 Leading: What's a Leader to Do?
• 10 Attracting: Connecting Evangelism, Discipleship, and Mission
• 11 Revisioning: Evangelism Inside the Church Box
• 12 Balancing: Orthodox Distinction and Culture Engagement
• 13 True North: I Just Wanted to Know You Were for Real
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Praise for Not Done Yet
• About the Author
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright