In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Immanuel Can: Hey Tom, I’ve been reading a major recent sociological study published by the EFC and called Renegotiating Faith (2018). It’s about how changes in society are making it harder and harder for young Christians to arrive at what’s called “emergent adulthood”, the time in life when people make firm commitments either to be Christian or to become something else.
Tom: I see what you mean. It’s quite massive, isn’t it.
A Quick Quotation
IC: Let me give you a quick quotation from it, and see what you think:
“In the past, much of youth and young adult ministry has been organized on the assumption that identity formation was taking place in high school, while young adults were still part of the Christian community that they belonged to because they were part of their family of origin. Today, most young adults are forming their identities within the communities that are available to them, often in a new school or work setting.”
Now, if that’s right, does it mean trouble for some of the things many churches have been doing traditionally, with regard to child and youth ministry?
Tom: I’m thinking back to the youth groups I attended in my teens and twenties. I don’t recall this idea of identity formation even crossing anyone’s mind in the seventies and eighties. I helped run a youth group for years, and it never once occurred to me to consider that there was any sort of fixed point in time when I or anyone else I knew might “emerge” into adulthood. In truth, I was probably trying to avoid that as much as possible. My eventual commitment to the faith I had professed as a child was more about abandoning my attempts to live life for myself than anything I would have considered the conscious or unconscious formation of an adult identity. There was a big fight in my head over how I was going to live in the two or three years immediately after high school, and God knocked me out cold early in the first round. That’s how it was for me.
Entrenching or Abandoning
So, to your point, should elders be thinking about when it is that most young people are either entrenching in their professed faith or abandoning it? Maybe. If so, it would be a first, I suspect. My guess is that age of crisis, and the degree of it, vary significantly from person to person.
IC: Well, we have to be careful never to assume our own experience is universal. And a survey is always talking about averages, not about specific individuals. This is not the first study I have seen that emphasizes that our social arrangements are artificially extending the transitional period of youth. It’s a general social phenomenon. Adulthood — marked by taking on social responsibilities such as marriage, family and dependents — is being put off until 30 or later. This survey concerns primarily one aspect of that: the making of a personal commitment to a particular Christian community. But it’s part of a pretty well-documented social reality. The question is, how does this impact our thinking as a church?
Tom: Oh, I think we can definitely agree kids are maturing much later than they did 100 or even 50 years ago, and that this is something close to deliberate social policy. Universities and colleges have turned into diploma mills for a demographic that wouldn’t have had the intellectual chops for higher education in times past. There is money to be made in dragging the process out, and several generations of Christian parents — in good conscience, believing themselves faithful stewards and loving mentors — have pushed higher education on even marginal scholars as a necessity, or certainly desirable. So marriage is coming later, employment later, financial independence later and sexual activity earlier. Adulthood is way down the road. We’ve talked about this before. There are other factors infantilizing the population too, the popularity of videogames included.
Being Countercultural
So how does this impact our thinking as a church if we are conscious of it happening? Well, it might require us to actually be countercultural for once rather than constantly talking as if we are.
IC: Countercultural? Always. But what specific forms does that need to take?
Tom: That very much depends on how you analyze the five-to-seven-year development delay the study’s authors say now exists compared to the 1980s. If you think that can’t be changed and the church must simply live with a new cultural reality, then you’ll probably attempt to deal with the problem one way. That would be accepting modern society as it is and adjusting the church’s methods to deal with it.
Alternatively, if you believe the church’s job is to help parents prepare their kids to fight back against the negative effects of delayed development, you’ll proceed differently. That would be the countercultural approach. Personally, I don’t think, once they are aware of it, Christian parents can afford to allow their children’s development into adulthood to be delayed five to seven years. From the perspective of sexual continence alone, it’s a monumental hazard.
IC: It certainly is.
The study takes for granted that we cannot substantially change the social conditions, only the way the church reacts. And what they recommend is a mentoring process, somebody non-parental to walk alongside the young person through his or her transition into new commitments. It does not discuss genuinely countercultural alternatives, such as forming religious communes or arranging younger marriages.
Infants on Hold
But let’s roll with that. Assuming that our culture does infantilize and overprotect children, then holds young people in a kind of extended stasis between the ages of around 18 and 30, what’s to be done? Can we expect, for example, that if we just get kids through the teen years, that after that, they’ll take care of themselves, spiritually speaking? That’s what we used to assume, it seems. So what now?
Tom: Well, no. It brings up this question — and I ask it because I’m genuinely unsure of the answer — does sexual incontinence lead to the abandonment of faith more than the abandonment of faith leads to sexual incontinence? Because they are most certainly related, and we need to know which is more frequently the cause and which is more frequently the effect. I believe if you ask the average professing Christian male at age 13 to wait until he’s 30 to have his first sexual relationship, you’ll have 50% of your kids coming to church riddled with guilt all the time because they’re failing their own purity standard. The physical package God gave them is working against their self-control 24/7, and they need to find a way to deal with that, which often means ditching the standard rather than the conduct that violates it. The remaining 50% will either be prissy and pharisaical or else “pure” only for lack of opportunity or interest. Little about that dynamic makes for solid, growing believers. The ones you keep around may not be the cream of the spiritual crop.
IC: And that in a pornography culture, with social media, and with parties and hookups everywhere available and expected.
Tom: Exactly. You know, I genuinely believe parents have much more passive control over their children’s choices than we think, and therefore elders and mature Christians in local churches may have an opportunity to help concerned Christian moms and dads navigate potentially dangerous situations for their offspring. For one thing, no kid is coming out of high school and going straight into university or college unless his parents either fund it or countenance their child taking on massive amounts of government-authorized debt. Grade 12 students are simply not sufficiently financially independent to move on through this newly manufactured cultural delaying process without our enabling them. This problem is our fault as parents. We made it. We can certainly slow the process down by insisting on a year or two of work before higher education, during which no small number of children may find reasons to keep working instead of continuing schooling they don’t really want or need. In a case like that, slowing down for a short time may actually speed up progress to adulthood, independence, responsibility and commitment to Christ.
Swing Factors
IC: Ah, now you touch on something the findings of the survey also show. A number of factors greatly swing the odds of children retaining their faith. One of them, surprisingly enough, is the taking of at least one year off between high school and post-secondary studies.
Tom: No, no, that makes total sense. Exposure to how people actually live is a great strengthener of faith. It was for me. You see unbelief with all its warts, unexpected side effects and, well … despair. It’s the hothouse classroom that’s artificial and tells believing children lies for which they don’t yet have convincing answers. A year off also gives a solid chance for the maturing young person to rethink their priorities and decide whether four more years of education is really necessary or ideal, especially when getting right down to living life for Christ here and now may accelerate the prospect of marriage by as much as five years. In most cases the education isn’t worth either the financial investment or the opportunity cost (which is massive compared to four years in a well-compensated trade), and after a year or more of working nine to five, kids can often see that for themselves and offer a better idea or two about what they want their future to look like. What’s dangerous to faith is climbing on an institutional treadmill with a bunch of unbelievers right after high school, having given no thought where you are going or why, or often for how long and at what expense.
IC: Another swing factor is involvement as young people in leading Christian camps. Still another is the age at which serious responsibilities, decisions and consequences begin to be shifted to them, which is usually not early enough.
Tom: That’s good, and that’s also why camps work: they encourage participative faith, not just sitting on the sidelines.
Service and Mentoring
IC: Yet another swing factor is serving in the local assembly already.
Tom: Which works for the same reason, with even more potential spiritual support around.
IC: One more: the presence of a mentor (non-parental: one to five of them) who walks them through the transition away from home, giving them connections in a church in their new location, getting them involved with the campus group, checking in with them on their progress as they go …
Tom: Very much so. Sometimes my dad said things fifteen times to me and I didn’t hear them. The first time another Christian I admired said them, those same old concepts clicked and resonated. We just need that third-party independent confirmation sometimes.
IC: Do you have any difficulty imagining that some of these things would be tied to young people staying firm on their commitment to their own spiritual life and values? But what doesn’t work? Almost everything else we’re doing.
Tom: That I can believe. Can we talk more about that next week? I think it’s worth pursuing.
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