Lederleitner / MacDonald / Richardson Formation for Mission

Discipleship and Identity for Emerging Adults
1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-1-68359-616-5
Verlag: Lexham Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 288 Seiten

Helping the next generation live for Christ As Christian adolescents develop into adults, they face unique questions and challenges. But this stage of life also provides unique opportunities for all who care about the spiritual flourishing of the next generation. Created in partnership with the Wheaton College Billy Graham Center, Formation for Mission empowers those who interact with teenagers and young adults. Gathering wisdom from a diverse variety of veteran teachers and weaving together research--informed social, theological, and practical insights, each chapter examines essential features in the missional development, formation, and contexts of young people. Questions for reflection and discussion move the conversation forward. Each generation is commissioned to pass the faith on to the next and help them live for Christ, enter congregational life, and engage in Christian mission. With cultural awareness and sensitivity to the challenges of today, Formation for Mission offers hopeful advice to those who are invested in supporting the spiritual thriving of emerging adults.

Mary T. Lederleitner is founder and executive director of Missional Intelligence and author of Cross--Cultural Partnerships and Women in God's Mission: Accepting the Invitation to Serve and Lead. Andrew MacDonald is associate director of the research institute at the Billy Graham Center and a frequent contributor to blogs and journals such as Christianity Today'sThe Exchange. Rick Richardson is professor of evangelism and leadership at Wheaton College, director of the church evangelism and research institutes for the Billy Graham Center, and an Anglican priest. He is author of You Found Me: New Research on How Unchurched Nones, Millennials, and Irreligious Are Surprisingly Open to Christian Faith.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Lederleitner, Mary T.

Macdonald, Andrew

Richardson, Rick

Leseproben

1 What Are We Talking About? Mary T. Lederleitner, Andrew MacDonald, and Rick Richardson There is something particularly powerful and poignant about the “twenty-something” years, harboring, as they do, both promise and vulnerability. —Sharon Daloz Parks Sophia explained, When I was at university I started going to a Christian group on campus. I was on the leadership team but I was leading a double life. I would attend meetings and go to Bible studies but, because I was part of the Greek system on my campus, many nights I would go to fraternity parties. I drank way too much. I wasn’t sleeping around, but close to it, always hoping no one would find out. When I graduated I wanted to make a clean break. I wanted to live like a Christian. I wanted to be a true disciple. I started attending a church near where I live. They are very welcoming towards people from my generation. I have been able to grow in my understanding of the Bible and lead in some areas of ministry and outreach. I’m so grateful for my church small group. We’re all facing the same challenges and temptations. Everyone our age goes to bars, and it’s easy to drink too much and do things that we deeply regret later. So, we hold each other accountable. If we go to a bar to be with other friends, we go together and we watch out for each other. I am growing so much in my faith and as a person. THE PURPOSE OF THIS BOOK The person who shared this story was such a talented and gifted young woman.1 As she recounted her aspirations and the challenges she faced, her story seemed to capture the “promise and vulnerability” that often come with the journey to adulthood.2 Our purpose for this book is to equip anyone who might have a passion to help emerging adults navigate this season of life. You might be older than they are, or you might be a peer. Whichever way you are positioned, we want to provide an opportunity for you to learn from others. We will share positive experiences, and also mistakes made, that facilitate and hinder their missional development. Our hope is that this book will be a resource that equips you to influence emerging adults in ways that help them grow to their full potential so that, in Christ, with their eyes focused on the God of mission, they can make their best contributions in the world. The authors who have contributed to this book have shared some of the richest insights they have uncovered through their academic studies and research on emerging adults. They have translated this wisdom in ways that will help you to easily make connections between theory and practice, research and real life. For those who desire a deep dive into the academic research behind each chapter, bibliographic resources are also provided. We believe this book will be especially beneficial if you read and work through it together in groups or teams, discussing and unpacking insights and implications with your own unique contexts in mind. For that reason, questions are included at the end of each chapter to facilitate deeper reflection and problem solving, and to think strategically about next steps. UNDERSTANDING EMERGING ADULTHOOD There are different terms and complexities surrounding the phase of life that is frequently referred to as “emerging adulthood.” For that reason, it is essential to clarify what we are talking about so we lessen confusion as we travel on this learning journey together. AN AGE RANGE OR A GENERATION? The conversation addressed in this book relates to the season of life between when a person ends adolescence and when they begin making long-term commitments characteristic of adulthood. For many that means it begins after they finish high school and before they get married, begin having children, and settle into professions. In some cultures that transition might be marked by other actions such as providing financial support for parents instead of being the recipient of their support. The time a person spends in this season of life varies based on their own developmental progress, sociological issues such as the availability of long-term employment in their desired professions, and other factors. Often people reference the age span between eighteen and twenty-nine as the season of emerging adulthood, with the core period common to most being ages eighteen to twenty-five.3 While some might view emerging adulthood in terms of a specific generation, such as iGen/Gen Z, that is not a complete picture. The phrase emerging adulthood relates most frequently to the maturation process a person undergoes as part of their development to adulthood. Those navigating it are from diverse socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds,4 and those contextual realities trigger diverse challenges and issues. One of the goals of this book is to address some holes in the research, since experiences of emerging adults from diverse backgrounds are less frequently studied and understood. We wish we could highlight all of these distinctions, but that is impossible within a single text. However, our hope is that the examples shared will foster in readers curiosity and new research with diverse groups of emerging adults in the days ahead. WHAT HAS CHANGED? In many cultures and for generations, elders from a community would initiate younger members. There would be some form of ritual or process they would follow,5 and at its conclusion they would be initiated into the community with adult status, accompanied by the corresponding roles and responsibilities of adulthood. The process of entering adulthood has become elongated because of a wide range of sociological factors such as globalization, growing access to information, greater financial resources, the need for higher levels of education to work in an information economy, the burden of academic debt experienced by many in order to obtain higher levels of education to function in an information economy, and older people living longer and not leaving their jobs. Entering adulthood used to be fairly straightforward: after adolescence most people would get married and begin working in a vocation handed down by a parent (or choose their vocation from a small set of options). The process is now far more complex. Another area that has changed relates to continuity of faith and church participation. The Pew Research Center has been showing an increase in the number of people who are now religiously unaffiliated and who attend church with less frequency than prior generations.6 Below is a graph of the Pew data on religious affiliation in the United States.7 The unaffiliated, also called “nones,” are now the most numerous religious grouping in America (26 percent, or one out of every four people). Nones are made up of atheists (4 percent of US adults), agnostics (5 percent of US adults), and “nothing in particulars” (17 percent of US adults). The percentages are much more striking for younger adults. Among millennials ages twenty-two to thirty-five, nones make up 40 percent as of 2018/2019, up about 4 percent in just four years. In the same age grouping, the percentage of those who identify as Christian stands at 49 percent. The percentage of nones for people ages nineteen to twenty-nine, though we don’t have exact figures, stands at about 42–43 percent. We are approaching the time when emerging adult nones will numerically surpass emerging adults who identify as some form of Christian. If the trend lines continue at about a 1 percent gain per year, we are two to three years away from that seismic shift in the majority religious identification of emerging adults in the United States transitioning from Christian to unaffiliated, with unaffiliated at more than 45 percent of the emerging adult population and Christian-affiliated emerging adults at less than 45 percent. The drift away from Christian affiliation is steady and substantial, and shows no signs of reversing. By 2026, more than half of emerging adults will likely be unaffiliated. Religious Shifts Between 2007 and 2019 Prior to this latest research, others had also been sounding the alarm that many in this age range were leaving their faith.8 Since many churches are developed primarily with families with children in mind, the elongated path of emerging adulthood, according to Robert Wuthnow, now means “it is now more likely that a teenager may drop out of his or her congregation after confirmation at age thirteen and not feel the same urgency about participating again until he or she is a parent at age thirty-five.”9 For these reasons, reaching emerging adults and aiding their faith formation has been a growing concern for parents, campus-ministry workers, pastors, and others across the country. IS IT A NEW STAGE OF LIFE? Jeffrey Jensen Arnett was the academic researcher who first proposed the phrase “emerging adulthood.”10 He found after adolescence young people seemed to be entering a new phase characterized by identity explorations, instability, self-focus, feeling in-between or in transition, and an age of possibility when they seemed to have “an unparalleled opportunity to transform their lives.”11 The term emerging adulthood arose out of research as the phrase people being interviewed were using to describe the process or journey they were traveling.12 During this season, “emerging adults...