FTE "On Call" Blog

Melissa Wiginton

Vice President for Ministry Programs and Planning

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May 18, 2009

Emerging and other young adulthoods

Sitting and waiting in the Houston airport one day, my father looked around and said to my mother, “Joyce, where are the beautiful people?” Well, last week I found a whole group of them having lunch in downtown Princeton, NJ: thin, fit, elegantly understated in dress, sophisticated in intellectual conversation and assured of their place in the world. It was quite something.

I was there for Princeton Seminary’s conference on “Emerging Adulthood,” a title taken from a book by developmental psychologist Jeffrey Arnett. Arnett claims—based on 300 interviews with people between ages 18-25—that he has identified a new life stage between adolescence and adulthood. Emerging Adulthood, he says, is an age of identity exploration, instability, self-focus, feeling in-between and many possibilities. EAs, as he refers to them, have a somewhat wary but yet robust optimism about their future. They believe that will find their soul mates and do meaningful work. Arnett endorses them: They are wise to explore before they marry and settle down—before they emerge as full-blown beautiful people. (That last part is me.)

Over breakfast, a pastor from Western Pennsylvania talked about the young adults who live in his town. He described the place as like an American Indian reservation: tribal, without economic opportunity, lots of alcoholism, dis-integrated families and not much hope for the present or the future. And yet, he says, the young people don’t leave. They stay with their tribe. They are not exploring; in fact, they are stuck. The median annual income for men from 18-65 was $32,000 according to the 2000 census, a time when young men could count on their uncles getting them jobs at the mill. Times have changed.

Another pastor from the urban Northeast told us about some younger people he knows—skaters, drug-users, drop-outs—who asked him, “Why are you here?” Not sure how they would react, he offered, “Because if Jesus were here, I think this is where he would be.” “Yeah,” one said, “Because we need him and they don’t.”

As Christians, we would agree. The skaters do need Jesus. But also, Arnett’s 300 emerging adults need Jesus and guys in Western PA need Jesus. Even the beautiful people need Jesus. We all need Jesus. Isn’t that obvious? Well, no, not to most of us most of the time—and this is where things get interesting. The ways we don’t know we need Jesus are particular to our culture and context.

Arnett shrugged off Columbia Theological Seminary professor Rodger Nishioka’s claim that EAs need for relationship is a need for God and that is the ground for a theology of ministry with them. Maybe they do, Arnett said matter-of-factly, but it is likely that they are meeting the need for relationship through ties with their parents, friends, and love partners, so not many are going to need what you are offering. No big deal.

Of course, the young people in the Western PA town are not going to church either. It’s probably not because they have their needs met in other places. The pastor said they are too different in lifestyle from the older folks to feel they belong. For them, there is no There there. (Thank you, Gertrude Stein.)

I think human beings do need Jesus, to enter into life with God, and I think this is a big deal. We need faithful, creative, even wily leaders from and in all the diverse particularity of young adults’ lives. We need them praying, paying attention and responding theologically and relationally to these realities. And they need to not be alone.