Guest essay by Josh Graber, developer pastor of the Altyear program:
Forthcoming in Connect: The Journal of Youth & Family Ministry
One of the lessons I learned as a youth director and one of
the lessons I’m sure any one that works with youth has also learned is that
youth aren’t dumb. They play dumb
sometimes, sure, and they may even seem to play dead sometimes, right in the
middle of what you think is a great lesson, but they are usually
listening. They are paying attention
even when it seems like they aren’t. And
late at night during a lock-in or traveling back from a mission trip, when you
get that chance to talk with them one-to-one, they will reveal a whole world of
ideas, emotions, and faith that you probably could not see on the surface.
Youth are not dumb.
They notice things, they are curious, they pay attention. And so when youth look around the church and
see a lack of young adults. When they
see their fellow youth group leaders, graduate from high school and go off to
college or the work force or their parent’s basements and not show their face
in a church and not connect with a faith community, they know that this time in
youth group has an expiration date and as the curriculum of church culture
teaches them so does their time in a faith community.
The least common demographic in church involvement is young
adults. Statistics back this up but any
youth group participant could tell you that too. We as a church do many great things for youth
and provide opportunities for young adult leadership as camp counselors, campus
ministries, and service leadership in places other than congregations, but it
is leadership that churches and youth rarely see, and even when they do see
these examples, they may not translate into a faith that is a daily experience
and a life changing call.
Youth need to see that the young adult years are not years to
spend away from the church. Years to
graduate from the need for faith communities.
This is the time that faith communities most need to step up to support
the human growth and contemplation of major life decisions and personality
formation that occurs during young adult years.
We need to be there for young adults and if we are connecting with young
adults, and the church and world sees that, it will be the best possible way to
engage youth who are ready to grow up but not ready to grow out of the
faith. Youth are not dumb and care more
about their faith communities than they will admit.
PUBLIC CHURCH: A VISION OF WHAT’S NEXT
I have had the privilege to work with the leaders of
Lutheran Year programs like Young Adults in Global Mission, Lutheran Volunteer
Corps, Urban Servant Corps, and Border Servant Corps. Along with the great tradition of Youth
Encounter these ministries have given support and a transformative community
experience for young adult Christians for decades and now we are working
together to share these experiences more openly and publicly to the rest of the
church and especially so that youth can see that there are opportunities for
them to live out their faith even more deeply when they finish their youth
group years. This winter we will begin a
push to let churches and youth groups know more about these opportunities.
For the most part these experiences are seen as service year
opportunities, but there is room for new ideas and models that can reach young
adults that may not see the church as having anything to offer them more than
membership in a club that is owned and operated by older generations.
PUBLIC CHURCH: ENGAGING THE CHURCH AND CULTURE IN ABUNDANT
LIFE
ALT Year is a new model that creates space for young adults
to boldly live out their faith with peers, the church, and society. ALT stands for Abundant Life Together and it
is a call for all people in our church to live into the abundant life Jesus
came to give us (John 10:10) a life full of joys and challenges, faith and
doubts. It takes what has often been
seen as the major weakness of our church, a lack of young adult participation,
and gathers a critical mass of young adults in a specific location making it a
strength for area congregations to gather around, support, and learn from.
The young adults participate in service leadership at area
congregations, ministries, and nonprofits, they connect with mentors who teach
them a skill or help them pursue a vocational interest, they have bible studies
and do spiritual practice exercises with area pastors, they learn life skills
like cooking, financial management, and group dynamics. They pursue intellectual growth connected to
faith conversation through texts, films, and speakers around monthly themes
like Freedom, Imagination, Community, and Vocation. This abundant way of living and learning is a
relational “grade-free” model based on a 150 year old Scandinavian
Folkehøgskole Tradition that values learning for learning sake and treats life
as a curriculum.
PUBLIC CHURCH: FAITHFUL CITIZENSHIP
ALT Communities also gather around the strengths and
resources of the community that hosts them.
Our first site in Toledo, Ohio chose to focus on “Faithful Citizenship”
because of its rich political tradition, its placement in the state that
determines all presidential elections, the placement of the host church in the
midst of the government plaza in downtown Toledo.
The windows of the ALT Room in Saint Paul’s (the host church
for ALT Year Toledo) looks out on the courthouse, the police station, and the
government center, with the Toledo Blade Newspaper building and the Valentine
Theater in the periphery. I like to say
that this Faithful Citizenship site is planted in the middle of every season of
the Wire (an HBO Series about the interconnected participants in civic life in
Baltimore).
In one of our first sessions I looked out on the government
center and saw that the flags were lowered so we had a discussion and prayed
for those affected by the shootings in Washington D.C. Most of our sessions and prayers are
interrupted by the sound of sirens passing by whether going from a police
station, hospital, or fire house to help someone in need. The sirens are a constant reminder of the
needs of the community and to pray for those that are suffering.
PUBLIC CHURCH: MEETING COURAGOUS LEADERS
One of the values that we hold up in ALT is “Courage”. Courage is what is lacking in our
church. Our belief is that if our church
leaders were better at embodying courage, especially the courage to change,
courage to create something new, our voice among young adults would be
magnified. When we talk about a Public
Faith we should understand that this is a faith defined by the courage to speak
into a culture that may not understand or agree with us.
The ALT Year participants are introduced to courageous
Christians from our tradition like Luther and Bonhoeffer, who followed their
faith even to the point of risking their lives. They learn about the prophets of the Bible
and the Prophetic Imagination that has called empires to tension points of
transformation. They identify leaders around them or from their past experience
that they also see as courageous and willing to stand up to the status quo in
order to help others and follow their calls faithfully. We learned about Martin Luther King Jr.,
Oscar Romero and the musician Rodriguez, a Detroit musician who affected the
end of apartheid through his music.
Learning the courage to speak and to take action are areas that the
group needs to be challenged in and they often challenge each other to live out
their faith more deeply. But the best
way to be inspired to live out a courageous faith is to meet people that live
out their faith in courageous ways in the very moment of our own context.
Our first Faithful Citizenship Session happened to be on the
first day of the government shutdown this fall.
One of the hopes of ALT Year groups and especially this one in Toledo
focused on Faithful Citizenship is that these young adults may be able to give
older generation a better model for dialogue than what they see on TV and hear
on the radio from D.C. and elsewhere.
The polarized paralysis of government this year was evidence of the
need, but the group in Toledo got to see first hand that change is possible through
civic action and living into a role of public church participants.
Early on the morning of the shutdown our ALT Facilitator
gave me a call telling me that her husband, a local pastor at Salem Lutheran in
Toledo’s Northside neighborhood was organizing a trip to visit politicians
offices with some of his parisioners, in order to advocate for the poor who he
said would be most quickly affected by the shutdown. I pondered how involved to get in the action. Our pilot group is made up of a pretty good
cross section of the American political system from anarchists, to liberals, to
conservatives. We invited Pastor Vince
to come talk with us along with his parishioners and they let the group know
why they felt this action was important and was part of making their faith
active and engaged with the world.
One of the ALT Participants joined them at their Toledo
action where they attempted to go to a Senator’s office. They had media cameras with them and when
they were denied, the media revealed that the senator was meeting with
corporate lobbyists at the same time in Washington D.C. Vince was in the middle of a news story and
in the middle of being public church.
He came back at the end of the week and shared the
experience of the group and the news footage from local TV about the Toledo
event. At the same time he was
presenting, we learned that the Senator, perhaps in need of good publicity had
begun floating compromise bills conceding some points to the opposition party. I doubt the compromise went anywhere, but
thanks to Pastor Vince sharing his action with us, the young adults is ALT Year
were able to see first hand what being Faithful Citizens could look like and
how these actions of lived out faith can make an impact and a chain reaction
that we may not see at the beginning.
PUBLIC CHURCH: BEING COURAGEOUS LEADERS
Too often we wait to act until something else happens. We wait for the reaction as a link in the
chain, but don’t know how to start it.
It’s my hope that the young adults who go through ALT Year will be
exposed to so many people who practice an active public faith that they are
able to easily live into the same faith.
But more than copying the best of our Christian example, I sincerely
hope that these young adults will be able to lead us with good courage and
creativity to new ventures of faith. And
that those actions and lives of faith are public to the people that most need
to see their future in those lives of faith…our youth.
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