More on Emerging Adults

This past week I started reading After the Baby Boomers: How Twenty-and Thirty-Somethings Are Shaping the Future of American Religion by sociologist Robert Wuthnow (who wrote Habits of the Heart in the '80's). Wuthnow, the Gerhard R. Andlinger '52 Professor of Sociology and director of the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University, believes that the church needs to get its act together in understanding this group or it will suffer significant attrition over the coming years.

He writes,

Congregations could be a valuable source of support for young adults. They could be places where young adults gravitate to talk about the difficult decisions they are facing or to meet other people of the same age. Congregations could be guiding the career decisions of younger adults or helping them think about their budgets and their personal priorities. But, again to anticipate the evidence in subsequent chapters, this potential is often going unrealized. It will continue to go unrealized as long as congregations invest in youth programs for high school students and assume this is enough. It will also go unrealized if congregational leaders focus on their graying memberships and do not look more creatively to the future (13).

He uses the word, tinkering, to capture how young adults address religion and spirituality. He does not intend a negative connotation for this word which it sometimes carries; on the contrary he writes, "Tinkerers are the most resourceful people in any era" (13). A number of influences such as globalization, less job security and more social instability have led to this age group as tinkerers.

In the next installment of this book I will review the second chapter which deals with seven key trends that religious leaders need to understand if they are to understand and adjust in ways that will impact this generation.