Continuing Faith: Navigating Church Life After College
Before digital communication, the church and other institutions like it served as a central meeting place for adults. But today worship attendance continues to drop from its peak in the 1950s and 1960s, especially among millennials who now see church as one choice among many for how they spend their leisure time.
Young adults report that they are still looking for spirituality and community in combination, but are increasingly finding it at the gym, special-interest groups, in online communities or elsewhere.
They face many of the same challenges as previous generations, but they have so many more options—and having too many choices can also be paralyzing. The lives of young adults today are also much less certain because the world is changing so rapidly. The average young person is going to have five careers in their lifetime and about 14 jobs. That’s a lot of transition.
So what value do you the young adults who continue to regularly engage in worship communities—especially after the built-in spiritual communities that many students find in college—find in staying connected to a church?
Recent graduates have reported the importance they find in the friendships, music, and community involvement that churches offer.
Craving authentic connections
After Peter Severson relocated to Denver to work as director of Lutheran Advocacy Ministry–Colorado, he began looking for a congregation because it was important to him to care for his spiritual life. The lifelong Lutheran and former volunteer with ELCA Young Adults in Global Mission found his faith community, House for All Sinners and Saints, Denver, in the same way Baird and Hedberg did—through friends.
House is a growing, young ELCA congregation that describes itself as “queer-inclusive” and “social justice-oriented.”
For Severson, the authenticity found at House is key. “There’s a lot to be said about the authenticity and vulnerability people feel free to experience in [this] community and how faith animates people to be free in that environment,” he said. That’s what has kept him connected, and the relationships he’s made because of it, he said.
People and places that reflect the radical, inclusive love of Jesus are what today’s young adults are searching for in a congregation, said Don Romsa, ELCA program director for campus ministry.
“Some of our students who graduate and leave our campus ministry programs have difficulty finding a congregational home in which they feel warmly accepted and affirmed for what they have to offer,” Romsa said.
Instead, they look elsewhere for spiritual nurture. In fact, 2 out of 5 millennials say they find God outside of church walls, according to the Barna Group.
Leading across the church
Mission developer Ángel Marrero credits his home congregation for entrusting him with leadership opportunities that gave him “a sense of belonging in the church.” That is why he has stayed in the church, he said, even though many of his peers have left. While serving with the ELCA Caribbean Synod, Marrero said he never felt like “the token young person in the room,” but was treated as a vital member of the council.
Today, Marrero emulates this leadership model as pastor of Santuario Luterano, Waltham, Mass. He regularly invites millennials to fill leadership roles in the congregation.
In his life and at Santuario, Marrero has seen the power of authentic engagement in retaining young adults.
“[Many young adults] really aren’t hungry for more church structure, or smooth programming, or better praise bands, or fun social activities—they are hungry for the radical Jesus they discover in the Bible. In this Jesus, they see a God who is real—present on the margins, willing to shake things up, on the side of the lowly, choosing to die without status, and always radically loving us and the world.”
–Don Romsa, ELCA program director for campus ministry
Sources: Living Lutheran articles by Erin Strybis and Brian A.F. Beckstrom
