Spiritual but not religious: reaching an invisible generation

Currents in Theology and Mission, Oct, 2002 by Roland Martinson

Welcome to a journey into a new time with a new generation. I invite you to engage the lives of the first postmodern generation in America. Using the research of sociologists and the theological lens of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, we will develop a conversation with the spirituality of this young adult generation. We will identify their giftedness, consider joining their faith journeys, and imagine possibilities for unleashing their gifts for ministry in Christ's church.

In November 1994, Peter Drucker wrote an article for the Atlantic Monthly entitled "The Age of Social Transformation." He argued that in one century, the United States had experienced three major economic shifts. The century began with over half of all Americans working either on farms or in agribusiness. By 1950, over half of American workers were either factory employees or in offices supporting those factories. By 1990, more than 75 percent of all American workers were either producing or transmitting information.

Drucker pointed out that Americans have been nimble in making the necessary economic transitions from one era to the next. America has not been as nimble, he argued, in reworking its social, moral, and spiritual life.

Others have studied and written about a cultural shift to this new time in the West. In 1979 Jean Francois Leotard wrote a small essay for the Canadian Government entitled "The Post-modern Condition, A Report on Knowledge." His work provided new language for describing the philosophical shift that had been talking place in Europe and elsewhere since the 1960s and helped a new generation find a common frame of reference within which to understand a shift in consciousness occurring in western civilization. Stanley Grenz's A Primer on Postmodernism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996) is an excellent presentation of a related condition or question: Is this a post-Christian as well as a postmodern era?

These descriptive and analytical works place a challenging question before the Christian church: What does postmodernity mean for how Christians go about living the faith today or dis-cerning the presence of God in the face of a new generation? Or, put more directly, How have we, the latest generation of the church's leadership, been doing theologically and strategically in participating with God in passing on faith to this next generation?

For the last forty years I have been tending this catechetical and evangelical task and working with the challenges inherent in these questions: Will our faith have children? Will our faith have adults? Will our faith have leaders?

During the forty years of my "watch," the bridge carrying children and youth from baptism to mature faith has become less and less effective. The Lutheran Church has become a prime example of "faith drift" occurring among mainline Christians.

Often people tell me that I ought not be concerned with faith drift among youth and young adults. Their argument is that faith drift has regularly occurred in young adulthood. The conventional wisdom is that young people will leave the faith when they are confirmed, turn 16, get a driver's license and go out on their own. These young drifters will wander in a spiritual wilderness for six, eight, ten, or twelve years and return to participate in faith life when they get married or have a child.

I've never quite been able to understand such logic. Why should it be "automatic" or accepted that our young adult baptized sisters and brothers in Christ develop the foundations of their adult life outside of the faith community? These are years when young women and men enter and develop their great intellectual powers, a time in which they are developing friendships that often last a lifetime. They are discerning their calling--finding their place in God's great work in the world--a calling that might well develop out of the giftedness God's Spirit is waiting to unleash within and through them. In this time of life they meet persons from whom many will choose a mate.

With such crucial life decisions at stake, is it not important that they worship or participate in the community of the faithful or engage in ministry? It is disturbing that the prediction that young adults return when they marry or have their first child has not come to pass among the Boomer generation, and it is not coming to pass for this first postmodern generation. Many Boomers and "Xers" have not returned but have simply swelled the ranks of the unchurched.

Other young adults, however, never leave the faith in which they were raised. In fact, approximately 10 to 12 percent not only don't leave, but lead. What is it about these people? Do they have a God gene? Will we discover that faith is, in fact, passed on physically and/or physiologically? Brain studies tell us there may be some physical influence; but my guess is that this is not fundamentally a matter of genetics.

I have chosen to listen to the voices of young people who have stayed with the practice of their faith. As I listen to their life stories, I ask: Are you spiritual? Is there faith in your life? As I listen to their faith stories, I ask: How does church or a faith community fit into your life?