What do baby boomers want from the Seventh-day Adventist church and what will they contribute to it?
Baby boomers are the nearly 77 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964. They crowded the schools and hospitals in the 50s and 60s. They were teenagers who wanted longer hair, livelier music, shorter skirts and more liberal social policies.
Boomers are educated. Most graduated from high school and 25 percent graduated from college. Another 25 percent have some college experience. Most have white-collar professional careers. Seventy percent of boomer women work outside the home. Boomers have re-defined most societal institutions they have touched, including the family and the workplace. Their divorce rate is high, resulting in more single-parent families, and a great demand for convenience and quality in child care, services and goods.
This has influenced the boomers agenda, and they have at least four major expectations for the Seventh-day Adventist Church.
First, boomers want a congruent church�one that practices what it preaches. A major focus is standards. Adventist boomers are more interested in the principles behind the standards than in the standards themselves. Boomers consider standards to be applications of principles and thus open to modification as time and culture require.
Second, boomers believe in equality. They can appreciate Adventism's theological basis for the equality of all human beings. Yet many have a problem with the church's slowness to express that equality in church life. Some steps have been taken, but boomers will not rest until the Adventist church affirms not only the equality of all races but the equality of both genders. A major item here is the inclusion of women at all levels of church polity, including the ordained ministry.
Third, boomers are still idealists, believing that those with much have a responsibility toward those with little. They first filled the ranks of the Peace Corps and the student missionary program in the 60s. Many still have a strong social consciousness and expect their church to be involved in fighting hunger, homelessness, prejudice and discrimination.
Finally, boomers are doers' participants and this includes their worship experience. Boomers appreciate worship that is lively and participative. They attend church to worship God. They do not want to sit passively in a pew watching others participate for them. In a world consumed by difficulties, they want to celebrate a God who stands by their sides in the midst of problems and encompasses them with divine arms.
What will they give in return for the above? They will give their idealism, their energy, their time and their money. Some say boomers will not commit. Not true. They commit money to their mortgages and car payments. They commit time to family and friends. They commit energy and idealism to causes they believe in.
When the church offers them a place to participate in a cause they can embrace, they will come and bring their resources with them. And all the church, the boomer generation and our world will be blessed.