The Seventh-day Adventist church in North America is peering down the barrel of a crisis that could destroy it: the church’s young adults are missing.

The numbers are telling—an estimated 1 to 2 million former and inactive Adventists live in North America, writes Monte Sahlin in a 1989 church ministries report. The report conservatively estimates that about half the dropouts fall in the 20-35 age range. Compare North America’s 400,000 to 450,000 active members, people who attend church at least once a month, with the estimated 1/2 million to 1 million missing young adults.

Baby boomers have found themselves the primary object of the church’s too-little, too-late efforts to boost its holding power. But the problem’s center of gravity is rapidly shifting to an adjacent generation so distinct from boomers that the two age-groups often clash in the conflict and competition of their own brand of generation gap. The long-nameless 18-29ers, born in the early ‘60s to mid ‘70s, are emerging on the horizon as a force with which both the church and society at large must reckon. And with their increased impact and definition, they have shed anonymity to become a generation with a name—several, in fact. Call them twentysomethings, Generation X, or by the derogatory title baby-busters, only recognize that this generation, now pouring into the mainstream of society, is destined to profoundly affect its future. But how twentysomethings will shape the church—and how the church will influence them—may be a moot point if the church fails to somehow capture their hearts and imaginations.

The attrition of twentysomethings from the church cannot be quantified by numbers alone. The church is losing a core of talented, educated young adults. Sahlin writes that

The surveys paint a portrait of a dropout who grew up in the Adventist faith, a younger adult who has gone through a divorce or never married, has few friends in his or her local church, holds a professional position or white collar job that is very demanding, and does not find that the program of the local church meets his or her needs.

The reasons have little to do with theology and much to do with human factors such as relationships, respect and common concerns. This is clear from the Valuegenesis study, commissioned in 1991 by the North American Division’s Board of Education to study the values of Adventist young people and to determine factors in Adventist homes, churches and schools that nurture desired values and faith. The report identifies four central effectiveness factors related to strong faith and loyalty in Adventist young people. Local churches received low marks in 2 areas—“thinking climate” and “caring, supportive leaders and teachers.” For example, only 12 percent of 12th graders in the Pacific Union rated their congregation’s thinking climate highly, and only 30 percent rated its warmth highly.

Active young adult members also indicate dissatisfaction. A recent Adventist university graduate, active in student leadership and publications on her campus, identifies negative perceptions of the church repeatedly expressed by peers:

• Experiences that have caused bitterness toward the church, such as cold treatment by members.
• Cover-ups of ethical misconduct of church employees and faculty in Adventist educational institutions.
• Dictating of standards instead of teaching of moral principles.
• Inconsistencies between church teaching and practice.
• Closed-mindedness on the part of the church institution and its members. Students indicated great frustration regarding this point: “Questions our education taught us to ask are dismissed as heresy.”
• Perception of mediocrity and lack of professionalism in church institutions and workers.
• Discouragement at slowness of change.

With regard to this final point, the Valuegenesis study recognizes “an emerging consensus” that institutional structures, particularly Adventist congregations, need “a great deal of change.”

From Programs to People

If one thing more than another characterizes the twentysomething generation, it’s that it can’t be characterized. “The idea of a generational culture is itself largely a byproduct of the considerable leisure and prosperity that young people enjoyed in the ‘50s and ‘60s, together with the existence of overarching causes like Vietnam,” writes Alexander Star in “The Twentysomething Myth” (The New Republic, January 4 and 11, 1993). Star continues,

How can one generalize about a group that is said to be politically disengaged and politically correct…technologically savvy and unconditionally ignorant, busy saving the planet and craving electricity and noise, prematurely careerist and proud to be lazy, unwilling to grow up and too grown up already? As young people acquire adult responsibilities and adult vices at an earlier age, their distinctness as a group diminishes. They do not stamp a unique sensibility on society so much as mirror its disarray.

Furthermore, twentysomethings seem “more comfortable with diversity than any previous generation” (“Move Over Boomers,” Business Week, December 14,1992). And having grown up on media and advertising, they are cynical of approaches that attempt to mass-manipulate them.

The implication here is that as an initial reach toward twentysomethings, the church must concern itself with individuals and individual differences, rather than stereotyping groups. It might even need to take a long, hard, reconciling look at that dirty word “pluralism,” not only to tolerate it, but even to help it along. Church members and leaders must understand that any effective overture toward twentysomethings will fail to reach all or most of them, but only small groups or individuals at a time. There is no quick fix, no single solution. The age of the program has passed. The time is here for being individual, genuine and human.

Growing Faith

Esquire magazine’s recent poll of 1,000 college students on 27 campuses indicates widespread openness of twentysomethings toward higher purpose. Seventy-three percent of those polled believe in God, and more than three-quarters think “we are placed on this planet to serve some greater purpose.” These general-population statistics nudge the church in the direction of one of its primary functions—to nurture faith maturity.

Valuegenesis defines faith maturity as “a process, not a product …Much more than a set of right beliefs, it is a way of life…reflected in the priorities, dispositions, and behaviors of people.” The study identifies the following core dimensions of faith:

• Trust in God’s saving grace; belief in Christ’s humanity and divinity.
• Sense of personal well-being, security and peace.
• Integrated faith and life.
• Spiritual growth through study, reflection, prayer, discussion.
• Fellowship with a community of believers who support and nourish one another.
• Life-affirming values, including affirmation of cultural and religious diversity and commitment to racial and gender equality, as well as to healthful living.
• Commitment to social and global change to bring about greater social justice.
• Consistent, passionate service of humanity through acts of love and justice.

Many Adventist members have grown into middle-age and seniority with a child-level faith maturity, an experience characterized by rigidity, sentimentality, inability to make independent moral judgments, and the need for an authoritarian structure to plot personal belief, ethics and spiritual experience.

This immaturity not only diminishes the richness of these members’ experiences, but renders them incapable of offering spiritual nurture to other members. And adults with immature faith may perceive those who probe, question, and press the boundaries as a threat to Adventism.

“The research seems to indicate that the majority of those who drop out of church do not think they have lost their faith,” writes Lutheran researcher Robert Stuenkel. “They often state they do not need to be church members to be believers.” Concerned Adventists need to seriously consider the possibility that many young adults are leaving the church because they are unable to find in it the kind of faith development and spiritual nurture they need.

How should the church meet this need? By providing social opportunities? Entertainment? Babysitting? Job counseling? Fun trips?

Maybe. But in order to nurture faith development, church leaders and members need to understand the developmental processes young adults face—uprooting and resettling, developing intimacy, making vocational and relational decisions that will reverberate throughout life, establishing patterns that will affect the future, and—most critical of all—discovering meaning, pattern and integrity in one’s own life. And, of course, a byproduct of nurturing faith maturity in young adults is that their senior mentors may also grow and mature in their own faith journeys.

Listening Leaders

Church members and leaders who hope to influence the variegated generation we call “twentysomethings” must learn to listen to them, to what they say about their lives and experience, who they are, who they want to be and what they say about the church.

Listening is a risky form of caring because it implies a commitment to respond with actions as well as words. “We are committed to change,” says one union conference administrator. “We want young adults to see that something really does happen when the church listens.” But if nothing happens, these people will feel again that the church isn’t really hearing them. It is just pretending.

Many already feel this way. They point to the church’s slow progress in areas such as human equality, effective management and academic freedom, plus its perceived obsession with minutiae. “Many people have recognized these problems for years,” writes one young professional, “but we don’t see that anything is being done about them.”

“Within each human person,” writes David Augsburger, “there is a deep need to be heard as a real person, a person of importance who merits attention and respect” (Caring Enough to Hear and Be Heard). Failing or pretending to listen to others dehumanizes them and conveys the message that they are invisible, unimportant.

Many young adults say their congregations lack warmth. Are they talking about hugs, handshakes, and broad smiles? Or would they feel more closeness if church leaders and members opened their minds to them and listened? Many seasoned members and church workers have grown accustomed to finding the issue in “Who’s right?” and “Who’s wrong?” when the real questions begging answers are “Does anyone care about me?” and “Do you want a relationship?”

Victim of Success

For most of its history, the Seventh-day Adventist Church has placed a high premium on education. Insofar as it has done this, it now may find itself victimized by its own success.

“Adventists our age are more educated than ever,” writes a recent Adventist university graduate. “We get discouraged when the questions our education taught us to ask are dismissed as heresy.” What kinds of questions? She gives five examples:

“How do we know that God exists?”

“Why is the Bible considered a message from God?”

“How can the earth have been created 6,000 years ago when all dating evidence shows differently?”

“How can Adventists as creationists support their beliefs and defend them to evolutionists?”

“How much of the Bible should be read literally and how much of it is legend?”

“We aren’t so much searching for answers from the church as we are searching for the right to look for these answers and still remain Adventists.”

Educated young adults—and others—do not ask these questions to tear down faith. Rather, they hear them in the world around them. They ask because they take their faith seriously enough to explore it, to make it strong, intelligent and their own. Before internalizing one’s faith, the most difficult questions must be discussed. These questions may be more complex than those of previous generations. Young adults ask the rest of the church to be honest enough to thoughtfully face their questions with them, to join them in a faith for today. To them, faith is not an object but a process, not a fortress but a journey.

Ellen G. White wrote:

There is no excuse for anyone in taking the position that there is no more truth to be revealed, and that all our expositions of Scripture are without an error. The fact that certain doctrines have been held as truth for many years by our people, is not a proof that our ideas are infallible. Age will not make error into truth, and truth can afford to be fair. No true doctrine will lose anything by close investigation (Counsels to Writers and Editors).

The process of faith maturity is an intelligent process engaging the whole person. It manifests itself uniquely in each individual and generation. “Being sure enough in your heart of what is worth living and dying for is, indeed, a very different matter for the generations of students who dwell on the other side of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Vietnam, and Watergate,” writes Sharon Parks in The Critical Years. “Young adults must now search for meaning under a frayed and unraveling canopy. Bereft of a mentoring culture, these generations of young adults have, nevertheless, manifested intense, if tentative, probes toward meaning.”

Seventh-day Adventist beliefs hold a richness of meaning for this generation and the culture at large. But the meaning, largely obscured by conventional, unventuresome thinking on the part of church membership and leadership, is only dimly comprehended. Seventh-day Adventists are accustomed to supporting their beliefs on the basis of authority—the Bible and Ellen White. No coalescent philosophical framework for Adventism has been seriously attempted. Yet that seems to be what is needed if the church intends to communicate itself to coming generations and have any hope of relevance to society.

Adventism not only has no complete, thoroughly forged philosophical structure; most members don’t see the need for one. Rather, they think of philosophy as dangerous and destructive to faith. There’s no doubt that putting the big searchlights to the most fundamental issues of faith—the authority of Scripture, the divinity of Christ, the existence of God, the nature of reality—would change the church, perhaps a great deal. But doubt and seeking are essential elements of the faith journey.

It is within the power of the institutional church to validate and facilitate questioning as an important part of the development of a mature, resilient faith. Both historic Adventism and the Bible portray the Christian life as expansive and growing, not limiting, narrow, and exclusive. Adventist pioneers were open to “progressive revelation.” God’s intention at the Creation was for human beings to grow, prosper and live creatively and generously upon the earth.

Jesus, in his parables of the kingdom about growing seeds and rising bread and multiplying talents, reveals the expansive nature of the gospel. Jesus takes a little bread and a few fishes and feeds a multitude of people; he works with 12 flawed people to begin a worldwide movement.

The extravagant gift of salvation calls human beings to live fully, expansively, generously, always reaching to grow. In the words of the Old Testament prophet:

Enlarge the place of your tent, and let the curtains of your habitations be stretched out; hold not back, lengthen your cords and strengthen your stakes. For you will spread abroad to the right and to the left, and your descendants will possess the nations and will people the desolate cities (Isaiah 54:2,3).

As Seventh-day Adventists examine their relationship with the twentysomething generation, they would do well to consider this ancient challenge and promise.