* Adulting * is B A C K !
Last Friday night the young adults of Good Shepherd, affectionately known as the Adulting group, returned from a long hiatus to get dinner together and discuss the future at a local brewery in Oakland. While some familiar faces attended there were also some new folks to join the adulting community. It’s an exciting opportunity for these young professionals to build relationships, pray, explore God’s Word, and reach out to their peers with the Good News of Jesus Christ.
Adults. Young adults. Young adults in the Bay Area can be a tricky demographic to effectively engage in ministry. Often times they are a group that doesn’t come back to congregational life post-college. In other situations, they feel out-of-place in church settings that appear out-of-touch and strange in their professional or social worlds. In the Bay Area, the challenge is a cultural one for sure. Not as a result of culture wars or political divides per se but because the young adult professional world in the Bay Area resembles a mine more than the farm.
Have I piqued your interest? Let me explain…
The purpose of mining is to strip land of valuable resources and move on in a very short amount of time < > the purpose of farming is to cultivate land in order to produce valuable resources over a long period of time.
The allure and opportunity of the Silicon Valley draw many young, tech professionals into the Bay Area. Not a bad thing. Actually, this is an incredible resource we have in the Bay. However, the sticker shock cost of living, cultural chasms that exist (for out-of-state transplants) and the general grind of traffic on any freeway with the # 80 buy the greater population only about 3-5 years of these young professional’s lives. They strip the Big Tech landscape of resources like resume builders and invaluable job experiences to see that a long term commitment to any city along the Bay is almost certainly a pathway to burnout. So, instead, they glean what they can then move on, or move back to where they came from to start their small businesses or families closer to family or the comforts of childhood homes. While there are many challenges with this in the employment sector the hardship is even greater within the spiritual sector. Relationships are built over time. Faith matures over time. Community is formed over time. Three to five years just isn’t a lot of time.
Contrary to a mining mindset, what many churches in the Bay Area seek to instill is a farming mindset instead. How can we compel our young adults to stay just a few years longer? Embrace the tension and stick around and make a go of it in CA? Till the soil, water the seeds, pull the weeds, put down roots, see the long term possibilites that exist… farm the land. The best shot we’ve got is to cultivate a safe, healthy, and inviting landing spot for these solo or barely-coupled people to find community and a sense of purpose beyond paychecks and potent resume bullet points. In doing so, perhaps we buy enough time to show them a different perspective on the landscape of the Bay — one that can be invested in to bear fruit instead of stripped bare and left behind. Adulting seeks to do just that.
