We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's dam is the history we make today.
- Henry Ford
It caught my eye because once again I am reading a book on generational hoohaa. After the Baby Boomers: How Twenty-Somethings Are Shaping the Future of American Religion by Robert Wuthnow. I have only just started it, but it is interesting enough. I won't burden you all with Wuthnow's ponderings very often. But todays passage was interesting to me. He's trying to find an easy (?!) metaphor to understand the 30 year generation of people from born between 1965 and 1995. Since there is no singe earth shattering event to define them (Depression, World War etc), he needs a metaphor. He's also trying to walk the tightrope between rigidity and relativism. So, he offers this:
The single word that best describes young adults' approach to religion and spirituality - indeed life - is tinkering. A tinkerer puts together a life from whatever skills, ideas, and resources that are ready at hand. In a culture like ours, where higher education and professional training are valued, tinkering may have negative connotations. But it should not. Tinkerers are the most resourceful people in any era. If specialized skills are required, they have them. When they need help from experts, they seek it. But they do not rely on only one way of doing things. Their approach to life is practical. They get things done, and usually this happens by improvising, by piecing together an idea from here, a skill from there, and a contact from somewhere else.Ford's quotation, assuming he's not simply talking about assembly lines and child labor, expresses an attitude that is often laid upon young adults of every generation. Wuthnow wants to undo this perception. And he suggests that the posture of relativism is also not the reality for young adults either. Tinkering, cobbling together from a variety of spiritual traditions, the attempt to be orthodox and heterodox all at once, all to meet the practical need of a healthy spiritual life is what is at work. Kabalah, Buddhism, yoga, and free church protestantism can all find their way into an individual's spiritual tool box.
"Individual" is the key word here. Wuthnow does not take the approach that this generation is tremendously different in attitude than others. He says that the issue is that this generation lives cut off from structured community (church, village, career) longer than any previous generation. If one assumes that people will deepen involvement in church etc when they get married and have kids, and Wuthnow does, than it's important to realize that 70 years ago that was at the age of 18. 50 years ago that was 22. Thirty years ago, that was 26. Now the average age is much older. Only 46 percent of women and 31 percent of men have kids by age 30 (year 2000 statistics), compared with 77 percent of women and 65 percent of men of the same age in 1960.
People will spend the majority of their lived lives before having kids etc outside of a spiritual community. They will make spiritual choices as individuals, tinkering, cobbling things together. Then they will, statistically, find their way into a church...a collection of spiritual notions and a strong sense of the individual existing without community...
...more later. I've just started reading this book.
Posted by tripp at July 9, 2008 06:41 AMI think the last paragraph is an interesting observation, and a better view of the prime differentiator between generations. Of course, it has always been a truism that children bring parents back into the church. I fear though that the selfishness associated with single, childless economic existence in America will limit the ability of this group to ever truly desire community. It will possibly be their children who rebel against this cocooning isolation and form the next true iteration of congregational spirituality.
Posted by: Rich at July 9, 2008 08:43 AMRich, I think you hit the nail on the head. The generation (1965 - 1995 according to this guy) learn to function as individuals and without a specific intentional spiritual community...Why would they suddenly come to church when they have been doing so well on their own? There's no good reason for them to do so. What this guy also suggests is that their kids will be lost, too...because they will have no exposure whatsoever...or they will be an focus for conversion.
That being said, the book is supposed to go on to suggest ways of ministering with/too this generation. The church structure in America has been geared to families. Perhaps that has to change in order to meet the tinkerers where they are. This has been the failure of the church at large. We are waiting for people to come back as opposed to going out to look for them.
Posted by: Tripp at July 9, 2008 09:23 AMI agree with the second part of your comment about us being the searchers. But I believe that community and family focused ministries are where the need is more than ever with this group of people who don't understand what they are missing. I know you dislike the application of business principles to church growth, but I think it is integral to future success if done with the proper motivation and values. Good marketing principles suggest that organizations can unlock demand if they can access and define the unrealized need. Real Christianity is about community and mutuality. Somehow, a message needs to be crafted that separates the need from the notion of "church" in the popular connotation to avoid stereotypes while you are accessing the feelings of the target audience. Then, as they begin to see the need, the repositioned church is introduced as the place where the need can be met.
Of course, this is theoretical and would be much more complex in scope, but, at the end of the day, it is the same model that fueled the mega churches as they brought the late boomers back to the fold. They defined the solution differently than we would, but the concept is the same. X's aren't all that different than Boomers in their twenties were - distrusting institutions etc.... The difference is that they stay that way longer and then begin to calcify in that phase of life rather than in the young family stage. We need to get them to put that cycicism to the side long enough for the power of community to work its magic.
Posted by: Rich at July 9, 2008 11:37 AMAgreed. But it's not about asking them to have kids earlier. It's showing them community...an intentional (Christian) spiritual community...and finding ways to get them in the door for just that kind of encounter. You describe it well.
It's not just that they calcify in their cynicism. It's that they make all the Big Decisions without our "brand" of community. So, why do they need it at all?
Posted by: Tripp at July 9, 2008 11:48 AMAre they making big decisions without the connection to church? Are more young people getting married in civil ceremonies when they get married or are they finding churches? Just because everything happens later doesn't mean it is changing all that much - it's just deferred. I think you underestimate how alienated Boomers were from church in their time. It was just shorter.
I believe in echoes. But as those emotional echoes get fainter due to time and a lack of reinforcement, churches need to be more manipulative in getting them to resound again. If they are true, they will be there, and if they are not, they will die away.
I am reasonably sure that the key to this is to somehow tie self-reliance to selfishness - maybe "you" don't need others right now, but others need "you" and the denial of that is selfish. It is in giving that we receive. Then, we tie the message to the messenger and suggest that there may be more to receiving the gifts of others as well. Voila - a faith community regenerates.
We shouldn't need to ask why they need what Christian community has to offer - we had better know that. What the real question should be is what is blinding them to understanding the need. If we believe what we espouse, this is not about the value proposition we present - it is about helping people recognize what we know. Although this sounds arrogant, it really doesn't have to be. On the other hand, to declare anything as true will be viewed as arrogant by most people, including me. But any organization has to believe in itself before it will look attractive to others, even if the beliefs it holds are amorphous.
Posted by: Rich at July 9, 2008 12:08 PMThe thesis of the book suggests that people make these Big Decisions without the "guidance" of a specific religious community. Thus the overall shrinking of denominations, congregations etc. They learn to live without for so long that there is less impetus to return than even the Boomers had. The dynamic is the same, only more pronounced. Thus a smaller percentage returns to church...due to the duration and the lessening cultural reliance/expression upon/of organized religion.
Again, this is the book not me. I'm gonna continue to read it and see what he explains.
Posted by: Tripp at July 9, 2008 12:14 PMWow. Why would I have the least interest in continuing contact with an organization that considers me "selfish" and "cynical" because I'm the age I am, have no children, and am not married?
That's your idea of a marketing strategy?
Posted by: Megan at July 10, 2008 10:01 AMThus we have articulated the Boomer/X'er etc divide.
Posted by: Tripp at July 10, 2008 12:35 PM