Meeting Young Adults at Their Points of Tension

Growing up in the 21st century is a scary proposition. With a rapidly-changing job market, contradicting narratives vying for attention, and an unstable romantic landscape, a young adult’s desire for success often gets downgraded to something much more basic: a desire to survive. Today, the prospect of leaving home, securing a job, and finding a life partner seems harder than ever before.

However, churches are in a unique position to offer valuable direction in what can feel like a disorienting time. By addressing their tension points, churches can assist young adults with love, truth, and the grace of Christ.

Here are four of their areas of concern:

1. “Making It” in the Adult World

The transition from adolescence to adulthood is longer and more complicated than it used to be. Previous generations used to find a long-term job, buy a house, marry, and have kids all in the span of a few years. Now, young adults often take decades to do so.

The Great Recession, the emergence of freelancing and the gig economy, and the coronavirus pandemic have all shaken up the job market. As the market shifts dramatically and frequently, so do many people’s careers. Meanwhile, the competitive nature of social media tempts young adults to feel like others are flourishing while they are floundering. (After all, they look so happy in that touched-up picture!)

While this ever-evolving work environment would be challenging enough to handle on its own, young adults are also struggling with the second part of the previous generations’ lifestyle: getting married and starting a family.

2. Unstable Romance

The pursuit of a romantic partner is where young adults’ dilemmas become particularly harmful. They crave love, marriage, and family. But they are also afraid of instability: what if I change my mind about this person? What if they change their mind about me? What if they’re as messed-up as I am?

Popular culture both urges people to pursue love and sex and celebrates freedom and individual autonomy at the same time. Movies extol the magic of short-term romance that culminates in a kiss or a wedding, but say little of value about sustaining a marriage over decades. Young adults are often left unsure how to reconcile a desire for fulfilling companionship and a desire to prioritize their own individual freedom. Many crave intimacy without vulnerability and commitment. As a result, young people are more cautious about relationships. Some studies even show that they are less sexually active than previous generations. The Atlantic, for example, dedicated a cover story to the current Sex Recession stating:

“People now in their early 20s are two and a half times as likely to be abstinent as Gen Xers were at that age; 15 percent report having had no sex since they reached adulthood… About 60 percent of adults under age 35 now live without a spouse or a partner. One in three adults in this age range live with their parents, making that the most common living arrangement for the cohort.”

The matter of raising a family is yet another concern, as many who were raised in unstable families now struggle with insecurity and anxiety about starting their own. These changes in both the employment and romantic field have made becoming an adult in the 2020s a significant—and sometimes existential—challenge.

3. Contradictory Desires

Humans are complex beings at any stage of life. But current young adults face the cross-currents of youth and maturity, desiring both at once. Many wish to find their way in life but are afraid to leave their parents’ home. They long to excel in a profession but also maintain a flexible schedule and a number of hobbies. They desire to commit to one person while keeping their options open. And when they do leave the nest in pursuit of these things, they likely find themselves going from place to place to search for them.

In a major survey of young adults today, sociologist of Notre Dame Christian Smith states:

“Numerous dimensions of the culture of emerging adulthood—uncertainty about purpose, delaying settling down, the individual as authority, amorphous relationships, strategic management of risk, the tentativeness of cohabitation, aversion to moral judgments, reluctance to commit to social and political involvements and investments—reflect and reinforce their interest in maintaining as many live and promising options as is feasible.”

Yet many still feel unfulfilled and unsettled. In her hit song “I’m Like a Bird,” Nelly Furtado sings to someone she apparently loves, but largely reveals her insecurity, her fear of her ephemeral heart, and the sense that she will eventually change and leave her current lover behind. The chorus of this song expresses the spirit of a generation:

“I’m like a bird, I only fly away.

I don’t know where my soul is,

I don’t know where my home is…”

As a result, many are prone to commitment-phobia. Today’s young adults often feel like birds who only know how to fly away in perpetual pursuit, like the dove which could not find a place to land before it found Noah’s ark, with no firm place or soul or home to return to.

4. Forgiveness and Hurt

Another tension point comes from the ways young adults deal with each other—particular when it involves suffering and hurt. Today, there is a curious mix of ethical permissivism and moral outrage, a live-and-let-live ethos living alongside cancel culture. Young adults often hear, “Do whatever you want. Everything’s cool if nobody gets hurt.” But such different worldviews are bound to conflict with each other. Many even have different definitions of what “hurt” means. And when someone does feel hurt, they don’t know how to redeem the situation, forgive others, or heal their hearts. There is, instead, an aggrieved, all-caps “HOW COULD YOU?!” toward others instead of civil discussion about what is wrong and what is right.

Timothy Keller writes that,

“Our own contemporary Western society gives its members no explanation for suffering and very little guidance as to how to deal with it… The end result is that today we are more shocked and undone by suffering than were our ancestors.”

Unfortunately, this has left many young adults not only feeling like they have trouble in their work life or love life, but feeling like they have trouble even relating to each other at all.

Serving Young Adults with Love, Truth, and Grace

The combination of these tension points means that young adults battle overwhelming emotions as they are pulled in multiple directions by their desires and the culture around them, all while having few resources to truly guide and help them. Christians can do that—and we should be at the forefront in serving young people today with love, truth, and grace.

Churches can provide welcoming communities where young adults can find acceptance, community, and love. When people in their teens, twenties, and thirties find adults to admire, healthy friendships, and fraternal love, they feel like they can finally breathe. The church can serve as a parent and a family that models a more humane way of life.

After coming into contact with a life-giving environment, many young adults cherish hearing the truth even when it is uncomfortable. They long for a counterpoint, for faith-as-protest against the dehumanizing assumptions that used to govern their lives and their relationships. Their eyes sparkle when they hear the gospel not being preached in a vacuum but being contrasted with other worldviews.

Finally, love and truth often lead to grace. When young adults see their tension points being addressed, they begin to get a glimpse of a better way. They begin to see how it might be possible not just to survive the unique troubles of their age, but to navigate them with wisdom and hope. The communicated and incarnated gospel of Christ starts to make sense. Hope starts to appear possible—and after it, faith.