Formation

How to help young adults find holy ground in life’s in-between spaces

A lot of attention is given to whether young adults attend church or not. This topic deserves the focus it gets. Yet, when it comes to nurturing faith in young adults, I’d like to expand our gaze beyond the pews. 

A broader perspective is important because, although it begins by asking about young adults attending church, the answer continues beyond their initial steps through the church doors. For church leaders and congregations, it can be tempting to only notice or think about young adults in the stable, predictable spaces where they graciously show up on the church’s terms and schedules.

Our team at the Fuller Youth Institute has spent a dozen years researching effective ministry with and for young adults. We’ve learned from the young adults we’ve listened to that churches tend to focus on practices and programs that nurture Christian faith in stages of stability—when life is consistent, resourced, and predictable.

Often, good-intentioned attempts can send a subliminal message that young adults feel when their lives don’t align with churches. For example: 

• Small groups require long-term commitment—something young adults can’t make. 
• Church services happen only on Sunday mornings—a rhythm many young adults in junior jobs and roles don’t have the flexibility to attend. 
• Sermons generally address topics relevant to married people, parents, or established church members’ concerns, overlooking young adults’ formational needs.
• Young adults are pursued for their volunteer potential, but rarely as valued voices and perspectives. 

Perhaps this is why, even when young adults attend church, they often struggle to find a connection with Jesus (or with Jesus’ community). While in close proximity at church, their in-motion lives can feel light years away from others’ experiences. Caring adults want to discover new points of connection with young adults. We believe they’re found in young adults’ transitions.

Experiencing Christ in the midst of life’s transitions

Through our team’s research, we identified seven significant life transitions young adults are most likely to encounter: identity, relationships, responsibility, contribution, self-care, adapting, and making meaning. These transitions can feel sad because they require letting go of familiar ways of doing things. They’re scary because young adults don’t know what’s next. They’re exciting because they present a chance to experience something new. And they’re exhausting because they require extra effort and attention.

One finding we’ve learned from our young adult research is that experiencing these life transitions can also be deeply spiritual. In their unique moments of transition, young adults often ask questions about their faith: where God is, how God works, and what it means to live faithfully through new opportunities, challenges, accomplishments, and failures.

Young adults want to know God is with them as they navigate big changes in life. We can certainly invite them to the stable spaces where congregations meet and events happen. But let’s also encourage them to watch for God in their transition spaces—the late-night shifts, semester-end studies, messy breakups, family challenges, and friendship struggles where God may meet them in unique ways.

What if churches expanded their focus from helping young adults reach the pews to helping them connect with Jesus as their lives transition? Even more, what if Jesus is inviting church people to join him with young adults there?

This is more than hyper-positivity or wishful thinking. I believe it’s deeply theological. Transition is where spiritual transformation happens and experiences into which God invites each one of us. It expands our imaginations when we not only look for young people in our pews, but also consider how we join them in their transition.

Transition as holy space

“I started to realize that if [this new perspective] was true, it would change . . . everything.”– Samantha, 24

Hold this thought with me for just a moment: what if young adults aren’t problems to find and fix, but the very ones who lead us to see Jesus, who inhabits our transitions?

Among the Christian young adults the FYI team surveyed and interviewed, we observed that transition had a practical element, such as a specific issue they were working through. But their transition experiences also felt deeply spiritual—like they had an X-factor that defies simple explanation. 

If life’s transitions were merely logistical hurdles, young adults would only need a sermon or book on “ten steps to get through your next move, new job, break up, big decision, etc.,” and be on their way. But young adults themselves revealed that the transitions they’d experienced shook their core identities, hidden selves, long-term aspirations, and basic belief systems. Major life changes prompted them to reflect on how God worked or didn’t seem to, how their beliefs evolved, and how their faith transformed in the process. 

Life transition turns out to be more than simply a “rough patch” for young adults to work through. As Samantha reflected, it can “change everything.” 

Faith in motion

As I considered the seven transitions our research revealed from a Christian theological perspective, I began to see powerful connections to concepts like migration and pilgrimage woven throughout biblical narratives:

• In the Hebrew Scriptures, we see people leaving oppressive yet familiar Egypt to follow God toward a promised yet unknown land.
• In the Gospels, Jesus’ invitation to “follow me” assumes movement, in-betweenness, and transition (Luke 9:57-62). Even the Lord’s Prayer makes more sense for people on the move—daily bread for today’s journey, commitment to present faithfulness, hope for a better world even when you can’t see it yet (Matthew 6).
• The early church story in Acts chronicles constant transition as followers deconstructed and reconstructed their limited understandings of who the good news was for (“Even them?” asked the disciples. “Yes, everyone,” said the Spirit). Faith communities changed as they embraced an ever-inclusive vision of the gospel. 

Perhaps we need a renewed imagination that embraces a Christian narrative of the faithful in motion—people in transition.

God in motion

Here’s something fascinating: throughout Scripture, people experiencing life transitions often seemed more aware of God’s presence and provision than they did when they became settled. It was in the stable moments that idols emerged, devotion became distracted, and the privileged grabbed for power. 

Consider when the golden calf emerged or when the early churches received rebuke from Paul. The biblical story reveals an ironic pattern that it’s often in times of stability and comfort that God’s people find themselves in most spiritual trouble. The evidence suggests that our spiritual blind spots multiply not during our wandering, but when we think we’ve arrived.

If this is true, we can view young adults’ transition-filled twenties not as anomalies, but as a consistent part of the Christian’s faithful journey in seasons when we are less settled, less established, and less put-together. Even more, it may inspire our imaginations to notice that God is right here, too. As theologian Kutter Callaway suggests, divine presence is “dynamic and highly adaptable,” oriented toward being with people “amid their concrete, on-the-ground experiences, which almost always involve movement, disruption, and dispersion.” 

The God of motion runs with the people in motion. 

Moving with God

God moves with us, and Jesus reinforces this promise to his believing and doubting disciples that he would be with them (and us) “until the very end of the age” (Matthew 28:16-20). 

The good news for young adults (and all of us) is that they don’t have to suspend or solve their transitional lives to find God. God is not only in the stable spaces, but also with them right where they are—and perhaps more accessible in these thin, liminal spaces where young adults are the most open, desperate, even eager to hear God speak and lead them.

We, as adult ministry leaders, mentors, and parents, may need to worry less about “getting them to church” and more about inviting them to listen to what the Spirit is saying to them right where they are. 

You may argue that hearing the voice of God isn’t a solo endeavor and needs community to discern God’s voice. I agree. Young adults need you to help them discern God’s voice—so walk with them in their transition. Accompany them through their in-motion lives. Let go of stable solutions in stable places and offer whatever resource or power you have to nurture them as they navigate life’s changes. Join them where they are and where God is.

This is good news for young adults.

And I believe it’s good news for everyone.