John Piper Article
A third major social transformation contributing to the rise of emerging adulthood as a distinct life phase concerns changes in the American and global economy that undermine stable, lifelong careers and replace them instead with careers of lower security, more frequent job changes, and an ongoing need for new training and education. Most young people today know they need to approach their careers with a variety of skills, maximal flexibility, and readiness to re tool as needed. That itself pushes youth toward extended schooling, delay of marriage, and, arguably, a general psychological orientation of maximizing options and postponing commitments.
Finally, and in part as a response to all of the above, parents of today’s youth, aware of the resources often required to succeed, seem increasingly willing to extend financial and other support to their children, well into their twenties and even into their early thirties.
The characteristics of the 18-30 year-olds that these four factors produce include:
(1) identity exploration, (2) instability, (3) focus on self, (4) feeling in limbo, in transition, in-between, and (5) sense of possibilities, opportunities, and unparalleled hope. These, of course, are also often accompanied by big doses of transience, confusion, anxiety, self-obsession, melodrama, conflict, and disappointment.
How Should the Church Respond?
1. The church will encourage maturity, not the opposite. “Do not be children in your thinking. Be infants in evil, but in your thinking be mature” (1 Corinthians 4:20).
4. The church will foster flexibility in life through living by faith and resist the notion that learning to be professionally flexible must happen through a decade of experimentation.
7. The church will provide inspiring, worldview-forming teaching week in and week out that will deepen the mature mind.
8. The church will provide a web of serious, maturing relationships.
9. The church will be a corporate communion of believers with God in his word and his ordinances that provide a regular experience of universal significance.
12. The church will provide leadership and service roles that call for the responsibility of maturity in the young adults who fill them.
13. The church will continually clarify and encourage a God-centered perspective on college and grad school and career development.
14. The church will lift up the incentives and values of chaste and holy singleness, as well as faithful and holy marriage.
15. The church will relentlessly extol the maturing and strengthening effects of the only infallible life charter for young adults, the Bible.
In these ways, I pray that the Lord Jesus, through his church, will nurture a provocative and compelling cultural alternative among our “emerging adults.” This counter-cultural band will have more stability, clearer identity, deeper wisdom, Christ-dependent flexibility, an orientation on the good of others not just themselves, a readiness to bear responsibility and not just demand rights, an expectation that they will suffer without returning evil for evil, an awareness that life is short and after that comes judgment, and a bent to defer gratification till heaven if necessary so as to do maximum good and not forfeit final joy in God.
http://www.desiringgod.org/ResourceLibrary/TasteAndSee/ByDate/2007/2487/
Finally, and in part as a response to all of the above, parents of today’s youth, aware of the resources often required to succeed, seem increasingly willing to extend financial and other support to their children, well into their twenties and even into their early thirties.
The characteristics of the 18-30 year-olds that these four factors produce include:
(1) identity exploration, (2) instability, (3) focus on self, (4) feeling in limbo, in transition, in-between, and (5) sense of possibilities, opportunities, and unparalleled hope. These, of course, are also often accompanied by big doses of transience, confusion, anxiety, self-obsession, melodrama, conflict, and disappointment.
How Should the Church Respond?
1. The church will encourage maturity, not the opposite. “Do not be children in your thinking. Be infants in evil, but in your thinking be mature” (1 Corinthians 4:20).
4. The church will foster flexibility in life through living by faith and resist the notion that learning to be professionally flexible must happen through a decade of experimentation.
7. The church will provide inspiring, worldview-forming teaching week in and week out that will deepen the mature mind.
8. The church will provide a web of serious, maturing relationships.
9. The church will be a corporate communion of believers with God in his word and his ordinances that provide a regular experience of universal significance.
12. The church will provide leadership and service roles that call for the responsibility of maturity in the young adults who fill them.
13. The church will continually clarify and encourage a God-centered perspective on college and grad school and career development.
14. The church will lift up the incentives and values of chaste and holy singleness, as well as faithful and holy marriage.
15. The church will relentlessly extol the maturing and strengthening effects of the only infallible life charter for young adults, the Bible.
In these ways, I pray that the Lord Jesus, through his church, will nurture a provocative and compelling cultural alternative among our “emerging adults.” This counter-cultural band will have more stability, clearer identity, deeper wisdom, Christ-dependent flexibility, an orientation on the good of others not just themselves, a readiness to bear responsibility and not just demand rights, an expectation that they will suffer without returning evil for evil, an awareness that life is short and after that comes judgment, and a bent to defer gratification till heaven if necessary so as to do maximum good and not forfeit final joy in God.
http://www.desiringgod.org/ResourceLibrary/TasteAndSee/ByDate/2007/2487/
posted by Steve Neola at 3:03 PM
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