There are understandable reasons why churches start young adults ministries. But the bigger the ministry and the broader the age range, the bigger the potential downsides. Increasingly, since Covid, I’ve observed a number of churches now running such ministries. They are an addition to evening services, that have often been dominated by older high-schoolers, university students and young workers. What’s striking for young adults ministries is how variable the age-range this label encompasses. The label ‘young adult’ has a range of different usages. In human development it can mean everything after adolescence but before middle age. In literature ‘YA’ refers to books written for teenagers (but often read by those approaching middle age!). Among Australian Christians, the lower end of the ‘young adult’ label can be as young as sixteen years old (as with the CRCA’s national convention), and can stretch as old as thirty-five (as with C3 in Hobart).
Young adults ministry, like all targeted ministries, needs to be conscious of the theological and practical risks of the homogeneous unit principle (see also also here). However, if we accept that targeted ministries can have a healthy place in church life, there are some potential negative consequences in stretching the age-range of ‘young adult’ too wide, and investing in specialist ministry to this broad cohort.
Harnessing Social Phenomena for the Gospel
Young adults ministries (including those with large age-ranges) are effective for various reasons. Ministry tailored to or dominated by those from their late teens through their twenties is not entirely new. For the last forty years, ministries to university students (primarily emerging adults, under twenty-four years old) have grown significantly. In the same period, many evening services have functioned as predominantly young adults ministries. In some larger churches, there have even been multiple evening services with a series of targeted demographics: a congregation for young workers, another for university students. One of the significant forces in church planting during the last twenty-five years has also been young people in their twenties.
Economic and social changes have influenced behavioural norms in the twenty-first century: the result has been (sometimes unkindly) described as ‘extended adolescence’. Emergent ministry patterns understandably reflect social changes.[1] Disconnection and loneliness, already features of twenty-first century societies, were intensified by various Covid restrictions in the 2020s, having a major impact on teenagers and young people. Extra social infrastructure and support from churches in the form of a specialist ministry meets this felt need.
There are substantial differences between a nineteen-year-old and a twenty-nine-year-old. Still, the line between emerging adulthood (say, seventeen to twenty-four years old) and young adulthood (twenty-five to thirty-five years old) is porous. Friendship groups can span a decade, bridged by relationships with siblings, age gaps in romantic matches and so on. Although there is one major life change that separates those in this phase of life: the upheaval caused by having children (especially more than one child). In many cases, a childless person in their mid-twenties will have more in common with someone seven years older than them who has no children, than someone a year younger who does.
On the practical level of critical mass: defining young adulthood with a broad age span encompasses a larger group of potential participants, with all the benefits that come with a larger group. A group of eighteen-to-thirty-year-olds could be twice as large as a group of eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds.
Clearly, there are some good reasons for targeted ministries to the demographic of young adults broadly defined as something like eighteen to thirty years old. But in what follows I give a few words of caution. Even granted social and behavioural changes, how we respond requires a discerning mix of adaptation and critique. Despite all the potential for community, discipleship and evangelism, there good reasons to keep such targeted ministries in check, and to often focus our ministry attention on the narrower demographic of ‘emerging adult’ (i.e. seventeen to twenty-four years old).
Targeted Ministry to Emerging Adults
The broad definition of young adult as eighteen to thirty years old covers a twelve-year age range. That’s roughly the same as a K to 12 children and youth ministry! Of course there are much greater changes in development during childhood and adolescence than at later stages of life (middle age lasts for around twenty years, and retirement/old age can extend for thirty or more.) Be that as it may, there are still major differences between your average eighteen-year-old and your average thirty-year-old (how much more a sixteen or thirty-five-year old!). There are differences of lifestyle and experience, and therefore differences of needs and capacity.
Focussed ministry programs for emerging adults (around seventeen to twenty-four years old) are very strategic. This is the time of transition to adulthood, involving a gradual increase of new kinds of independence and responsibility (financial, legal, educational, spiritual, romantic), made more radical for those who move out of their childhood home. Although common life circumstances vary across different groups and locations, there are some major commonalities among emerging adults: many will still be studying or training, fewer will be in full-time employment; fewer still will be married, much less have children. There is great potential for a targeted work, making disciples and training up leaders among the next generation as they are first coming into adulthood. Such work can also establish partnership links with parachurch ministries working among university students and those entering the workforce, leading to synergy and fruitfulness beyond a single church.
Beyond the emerging adult age bracket, I suggest younger adults over the age of twenty-five can largely be served in general church life. In larger churches, this might usually take place in an evening service. The various specific evangelistic opportunities, and pastoral and social needs of ‘older young adults’ will be different than those of emerging adults. Various specific opportunities and needs might only call for occasional programs and events (for young marrieds, for those entering the workforce, for men and women etc), rather than a separate weekly, intensive and holistic fellowship.
From this point of view, a broadly defined young adults ministry ends up clumsily hosting several ministries to older young adults inside a strategic ministry to emerging adults— a young workers ministry, a young singles ministry and a young marrieds ministry. To pour a large amount of ministry resources, energy and programming into such a broad young adults ministry risks diluting the peculiar strategic benefits of focusing on emerging adults.
Moreover, keep in the mind legitimate critiques of targeted homogeneous ministries alluded to in the introduction. To foster thick and rich social bonds primarily among all those in their twenties is not necessarily best for the holistic formation of emerging adults. Beyond focussed and strategic input, it is overall better for emerging adults to have meaningful relationships with those who are twenty-seven, forty-seven and seventy-seven years old, rather than almost exclusively with teens and twentysomethings (the same could be said for those over the age of twenty-five).[2]
From Young Adult to ‘Adult-Adult’
In adapting to social changes influencing early adulthood, churches can fail to help emerging adults make the move into responsible adulthood, in every area of life, including church life. When do your young adults need to come to terms with the fact they are just ‘adult-adults’? When are they no longer part of the ‘next gen(eration)’ and they are just the current gen? Rather than simply accepting ‘extended adolescence’, we can guide our people through into responsible adulthood.
A vibrant broad young adults ministry can meet lots of real and felt needs among all those involved. It can be edifying and uplifting to those struggling with the rude shock of adjusting to full-time work, grieving the social life of their early twenties, worrying about what their future career and family life might look like. As participants in such a ministry grow older, we should pastor them towards discovering ways to meet these needs without the infrastructure of a specialised ministry. Healthy intergenerational church life is beautiful, and the benefits that come from twentysomethings immersing themselves in it will flow in both directions. Intergenerational small groups ministries can be as enriching to those in their late twenties as the young adults ministry’s breakout groups.
Even more powerful both for the church and for the individual is an emphasis on the role that serving has in our sense of belonging and spiritual health. An intentional ministry among emerging adults should work to set them on a trajectory of stepping up to build the church, in evangelism and edification; of giving not just receiving. Mature disciples discover that some of the best church community is tasted not in church programs but in ministry activity: in team meetings and working side by side. And mature disciples discover the blessing of the intergenerational fellowship they often experience in ministry teams and on rosters.
This raises the question of what ministry and responsibility is expected of those in young adulthood. Does your church set a vision that twenty-five-year-olds or twenty-seven-year-olds can be elders, deacons, churchwardens and parish councillors? Or is the cultural norm and implicit message that those under thirty should stick to youth and children’s ministry, music ministry and camping ministry?
The risk in leveraging the short-term gains of a large and broad young adults ministry is that we undermine the potential for ministry across the wider church. The sooner we can get our young adults to see themselves as adult-adults, the sooner we can enjoy the benefit of their presence, their gifts, and, for some, their leadership across the whole church.
Beware of Over-Programming
Lastly, there is the question of how young adults ministries are structured. Any ministry area that experiences success (uni ministry, young families ministry, summer camps) runs the risk of bloating in a way that threatens the balance of the church, and wider Christian community. A successful mid-week young adults ministry of the 2020s might run for twice as long as an evening congregation of the 1990s. Does the three or four hours in the former deliver twice the benefits of the ninety or 120 minutes in the latter? Time and energy are finite. Overprogramming in the successful ministry might be unintentionally robbing from other areas of church life, or wider denominational and parachurch ministries. There are contexts where it is strategic to invest more resources; there are occasions where it is strategic to ask what the minimal viable product is—can the same outcome be achieved, more or less, with half the time and effort?
Maintaining a broad young adults ministry with a wide age range harnesses social phenomena and can generate substantial momentum and enthusiasm. But I recommend a more narrow focus on emerging adults and caution about over-programming such specialist ministries. Ministry among young adults should work intentionally for the outcome of discipling them towards both natural and spiritual maturity, and towards active participation and service in church life as a whole.
[1] In the first half of the twentieth century, when a minority of people went to university, there were other youth ministries of various kinds that fulfilled similar roles to what campus ministries do now (such as the YMCA, Scripture Union, CMS’s League of Youth and Christian Endeavour).
[2] Where churches have the opportunity to build partnerships with parachurches for uni students and young workers, they ought to consider whether homogeneous church-based programming could be scaled back. The local church can make a bit more room for intergenerational fellowship, rather than doubling down on age-specific fellowship.
