College Union

A Long Adolescence in a Lame Direction?  Part 2

A recent edition of Christian Education Journal, a publication of Talbot School of Theology, focused on College and Young Adult Ministry (Series 3, Volume 5, Issue 1, pages 11-27).  One of the articles in this journal was written by Dr. Chris Kiesling, professor of Christian Discipleship and Human Development at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, KY.  The article, “A Long Adolescence in a Lame Direction?  What should we make of the changing structure and meaning of young adulthood?” is featured here in a series of three articles. 

The first article in the series laid the foundation for understanding the changing nature of when a person “reaches” adulthood.  Kiesling identified societal factors and discussed their implications.  This is the second article in the series, where Kiesling will focus on how Christian Education can tend the young adult life course. 

Dr. Kiesling’s article is posted here with permission of Christian Education Journal. For more information about the journal, go to:  http://wisdom.biola.edu/cej/issue/?i=70.

The next article in the series will identify best practices for spiritual formation for young adults as well as wrap up with some conclusions. 

(Kiesling’s Article)
Focusing Christian Education to tend the young adult life course
Not long ago I attended the Refresh Conference, a networking and training event for campus ministers sponsored by the Foundation for Evangelism. In the context of addressing the deep cries and longings of college students today, a hallway conversation took an intriguing and insightful turn. The friend I was talking with shared insights gleaned from a book authored by a mental health chaplain. I tried to reconstruct the conversation later: “Ever since Luther’s Reformation, we in the Protestant church have largely relied on words to communicate the gospel. Much of what we understand of God and His ways depend upon our capacity to communicate through written and spoken words. We emphasize the creeds as statements of belief; we focus the primacy of worship on the sermon; and we encourage personal Bible study. Although all are important, none are of particular help in ministry with the mentally challenged. In fact, the only way to present the gospel to those with limited intellectual capacity is for the people who daily surround them to become living incarnations of grace whereby something of the character of God gets mutually transferred.” 
It struck me in that setting that there are thousands of young adults who may be equally spiritually illiterate, not because they suffer an intellectual disability but a relational/spiritual one. The journey toward wholeness involves finding a spiritual community that fosters plausibility for the Christian life. Critical is recruiting the attention and insight of those who can mediate hope, mercy and grace in their journey toward discipleship in such a manner that it provides an embodied apologetic (Long, 2004). However, the national Spiritual Life of College Student’s study  from the Higher Education Research Institute (http://spirituality.ucla.edu/spirituality/reports/FINAL%20REPORT.pdf), reported that although more than half of all college students regard it as “essential” or “very important” for their colleges to encourage spiritual development, the academy rarely addresses these concerns. If the sociological crises predicated on fundamental changes to the life-course create problems of social integration and personal meaning among our young adults, what might focus Christian education in a way that tends the life course of young adults?
Trinity as the key to personhood
Each year I teach classes at Asbury Seminary aimed at equipping future campus ministers to function as practical theologians on the college campus and in churches as ministers with young adults. The early curriculum for the class is an introduction to Trinitarian theology drawn from several of Dr. Dennis Kinlaw’s presentations (Kinlaw, 2005). Kinlaw’s message, hardly done justice in an abbreviated format, proclaims that if God is fundamentally Trinitarian, then the key to understanding the nature of God is not to be found in His omnipotence, nor in His sovereignty, but in his relationality – His fatherhood. If so, then the key to relationship with God is not primarily a legal one (penalty paid for sin, being declared righteous under the law, justified), but something more relational and personal. The human predicament, and the subsequent anxiety of this generation originates fundamentally from distrust of the goodness of God and from separating ourselves from Him as the source of life. My colleague, Joe Dongell, recently imaged this as an astronaut on a space walk, who decides in the interest of liberation to cut themselves free from the mother ship, inevitably becoming totally preoccupied with supplying their own means for survival (Dongell, unpublished sermon).
To begin with a view of personhood that reflects being created in the image of a Trinitarian being, Kinlaw observes, is to recognize that “none of us are self-originating, none of us are self- sustaining, none of us are self-explanatory, and none of us are self-fulfilling.” Akin to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, any one of us can only be explained by the web of relationships in which we find our being (Kinlaw, 2005). The Trinity is love within the divine being itself; love is not something God does, but something God is. Sin or self-interest is the reversal of the nature of God, because it reflects a heart turned in upon itself. Sanctification therefore involves the re-orientation of the heart to reflect this love, becoming free of self-interest to offer oneself for the sake of someone else (Kinlaw, 2005). Holding Trinitarian theology in contrast to sociological currents in the culture as definitional for personhood provides a fertile and fundamental pedagogical dialectic for discipling young adults (Groome, 1980).
Koinonia as the formational center
As Trinitarian theology forms our understanding of personhood, so can it shape our pedagogical methods for forming and transforming young adults. E. Stanley Jones (1955), missionary to India, wrote a marvelous devotional commentary on the book of Acts, titled Mastery. Jones notes that if the way of salvation and kingdom living offered in Jesus was simply proclaimed we would only have words. To understand God we needed an incarnation so that we could see God lived out among us. We needed demonstration, and we were offered it in the person of Jesus. Then Jones argues that just as we needed the Divine Person to understand God, so do we need the Divine Order enfleshed so that we can grasp the Kingdom of God. The book of Acts offers a portrait of the Holy Spirit upon the framework of human living in such a way that we are given a demonstration of the Divine Order – “the Kingdom in cameo” (p. vii).
Jones (1955) points out that the Greek word for church (”ecclesia”) does not occur until Acts chapter 9. Although we celebrate the birth of the church at Pentecost, what is actually birthed in the early chapters of Acts, and what becomes the formational and missional center for the early disciples, is the fellowship (“koinonia”). Jones makes the case that as the soul is to the body, so is koinonia to the ecclesia. Koinonia gives life to the ecclesia; but when the koinonia loses its savor, “church” can feel as if it a body without a soul. There likely is no other period in the life course when the lifestyle patterns and developmental needs of people are conducive to forming and being formed by koinonia than the young adult years. I hesitate to regard campus ministries or young adult worship centers as ecclesia because such homogeneity in age is not representative of the whole people of God. Rather, I think they are koinonias, made up of those whose mobility and freedom for sacrificial commitment holds unlimited possibilities for birthing new demonstrations of the Kingdom of God in mission, mercy, social justice, evangelism, reconciliation, worship, healing and redemption. Like the book of Acts, the fruit of these movements can then emerge as a revitalized ecclesia.  
The summative work from the Commission on Children at Risk entitled Hardwired to Connect, provides scientific evidence that humans are hardwired to form the kinds of attachment represented in koinonia communities and that social bonding actually manifests itself bio-chemically in the way specific genes behave. The undeniable conclusion purported by the thirty-three scientists connected with the study, is that the crisis in America’s young with depression, anxiety, attention deficit, conduct disorders and suicide is fundamentally caused by: (a) a lack of connection to other people and (b) a lack of connection to moral and spiritual meaning. The commission makes an unashamed call for “authoritative communities” characterized by such dynamics as: a shared understanding of what it means to be a good person, a philosophy oriented to the equal dignity of all persons and to the principle of love of neighbor; work performed primarily by non-specialists, and encouragement for spiritual and religious development. These are helpful directives for ministers working at facilitating the conditions for vital koinonia in the educational context. Addressing community from a more theological understanding, my Christian Ethics colleague at Asbury, Christine Pohl (2008, forthcoming), has identified four key practices that shape authentic Christian community: promise-keeping, truth-telling, gratitude and hospitality. Each of these, Pohl notes, has its deforming counterparts of deception, betrayal, envy and grumbling. For ministers working with young adults embedded in the developmental task of consolidating identity with resolutions that promote a sense of fidelity (Erikson, 1963), sensitivity to such relational and contextual dynamics are crucial.
Missio Dei as the vocational ideal
In positing Trinitarian theology and koinonia as antedotes to cultural trends, a final parameter must be added. In a presentation referred to earlier, Dr. Kinlaw (2005) reflected on an article whereby he sought to name the core obsession Evangelicals carried across the 20th century. He determined that the predominant message spoken to the world has been an evangelistic word, namely the message “receive Christ.” To a great extent, he felt, the campaign has been a successful one. However, turning to the New Testament, Dr. Kinlaw noticed that the fundamental proclamation Jesus issued was not “receive Me,” but “follow Me.” Receiving far too often attends to what we get out of the relationship, inadvertently perpetuating the cultural narcissism of the age. However, Jesus’ call to “follow him” leads instead to a cross - a cross that moves our understanding of vocation from elevated individualism and self-absorption to sharing God’s burden in working for the world’s redemption.  
The sociological analysis offered earlier suggests that the conceptual itinerary most young adults implicitly follow leads toward responsibility for the self, autonomy from one’s family, and a greater sense of liberation. Campus ministers, wise in understanding, will honor these journeys toward maturity, differentiation and heightened agency. Yet they will also share the conviction and structure educational experiences that enable young adults to discover the joy and significance of participating in the missio Dei, or mission of God for the sake of the world. Missiologists keen on seeing mission as the organizing principle for discipleship are right on insisting that our Christology must shape our missiology, which in turn must shape our ecclesiology (Hirsch, 2006). Thus, the person of Jesus, who became incarnate and dwelt among us, patterns our life as missional to engage people within their cultural context rather than extracting them to a designated sacred space. The most innovative young adult ministries today are those experimenting with how to be incarnational, messianic and apostolic (Frost and Hirsch, 2003; Hirsch 2006). Indeed, when the fundamental understanding of vocation changes in the life of a young adult, they are re-storied into a different trajectory of what they might become. Following Jesus posits that the outcome of the developmental journey does not end in autonomy and achievement, but in centeredness, receptivity, surrender, and mission.
In light of the sociological shifts recorded in the first part of this article, it is predictable that the process of vocational discernment and identity will be a long process for many young adults. Those who traverse these waters best will be those who have around them mentoring communities and compatriots who encourage their moral visions and share together in a common life (Garber, 1997). The following passage from James Fowler (1984) offers a good description of what may be essential for the educational process:
…the shaping of personal vocation is a matter of corporate discernment and imagination as much as it is a concern of the particular person involved…Rather than thinking of one’s vocation as a kind of Platonic ideal form, waiting for us somewhere in the future, this kind of approach to the question of vocation urges us to take a frankly “negotiatory” stance…an approach that combines giving attention to one’s gifts and inclinations with careful listening to the Christian Story and vision, both in dynamic relation to the structure of needs and opportunities presented by the surrounding world. Vocation, in this case, is not found so much as it is negotiated. We shape a purpose for our lives that is part of the purposes of God by means of proposal and counterproposal, by means of inclinations and the nudges or real lures and shoves of the divine calling. Communities play a critical role in this process by providing relationship contexts where we are known personally (over time), where we are taken seriously, and where we are invited to submit our images of ourselves and our vocations to trusted others, who are informed by the communities ‘script’ and core story, for correction and confirmation. The community of faith at its best, is an ‘ecology of vocation.’ In a microscopic way, Christian community is a sign and anticipation of a universal community in which our callings will be complementary and where our talents, energies, passions, affections and virtues will coalesce in the praise and service of God (p. 103).

References

Arnett, J. (2006). Emerging adulthood: The winding road from the late teens to the twenties. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Baumeister, R.F. and Muraven, M. (1996). Identity as adaptation to social, cultural, and historical context. Journal of Adolescence, 19, 405-416.

Beck, U. (1992). Risk Society. Towards a new modernity. London: Sage.   

Blevins, D. (2005). The practicing self: A theory of personhood. The Asbury Theological Journal. 60, 9-22.

Commision on Children at Risk (2003). Hardwired to connect: The new scientific case for authoritative communities. New York: Institute for American Values. 

Côté, J. (2000). Arrested adulthood: The changing nature of maturity and identity. New York: New York University Press.

Côté, J. & Levine, C. (2002). Identity formation, agency, and culture: A social psychological synthesis. Mahwah, New Jersey: Erlbaum.

Crouch, A. (2003). Life after postmodernity. In Leonard Sweet (Ed.) The Church in emerging culture:Five perspectives. (pp. 63-100) Grand Rapids: Zondervan.

Dongell, J. (2007). How bad is it, Doc? Sermon for Holiness emphasis week at Asbury Seminary, September 17, 2007. 

Dunn, R, R, (2001). Shaping the spiritual life of students: A guide for youth workers, pastors, teachers and campus ministers. Downers Grove: Intervarsity Press. 

Erikson, E.  H.  (1963).  Childhood and society (2nd ed.).  New York: Norton.

Erikson, E. H. (1968).  Identity, youth, and crisis. New York: Norton.

Foster, E.M., and Gifford, E.J. (2005). The transition to adulthood for youth leaving public systems.  In Setterstien, R.A., Furstenberg, F.F., and Rumbaut, R.G  (Eds.) On the frontier of adulthood: Theory, research, and public policy. (pp. 501-533). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 

Fowler, J.W. (1981). Stages of faith: The psychology of human development and the quest for meaning. New York: Harper Collins.

Fowler, J.W. (1984). Becoming adult, becoming Christian: Adult development and Christian faith. San Francisco: Harper.

Frost, M. and Hirsch, A. (2003). The shaping of things to come: Innovation and mission for the 21st –century church. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers.

Furstenberg, F.F., Rumbaut, R.G., and Setterstein, R.A. (2005). On the Frontier of Adulthood: Emerging themes and directions. In Setterstien, R.A., Furstenberg, F.F., and Rumbaut, R.G  (Eds.) On the frontier of adulthood: Theory, research, and public policy (pp. 3-25). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.  

Garber, S. (1996). The fabric of faithfulness: weaving together belief and behavior during the university years. Downers Grove: Intervarsity Press.

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Groome, T. H. (1980). Christian religious education: Shaping our story and vision. New York: Harper and Row.

Hirsch, A. (2006). The forgotten ways: Reactivating the missional church. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press.

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Jones, E.S. (1955). Mastery: The art of mastering life. Nashville: Abingdon.

Kinlaw, D. (2005). (Informal conversations during a semester of round table talks called “Trinity on the Hill.”). Dr. Kinlaw’s formal presentation may be purchased from The Francis Asbury Society. 

Klapp, O. (1969). Collective search for identity. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc.

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Pohl, C.D. (forthcoming in 2008). Practices that make and break community (tentative title), Wm. B. Eerdmans.

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AUTHOR
Chris Kiesling (Ph.D., Texas Tech University)
serves as professor of Human Development and Christian Discipleship at Asbury Theological Seminary, in Wilmore, KY. 

Categories: Nurturing the Soul of the College Student
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