Feature Article: Winter 2008
The now generation
Calling out youth also calls for congregational vulnerability and risk
by Melanie Zuercher
The time was early July 2001 and the place was Nashville, Tenn., where delegates from Mennonite Church and General Conference Mennonite Church congregations would take the “final” vote on integrating the two denominations into Mennonite Church USA and where Mennonite youth were also holding their biennial convention.
Deb Schmidt, pastor of First Mennonite Church in Hutchinson, Kan., was there with members of the congregation’s youth group. One constant of working with youth is that they will always manage to surprise you, and this was no exception.
“We had been talking in youth group for a long time about integration issues—how homosexuality played into it, differences in structures [between the MC and GCMC],” she remembers. “When our kids got to Nashville and found out that the youth convention wasn’t going to be talking about these things, some of them decided to sit in on the adult delegate sessions.”
In another way, however, this doesn’t surprise her at all. Schmidt began serving First Mennonite as an interim pastor in September 1995 and moved into the lead pastor role in February 1996. Through Christmas of 1998, she worked on a pastoral team with Michelle Krehbiel, youth pastor.
After Krehbiel left, Schmidt and the congregation “made a conscious decision not to have the youth group be some ‘satellite church,’ something almost separate, but to be fully integrated into the life of the congregation.” That’s one reason that, although Schmidt has worked with two other associate pastors since then, and both have had some responsibilities with youth and young adults, there has been no other designated “youth pastor.”
And at First Mennonite, high school- and college-age youth are very much involved. As those youth at Nashville demonstrated, they have learned that participation in the life of the congregation—and the wider church—is “just what church members do.”
Several years ago, the congregation’s Peace and Justice Committee—borrowing freely from the practice of a sister congregation, Eden Mennonite Church in rural Moundridge, Kan.—started asking each high school senior to write an essay on any peace-related topic, from interpersonal communication to global issues, and present it to the congregation. In return, each one would receive a scholarship to use for the college he or she planned to attend. Perhaps even more important, the congregation got to know its youth in deeper ways. This was especially significant because a number of the youth who are still involved as college students and young adults only came to the congregation as high school seniors, often brought by their friends who had grown up at First Mennonite.
“Somewhere along there,” Schmidt continues, “it became unofficial church policy to have a college student be one of our delegates to the MC USA convention. The congregation made a financial decision to pay all expenses for this delegate.” First Mennonite sends one or two high school students as delegates to the annual meeting of Western District Conference as well.
In recent years, another way of “pulling the college kids back in,” Schmidt adds, is to have them be the Scripture readers for the “lessons and carols” service traditionally held the Sunday before Christmas and to ask them to come back and preach during the summer, which many of them do. “This keeps them in front of the congregation and reminds us who our college students are,” Schmidt says. “And it keeps them connected to us.”
The concrete ways that First Mennonite calls on the gifts of its youth and young adults has paid dividends, but it was not something that happened quickly or necessarily easily. “One important part of the process has been the tradition of telling faith stories, which began as a summer thing,” Schmidt says. “It has become normal for kids to see people from the congregation stand up on a Sunday morning and talk about faith issues” in a very personal way, she says.
The faith stories, she says, have demonstrated to the youth that “it’s OK to be vulnerable in front of each other. It doesn’t mean people don’t get hurt, but there is a holding and a support there [from the congregation]. You open your heart and speak your most tender thoughts and they’re held and respected.
“All of [what First Mennonite does] is part of a larger way of understanding the church—all the generations and all the people are involved in the body. That’s part of the meaning of discipleship.”
The Aging Church
In 2006, the Young Center at Elizabethtown (Pa.) College conducted the most comprehensive survey ever done of Mennonites in the United States. Many of its findings were published in The Mennonite earlier this year and were also part of a workshop at the San Jose convention.
One thing the study showed is that the average age of Mennonites today is 54. More important, however, was evidence of rapidly shifting age distribution. In 1972, 54 percent of Mennonites were under age 45 (within childbearing age). Today, this number is only 30 percent—a more extreme change for Mennonites than even for mainline Protestant denominations, described in a recent study of American Christians as “literally dying out” because of similar changes in their age distribution. (See “A rapidly aging membership” on p. ? ).
The Young Center study indicates that “the young people are absent from church,” Schmidt says. “Why is this? Well, there are a lot of reasons, such the search for identity and so on.”
She recently sat down with some of the church’s college students to talk about the study and its findings. “I took them to task,” she says. “I said, ‘You don’t have the luxury—none of us do— of dropping out of church to find your identity.’
The youth have been involved in church from the beginning. They are the church when they are in junior high or even earlier.
“Of course, they’re not unique in this,” she continues. “Everyone has the ‘drop-out stage.’ My generation did. We had to get out so that we could then ‘choose’ the church for ourselves. But the church is in a different place than when I was a 20-something. It’s basically ‘You’ve got 20 minutes to figure out who you are, because we can’t afford to give you 10 years any more.’”
So how do today’s youth get their chance to choose? “That’s why involvement from the getgo is crucial,” Schmidt says. “At First Mennonite, they’ve been involved in church from the beginning. They ‘are the church’ already when they’re in junior high or even earlier. They develop an ownership well before they’re in college.”
This, she says, represents “a fundamental shift. This isn’t ‘their parents’ church’ that they have to opt into. It’s theirs and it always has been. You just figure out how your role changes and evolves as you grow and change.
We have to give them a lot latitude in the congregation to work out their faith issues
“It means we have to give them a lot of latitude in the congregation to work out their faith issues,” she says. “We have to listen, to be patient and honest. We have to be honest about our own faith issues—to risk multi-generational vulnerability. We have to name the issues— homosexuality, wealth, whatever—and share our struggles, in front of them. Otherwise they won’t feel like the church is a safe place to work out their own issues. That’s why the faith stories are so important.”
One result of First Mennonite Church’s intentional involvement of its youth and young adults is that “because the congregation sees the kids function like they do, it’s easy to pick up on their gifts and talents,” Schmidt says. “Our church has been very good at this—sometimes overly good, the kids say.
“You plant seeds year after year, and after a while, they start to say, ‘OK, we get it.’ We’re learning to say, ‘You don’t have to go to seminary—just be involved, be a congregational leader.’ We’re not asking for ‘just attendance’—we want their first and their best.”
Melanie Zuercher, Newton, Kan., is the writer and editor for the Office of Institutional Communications at Bethel College in North Newton. She is a member of Shalom Mennonite Church, Newton.