Complex Migration Into Adulthood
A young adult’s migration from adolescence to adulthood is an important stage of defining identity. I think of the young adult stage as a period of transition and development - a “complex migration.”
It is complex in that it is not possible to identify one defining moment or influencer that stimulates this transition. Contributing factors come from a milieu of social, familial, religious and psychological influences. Smith and Snell in their study of young adults describe this complexity:
Perhaps the most pervasive, consistent theme in the lives of emerging adults is the fact of their frequent and varied major life transitions. To an extent matched by no other time in the life course, emerging adults enjoy and endure multiple, layered, big, and often unanticipated life transitions.[1]
It is a period of migration in that the young adult’s identity as a human being is moving out of one way of existence into a new way of approaching life. Just as the people have migrated from one geographic region to another, young adults are moving from adolescence to adulthood. This movement is reminiscent of westward expansion of the United States in the 1800s or the colonization of the Americas by Europeans in the 15-19th century. Like these, young adults carry with them familiar practices and values. Yet, when confronted with new realties, old practices no longer work. They are forced to create new ways of existing and coping while migrating from dependency to freedom.
Childhood and adolescence are built on a dependency model. Before adulthood, an individual is dependent upon authority structures around them for safety, education, nourishment, faith development and emotional nurturing. As an individual matures, society and family afford them more options and responsibilities and experience a great deal of autonomy. Young adults face changes in life structure and the way they are externally connected to society.[2]
The young adult period of life is the transitional stage of life, typically during the ages of eighteen to twenty-nine, when an individual traverses the complex migration from adolescence to adulthood. They are asking themselves important questions: “Who am I?” and “Where am I going?” Young adults migrate through an ever-changing landscape filled with uncertainty in a secular, smaller, self-segregated, and stressed world. Like early pioneers who left the comfort of the known to travel west into the unknown, they are both confident and terrified.
They feel the need to distance themselves from authority structures of their youth, yet in establishing their own identity, they want to maintain former attachments while finding new voices to inform them. Globalization has opened their eyes to new peoples and new opportunities. In regard to belief and faith, secularity has created a cross-pressured system where competing faith plausibility confuses them. Anxiety and stress are voiced by young adults at unprecedented levels as the result of this complex migration as well as Covid-19, global and local violence, and economic uncertainty.
During this complex migration, we as church leaders, cannot add pressure. The church must be willing to embrace the messiness of the migration and not turn on the young adult who asks questions. As they distance and establish their own identity, we hold them loosely by the hand. We help them keep their eyes on Jesus, the ultimate source of authority in their lives and allow them the space to learn to follow Him at their own pace and comfort. We create faith environments where young adults can flourish. To create those environments, we must ascertain what kind of participation young adults have in the church today.
Footnotes:
[1] Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults (Christian Smith and Patricia Snell), pg. 34.
[2] Fred Wilson, “Teaching Young adults,” in The Christian Educators Handbook on Adult Education, Kenneth Gangel and James Wilhoit, eds., (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1993), 191.