The Diaconate of Young Adulthood

by Jason Sierra

Three years ago this Pentecost I found myself worshipping at an open-air church on the Garden Island of Hawaii: Kauai. I had flown down to interview for the position of youth and young adult minister at one of two Episcopal Churches on the island. I was 25. As it was a half-time position I spent much of my visit seeking out other part-time gigs: outreach coordinator for an HIV/AIDS service organization, Spanish teacher at a local private school, hula dancer… Meanwhile, I knew my brother was driving the streets of Houston, Texas dropping off small bundles of the first-ever issue of a photocopied ‘zine we were calling Episcorific. Inside the front cover it read:

“The big idea? Young adults are not big churchgoers generally. Our lives are hectic and often unstable. We are at the mercy of the education system, bud­ding careers, frequent moves, and our own indecisiveness. We are justifiably self-involved as we try to make our place in this world, define the bounds of our lives. But for many of us the church is an important site for that self-creation, a place of expanding the me-box to let God in. So, this is just another attempt at bringing the few, the brave, the young adult Episcopalians of this diocese into closer communion.”

Self-effacing, folksy, and tongue-in-cheek, the ‘zine nonetheless was an honest call for community, if community “in transition.” Tired of waiting for our generation’s “faith manifesto,” we decided to build a forum from which it could be written, a space carved out within the church for us to speak: openly, honestly, creatively, together.

13 issues later, I’ve finally realized that the creation of the forum itself and not the words written there was in fact the manifesto, the manifest reality, for which we were looking: a space for young adults to authentically and fully engage the church even while they wrestled wholeheartedly with the questions of young adulthood: Who am I to be? Where am I to live? With whom? Where do my values lie? Who can I trust?

We, as a church, often see the double-commitment of young adulthood—fully immersed in the world and struggling to make sense of faith—as a weakness and a challenge. We all too quickly assume the attitude we developed fifty years ago. We’re afraid and overwhelmed, under-formed and content, and so we say, “Let them drift. They’ll come back.” But in reality, they won’t, and both they and we will be poorer for it.

The reality is that the socially acceptable options for authentic spiritual life today are infinite. If young adults prioritize spirituality at all, they will have the world’s religions to choose from, and in the end they’ll probably develop their own path, built from bits and pieces they’ve collected along the way, often with only episodic guidance, mentorship, and community. As a young adult, I know this is not satisfying. It is not enough.

As Episcopalians we struggle with the word “right.” We call it humility to deny an “exclusive” hold on truth, but all too often, in an attempt to be accommodating we underplay the tremendous gifts we have to offer, and we forget the transformational nature of sustained commitment to community and the spiritual processes that happen therein. We forget that through the structures of our tradition we actually do create space for the Spirit.

One such structure we’ve undervalued in the latest iteration of our tradition has been the diaconate, a station of incredible freedom and commitment. In Acts 6, the Seven were sent out to share the word of God. The diaconate is commissioned to lead the charge outward, to authentically and courageously forge the connections between the world and the church, to care for the widow and orphan on behalf of the church, and to challenge and expand the limits of the church’s embrace to include that same widow and orphan within the holy community. The diaconate is that liminal space where the world and the church overlap in a single process of integration, of blurring the boundaries, exchanging and translating information, practices, and values. In essence, it is the rightful place of the people of God, ever widening the embrace of Christ’s body on earth.

In some ways young adults cannot help but to occupy just such a process and a social location. Perched precariously on the border between an institutional culture trying to uproot itself from the 1960’s and find fertile ground in the 21st century and the popular and evolving cultures in which they have come to consciousness, theirs is necessarily a work of translation. Of both world and church, we would do well to affirm both identities. Now, embracing and making space for that reality is a scary thing for many in our communities, the earnestness and the immediacy of the struggle of young adulthood is fiery and often unsettling. We’d rather keep it at arms length until the flames die down, until the iron is forged, the metal cooled.

Our society is so outcome-driven that it can become difficult to sit with any process, especially one so unfinished. But that is precisely what it means to be sacramental people, to allow the mundane, immediate, and unfinished to become the holy and eternal.

Young Adulthood is a sacrament, and I’d venture, a sacramental diaconate. Young adulthood can and should represent for us an outward and visible sign of the grace that is continually tearing down our temple walls to build the kingdom broader and wider than we could ever have imagined. Young adults can be a living sacrament of the community’s vocation as a process; a reminder and a call to engage the world with passion and excitement, knowing full well that God’s kingdom lies just over the horizon.

Like the formal diaconate, the sacramental diaconate of young adulthood does not somehow absolve us of our responsibility to serve, sending “them” out to build houses and work in food pantries, while we finance and pray. Instead, as sacrament they remind us of the way in which we are called to engage the world: to proclaim the Gospel in our own voice, to call out from the back of the Church “Yay God! Now let’s go!”

Our call in working with, ministering to, and alongside young adults is to honor their vocation, to create forums for exercising that vocation, and to feed the depth of their curiosity with the richness of our traditions. This is done knowing full well the dangerous consequences - for both young adults and the church more broadly - that we might, just might, be carried into the world rejoicing in the power of the Spirit.

Jason Sierra is the Officer for Young Adult Leadership and Vocations at the Episcopal Church Center. He is based in Seattle, Washington in the Diocese of Olympia and a member of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church.

Resources

Episcorific: A web ‘zine for and by young adults. Read back issues here. The publication is currently going through a period of re-formation and will relaunch in Advent 2011.

The Seven: Sponsored by the Association of Episcopal Deacons, The Seven is a pre-discernment discernment program for young adults interested in exploring the diaconate. Over ten months, participants will meet regularly with a cohort and mentor, engage in theological exploration, and develop a project in their community.

Episcopal Leadership Institute for Young Adults: A new initiative of the Office for Young Adult and Campus Ministries, the institute is currently working to create short term immersion experiences for small groups of young adults around areas of advocacy and ministry of particular interest to them. Past topics have included Gender Justice and Middle East Peace; upcoming topics include Immigration, EcoJustice, Art and Faith, and Public Health. Find out more at http://www.episcopalchurch.org/109462_107663_ENG_HTM.htm

Young Adult and Campus Ministries: Check out other great opportunities for 18-30 year olds and those who serve them in the Episcopal Church. http://www.episcopalchurch.org/109462_ENG_HTM.htm http://www.episcopalchurch.org/campusministries

Resource Library: Offers resources related to curricula and vocational discernment as well as a link to
Broadcast, the e-letter of the Office of Young Adult Ministry. http://www.episcopalchurch.org/109462_43859_ENG_HTM.htm

The Six Years That Got Lost

by Ed Ziegler

For several years now I have been working with youth and young adults in the Diocese of Texas.  Every year I volunteer to teach a few courses for the summer Christian Leadership Conference for high school aged youth from around the diocese.  These students are the ones who have shown an interest in their faith and spirituality as they progress through high school and feel a call to help develop the future for youth and young adults in the diocese.  I have been working with the idea of “Life After Youth Group” when teaching at CLC.  What does life after youth group look like?  What does it mean for each of us?  What can we do to make it what we want and need it to be?  

We know as a church there are commonly several years lost in our youthful spiritual journey.  From the ages of 16 – 22 we start to see youth making their own choices about what their spiritual journey looks like.  They are no longer being told what to do and listening, or what to think and listening.  It is the age where we must make our own conclusions about what our faith life means to us.  Is this my church or my parent’s church?  Is this what I believe or what I was told to believe?  How does my faith work with the life I am living now?  

The students I work with at CLC are the ones who have shown an interest in continuing their faith journey by participating as they move from high school into college, but even some of them get lost along the way.  Why is this?  Do they not feel free to ask the questions?  Do they think they have to have all the answers?  Do they know it is ok to question along the way?  I recently heard from a new Episcopalian that it was refreshing to hear clergy say that they did not have all the answers. We are always growing. Scripture is always changing in what it means to us at each moment. Every time we hear a prayer it touches us in a different way.  Youth need to know this is ok.  The best way for them to stay active in their faith is to keep asking the questions and questioning the answers.  This is the only way to keep moving forward on the journey.  We have to keep learning as we go.  Youth making the transition to college have even more choices to make and life is changing even faster so it is hard to stay in touch with faith.  There are many ways to stay engaged, but the church must do it’s job to keep the young mind interested.

 

In my course on life after youth group we talk about how to find a new church and how to stay connected to your home parish. It is a choice to go to church or get involved.  In college there are many pressures for time and it is hard to pick church over sleep.  Being active in faith is like an exercise program, it has to be a habit.  Once out of practice, it is hard to go back.  If life in youth group was good, we need to encourage youth to stay involved, perhaps to become a sponsor and help out.  Encourage them to write back to their home parishes to keep them informed on what they are doing, to join a new church and volunteer and most of all, to be an example for friends and make attending to their faith a habit.  

Ed Ziegler is the Youth and Young adult Minister at Trinity Church in Houston, Texas