In the wake of the last few years of social justice work characterized by the rise of Black Lives Matter and the #metoo movement, the term "intersectionality" has risen in prominence. If this term is new to you, here is a simple definition:
 
The interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender as they apply to a given individual or group, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage. (For a more thorough explanation see the links at the bottom of the page.)
 
One of the ways we have pursued our mission of better understanding the relationship between young adults and the church is by examining intersections of privilege or lack of privilege.
 
The first summit we did with churches was focused on general diversity (ethnic, age, sex, etc.). It is often the first thing to come to mind when intersectionality is uttered. But we have studied other intersections in subsequent summits such as how the church treats artists and musicians (Spring of 2019), how the church treats entrepreneurs and innovators (Fall of 2019), and how the church treats non cis-het folks (Winter of 2020).
 
What we have noticed throughout our gatherings is a deep desire to not merely grow the numbers of young adults but to authentically diversify so that those who sit in the sanctuary embody those who are in our communities. If there are no young adults worshiping and serving in our congregations already, it is no wonder that they don't feel comfortable when they darken our doorways: the people they see inside the church do not look like the people they see outside the church and, in some ways, the outside world does a better job of welcoming them and making them feel at home.
 
It also seems clear that intersectionality is an eye-opening concept that is based in radical empathy. Once you start seeing people not for just a single marginalizing issue (woman or man, or black or brown, queer or straight) but rather as a more complex whole containing multitudes of identity (male, yet gay and brown; or white and educated, yet non-binary; etc.) then not only can the church start to reflect the diversity "out in the real world" but also reflect to the real world the true gift of a gospel for everyone.
 
For more on Intersectionality:
How it became a crucial part of our lexicon: https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/5/20/18542843/intersectionality-conservatism-law-race-gender-discrimination
Kimberlé Crenshaw’s seminal paper on Intersectionality: https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1052&context=uclf 

What does making a safe space for young adults in the church look like? This is an interesting question for churches to consider.
 
When this project started, the churches that applied and were accepted had the initial task of taking stock of their resources.

• Did they have young adults? 
• If they did have young adults, was there a critical mass? 
• Did they have leaders in the group of young adults or people who had leadership calling and talent? 
• Did they have older adults who wanted to come alongside young adults? 
• Were there obstacles to young adults operating safely in the congregation? 

 
Clearly there is a spectrum of situations and variations, given this set of questions and others like it.  
 
More often than not, the choice of what action to take came down to two options: Create a nested young adult group that is largely autonomous and somewhat protected from the congregation, or invite young adults to be involved in the congregation in a more integrated way right out of the gate.  

No matter how the start of a ministry to and by young adults happens, the end goal is always the same: Integrate young adults fully into the life of the church.*  
 
Often, the question the congregation must ask itself is how equipped are we to help young adults thrive in our community culture? If the congregation is well prepared, then the invitation to integration can happen sooner. However, some congregations that earnestly want to welcome young people have certain expectations stemming from their church culture and tradition about how these newcomers should be formed. While they have good intentions, expecting young adults to fit their mold can cause the church to become a hostile environment for young adults who are trying to adapt and integrate faith to their own experience and time (Kairos). If this is the case, then a longer period of identity and support building with young adult peers and a more careful integration plan might be in order.  
 
The big question our churches seem to be asking is whether it makes more sense to usher young adults into the congregation as a group, depleting the culture of a safe young adult space and rebuilding from scratch, OR try to maintain a separate young adult space where future young adults can land more softly in a congregation. If they choose rebuilding from scratch and each young adult group reflects its constituent young adults, then it can become a cycle that can adapt to each new group of young adults—though possibly an exhausting one. If they choose to maintain a constant young adult group presence, it could become another church program that doesn't change fast enough to adapt to newcomers, and waxes and wanes with organic growth and depletion.
 
The end analysis suggests that trying to decide between these various approaches is probably too systematic for something as dynamic as a group of 20-somethings in settings as varied and fluctuating as the local church. Rather, a posture of adaptation seems to be the best one. No matter what is "chosen," adaptation must characterize the process, given that not adapting—a choice too often chosen by the church when it comes to young adults—isn't an option.
 
For many churches, having two models that are both upheld as good and productive is still vocabulary broadening, given how much the imagination of healthy young adult spaces has shrunk over the decades.
 
*The only difference here might be a church planting church that is interested in nurturing and sending out groups of young adults to plant churches, which is more an aesthetic issue than a qualitatively different pursuit. 

As our churches move into Pentecost and to the end of this project in innovation with Pivot NW, it is a good time to return to the most basic of questions: what, then, is the nature of the Church?  So much of our work with you over these past 5 years have returned to that question.  This week my Seminary class is reading an excerpt from Tertullian of Carthage’s Apology written in 197 CE.  Tertullian’s concern in his Apology is multi-faceted and in many ways central to what we all continue to wrestle with as the COVID pandemic, racial justice, economic unrest, and political divides continue to fracture and splinter our collective sense of what we see as being “the Church.” Tertullian is writing in part to bridge the difficult divide between full participation in civic duties under Rome yet also a call to moral purity that stands in radical contrast to idolatry that was his context. But it is also a pastoral reminder to Christians in such a challenging time to remain “a body knit together as such by a common religious profession, by unity of discipline, and by the bond of a common hope.” Such a good word for us all at this moment. Part of the example to be set for the world as to what faithfulness looks like according to Tertullian is for members of the church to put aside “a small donation” that will be “piety’s deposit fund.”  This “piety’s deposit fund” is to be deployed for charity and witness: “…not taken thence and spent on feasts and on drinking-bouts, and eating-houses, but to support and bury poor people, to supply the wants of boys and girls destitute of means and parents, and of old persons confined now to the house; such too, as have suffered shipwreck; and if there happen to be any in the mines, or banished to the islands, or shut up in prisons, for nothing but their fidelity to the cause of God’s Church, they became nurslings of their confession.”
 
From this witness Tertullian says that we can find our “brand”: “But it is mainly the deeds of a love so noble that lead many to put a brand upon us. See, they say, how they love one another… how they are ready to die for one another, for they themselves will sooner be put to death… Our feast explains itself by its name. The Greeks call it agape, i.e., affection. Whatever it costs, our outlay in the name of piety is gain, since with all good things of the feast will benefit the needy.”
 
So many management consultants take about “branding” yet I love this phrase by Tertullian  – the deeds of a love so noble that lead many to put a brand upon us – and I wonder who indeed is “branding” us now in this moment and is the brand something we can hold our head high with?
 
We hope and pray that as we move into the Spirit’s work at Pentecost you will also find yourself with a “brand” put upon you thanks to your faithfulness in the Lord’s work for those who God has called you to serve and witness the power of justice, mercy and redemption in this season.

~Jeff Keuss

One phenomenon that Pivot NW has been watching closely across the last few years is 20-somethings joining the church council.

Out of the 20 or so churches that we've worked with, the number of 20-somethings in the highest leadership positions of the church could probably be counted on one hand. Does your church have anyone in their 20's on the council giving shape to your policies and ministry priorities?

If not, why do you think that is? Is there a reason? Here are some answers that are not beyond the realm of imagination:

• Young adults are too busy starting their lives and don't have time for council, unlike us older people and folks with young families.
• Young adults are too transient and don't stay at one church long enough to see through the commitments they make.
• Young adults don't yet have the wisdom, maturity, or leadership experience to serve on a council governing the whole church.
• If young adults were here and a more significant part of the population, they would nominate and vote in folks from their age cohort to help run the church.

What statements have you heard during your church experience? Or, what unspoken expectations do you understand to be part of the cultural narrative in your place of worship?

In the Fall of 2020, we invited Leroy Barber to come speak at the Fall Summit we host for our churches. He challenged us to ditch a theology of young adult "leadership formation" for a theology of "leadership identification." Simply put, instead of assuming that young adults need to be tamed, conformed, and wrangled into leadership (a common view among church leaders), allow them to come as their full, contextualized selves. Barber gave examples of recruiting leaders from the church's neighborhood who are trying to serve outside the church. The idea is this, who better to know what young adults need than young adults? And who better to see where culture is going and how it may be resisted or assimilated than young adults? Also, to refute a few of the points above:

• Older adults with their children and careers don't have the time or passion to lead churches effectively. It is best left to young adults.
• Because young adults are often moving, changing jobs and churches, working in the service industry or front office capacities, who better to know where the church is needed to create more shalom?
• Young adults are no more prone to heresy, financial mismanagement, or exhibiting un-Christlike behavior than older adults.
• There may be a correlation behind young adults not having a voice in the church and not wanting to be at the church. A conservative criticism is that this a chicken and egg issue. A harsher criticism might be that young adults have a hard time feeling connected to a church that can't include young adults in decision making or allow them real influence.

Scripture is full of called and anointed young people who become paragons of faithfulness. Ironically, many churches may point to these examples in their education as models to which young people should aspire, but they don't necessarily give young adults a chance to become them. We've observed that when young adults are called into ministry, they take their roles very seriously and see their calling as shepherding the entire church, not just the young adult portion. In a sense, this seems to resist the modern church's problems with silo-ing, while also allowing young adults to see themselves as more fully membered to the church.

*For one of our churches, "membered" is an intentional word used to describe someone who is in a membership relationship with their church. We borrow that term with gratitude for the fantastic imagery it calls forth.

One of the early defining questions of this project was whether to use the term Millenial or young adult when referring to our target demographic of 23 to 29-year-olds. We even floated 20-somethings as a possible primary label.

In the end, we landed with young adult, even with its murky definition. I will list the reasons why next, but then I will also seek to demonstrate why that term is helpful in identifying the particular struggles that we think are most prevalent for contemporary young adults.

Why not use Millennial(s)? Early on, we attended a consultation meeting at The Lilly Endowment along with the 11 other institutions participating in this inquiry. During one presentation, the researcher argued that, in one sense, a lot of what was being said about the Millennial generation that was coming of age was similar to what had been said about the Gen-Xers before them, and even the Boomers before them. In other words, older generations tend to criticize and misunderstand younger generations, regardless of who they are. Since this wasn't a new phenomenon for the Millennial generation, perhaps we needed to focus more on the phase of life rather than the distinctives of Millennials.

Why not 20-somethings? Often when we start engaging with a congregation, they will tell us about the group they have that best resembles young adults, and this doesn't always fit the 20-something description. It can look like a cohort of a few couples, new young families in their early 30s, or highschoolers fresh into college who happen to be attending locally and not in a new city. Given that in some communities adolescence is delayed, while in others teenagers grow up very fast, it's hard to say at a glance who best bears the standard of young adult.

If we err as a team, we would prefer, in most circumstances, to err on the side of being inclusive and working with whomever is present. We believe this models the very flexibility that we think young adults want to see in the church. Allow those with gifts to serve the community with those gifts. Also, simply by asking this question you begin to define the issues particular to young adults: first job or first step in the career; first rental or purchase of a home; first time out of a structured educational environment; first time paying one's own bills; first time making decisions about faith involvement outside of the home or structured environment (like college); maybe even first romantic relationship or first time that dating might lead to marriage; or first attempts at starting a family.

As you can see, young adulthood is full of firsts and could almost be compared to the amount of firsts someone has prior to starting school. As numerous people in our church interviews have pointed out, many of these firsts happened under the care of a local congregation, sometimes even directly aided by the congregation. Young adults might find a job or network their way into a career through someone at church. Or they might meet, marry, and start a family with someone they met in a ministry setting. Maybe they rented a room from a family in a congregation, or found out about a wonderful home coming onto the market through a real estate agent with whom they worship. Or perhaps, in the less sunny times, their church community helped them through a tragedy like a miscarriage, car accident, or relationship falling apart.

The point being, young adult problems can be Millennial problems, and can be problems synonymous with being in your 20s, but they aren't one-in-the-same.

_{Thumbnail and main image: Sermon on the Mount by Carl Bloch (1877), Public Domain}
One of the first things we did when we started this project was to dream up an application that would be short enough to actually be completed, but thorough enough to get a solid picture of churches serious about participating.

We were actually worried about being overwhelmed with dozens of applications because some of the other innovation hubs funded by The Lilly Endowment had that experience. After all, $30,000 is a lot of money, on top of the possibility of gaining answers to a vexing, decades-long question: How to get young adults back into church.

One way we sought a better understanding of all our church applicants was to ask for at least 5 narratives from members of each congregation. We asked for the pastor's narrative, of course, but we also asked for a number of other narratives, as seen below:

Q3.2. Please have 3-5 individuals write 5 short narratives of your congregational history and culture. Please write the accounts independent of one another. Ideally, the narratives should be from a pastor, an elder or councilperson, a non-leader younger than 30, a non-leader older than 50, and an additional person of your choosing. Include the good and the bad, the hopes and dreams, the failures, the miraculous, and the perceived effect on the congregation.

The idea was that the pastor has a particular vision for a church and a lot of pressure to write a narrative conducive to being chosen for participation in the grant. Also, the average pastor will only have been at a church anywhere from a few years to a full career of 20-30 years. This would still perhaps be less, on average, than some of the old-comers of any given established congregation who have seen anywhere from 2 to half-a-dozen pastors.

If we wanted to really understand the history of a congregation and how that history played out in the church's current identity, it seemed prudent to stitch together a handful of stories from different experiences in order to get a fuller understanding of what a congregation is bringing to the project, both the blessings and challenges.

Is there a history of shorter stints of pastoral leadership or longer ones? Is there a recent exodus or schism within the church? Have there been building changes, property sales or acquisitions, or shifts in demographics? Has there been recent growth or revitalization?

What we ended up with was a composite story that really helped us better understand the long- and short-term concerns of the congregation and included both voices that regularly made decisions and ones absent from key decision-making spaces. It was the hardest part of the application for many congregations to complete, and fittingly, it was also the part that caused the best reflection and learning for those involved.

In the end we got only about 2 dozen applications and ended up with half that many churches involved over the long term. But what we knew about the history of those churches was rich—the ups and downs; the faithfulness, traumas, and joys; the questions and the experiments. It helped paint a much fuller picture of what God was doing in these congregations and the communities they call home.

If you're anything like me, you might find the word "ideation" intimidating. What is it anyway? And "ideation lab?" I know most of us haven't had to set foot in a lab since high school or maybe college. What are we getting ourselves into here?

No need to panic, you don't need to dust off your beakers and test tubes for this. Think of it as a better brainstorming session and you've basically got it.

As defined by the Design Thinking industry, ideation is a process that is more than just brainstorming. It is more acute, more process oriented, and seems geared to get much better results when handled well.

To help us at Pivot NW get off the ground, we hired a consultant to help us design a process based on royalty-free concepts. This way, we can share the process with the Church in the hope that individual congregations find a straighter path toward discovering how to offer better hospitality to the young adults who might darken their doors. Here is a description of the process, with some explanation of the hoped-for-outcomes behind the steps.

Click here for a PDF of the packet we walk through when we do Ideation Labs. 

My POV: This exercise is a good temperature-taker. It helps participants crystallize their identity right then and there on the day of the lab. One useful part of this exercise is that it grounds people in their quite varied identities, and in the inherent contradictions that might exist. Sharing it with a table partner or with a small group of 2-3 others helps build empathy on which the rest of the process will lean.

What will you get?: It's important to help the group see everyone as a contributor. This is not a group project where only one voice is heard or one person does a majority of the work.

Methods and mindset: This is a process designed to get a specific result, not a haphazard thinking session. Also, the byproducts are relationship building and better empathy. You will leave this process knowing people better.

Mindset walking: These two slides help you to continue building empathy, to embody the process (walking) so it is less cerebral, to honor the tensions and feelings that people bring into the room, and to recognize the different giftedness of the diverse participants.

Sharing your church story with a partner: This is another empathy exercise with a few prompts. Sharing it with someone and asking them to take notes, sketch, and/or find another way to retell your story is a stretch both for the listener and the teller. How do you surrender your story to another and how does that feel? How does it feel to be put on the spot to tell someone else's story? What do you realize about your own story when someone else tells it?

So far, a lot of this process focuses on building empathy. Another major theme in this early part of the process that remains present throughout is the concept of lament. This process will redistribute power, lay bare assumptions and hopes unrealized, and require a recommitment to both the people doing the lab with you and the community the lab seeks to bless. This is both a wonderfully synergistic process and one that can make an indelible mark.

Describing Design: Many different metaphors can be used to describe design, but the one we use is a rhythm of Divergence and Convergence, or that same process with synthesis and analysis as intermediary steps. This is a simpler version of what you might find in the marketplace of Design Thinking, but we think it is appropriate to our approach. It's based on the free model out of Stanford Design School.

Brain-writing: This gets various thoughts and ideas out of people's heads and onto the table.

Categorization: This helps the group understand the relationship between their various ideas, as well as the relationship of resources needed to allow these ideas to take shape.

Prioritization or synthesis: What concept pulls most at the group?

Typical Next Steps: What is next in the process and how might the process be revisited to create new ideas or to integrate new voices?

Debrief: Discuss how the process went. What was good, what was hard, what remains unanswered?

Attached below is the statement from Pivot NW concerning the George Floyd protests. Along with our congregational partners, we pray for our communities and especially with and for our brothers and sisters fighting for a more equitable existence in our nation.

George Floyd Protest Statement

_{Thumbnail and main image: Robert the Bruce tableau, Edinburgh Castle cc-by-sa/2.0 - © kim traynor - geograph.org.uk/p/2179366} 

Early on in the life of this grant, we found ourselves giving general advice about how to spend the considerable funds we gave out. We told our tier one churches that we were going to give them $10,000 a year for 3 years. This was substantially more than the budgets our young adult groups were used to spending, many of which were only in the triple digits.

The first year we suggested Team Building as an area on which to concentrate. Specifically, we suggested forming a leadership team or maybe just building a sense of togetherness within the larger young adult community. This idea really came from telling the teams to go on all-expenses-paid retreats for young adults, who often don't have a lot of extra cash for such things.

The second year we suggested Partnership as a theme. This could look like young adults partnering with other ministry groups within their own churches. It could involve communing with other young adults groups within their denomination or other hubs associated with this grant. It could involve partnering with a community organization to promote a cause about which the young adults felt passionate. The idea was to help young adults grow in faith together by externalizing and challenging that faith. Also, we wanted them to expand their sense of the possibilities and power of their community.

Assuming that years 2 and 3 are successful at building both relationships and purpose, the logical next focus should be how to avoid losing those hard-fought gains. Thus, our third year theme is how to navigate succession and plan for sustainability. In these first two years, we saw how some transitions led to either an influx of energy or a loss of momentum, and so did our churches. We hope to mine some of the wisdom gained and have asked our churches to codify their ideas for maintaining momentum or successfully navigating the organic rhythms of young adult involvement in church communities.

In your own contexts, how has a simple loss of momentum caused a breakdown of an otherwise healthy group? Was it by a change in leadership, a loss of critical mass, or other unplanned stress? What steps could have been taken to minimize the loss of momentum or identity? What would you do differently to make the community more resilient to change?

In the Fall of 2019, Pivot NW attempted to host a dinner and panel discussion concerning Young Adult Hospitality. Our goal was simply to hear from voices in church and the hospitality industry that could help us examine our own biases about what young adults want and need from each other and from our churches in order to grow their faith.

Due to lack of interest, we canceled the event. But we reached out to a few folks among our partner congregations who practice young adult hospitality to learn about their approaches. Here is one musing by Tom & Susan Lane who, as a Boomer generation couple, have been hosting and creating a safe space for the Millennials at Lake Burien Presbyterian Church for the last few years (posted with permission):

I was sorry to learn that this month's conversation about hospitality with young adults was cancelled. Since hospitality is expressed in so many ways, we'd welcome opportunities to hear what others are finding helpful, what's gone wrong, and what they're learning about their own traditions and cultures. We started hosting monthly potlucks with young adults in our home about a year ago, and they've become a highlight in our schedule.

We love learning what the world looks like to people in their 20s and gaining insights into different ethnic and cultural stories. People our age (67) often can't imagine that hip young adults are interested in us, so Susan and I have been surprised and delighted to discover that they enjoy hanging out with us, hearing our stories, and being in our home. (We appreciate how the group sets up 'the big table,' brings out the folding chairs, knows where things are in the kitchen, and helps put stuff away and clean up.) We cherish the new friendships that are forming and the opportunity to give and receive perspective and encouragement, and pray for one another. We no longer assume that people prefer to gather only with others in their age group.

I liked the place settings idea, and recall our own experience of a growing "soup fellowship" that provided ladles and mugs to several other groups that it spawned. In addition to a small practical boost, it was a symbol and reminder that we began together and grew to become something new and life-giving.

Please let us know how we can help if there are other opportunities for this conversation to take place.

Tom & Susan Lane
Lake Burien Presbyterian Church

Even among the Pivot NW research and innovation team, Tom and Susan's openness and partnership with the young adults at Lake Burien Presbyterian Church is legendary, and yet probably not as wild or uncommon as it one might think. Do you know of any "Tom and Susans" in your congregation? What might help folks tip into this sort of outreach/hospitality if they are already inclined? What other models of young adult hospitality have you seen work?

***As of 10/29/19 we have cancelled this event due to a lower than anticipated interest. Please let us know if you have any questions or concerns. We’d love to hear what of this idea was interesting to you or how this failed to meet your needs and expectations.

In a few weeks, we will be hosting a Saturday night dinner at Lake Burien Presbyterian Church to have a discussion concerning the state of hospitality for young adults, and by young adults for their peers, in the church.

Tickets can be found here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/creating-hospitality-for-young-adults-a-dinner-and-discussion-tickets-72141586427

We are having soup, salad, and bread and have covered all of our bases for dietary restrictions (GF Potato Sausage Kale soup, VG/GF Tortilla Soup and GF/DF Turkey Chili all with extra toppings to make them yummy).

Individual tickets are $5, but you can eat for free if you bring a table setting for 4 people to serve your peers/friends. We hope to create a space with a diverse setting of plates, bowls and silverware so that we can show how we all approach hospitality differently, and we will have a short liturgy of blessing for your tableware to bless the meals and conversations that happen around them.

Additionally, we will have young adults from our innovation and research efforts who will help us gain insight into what being hospitable to folks in their 20s looks like at their churches. Some of our conversation partners will be folks who do hospitality professionally as Christians and who can describe their own philosophy toward welcoming young adults. We hope that the conversation can be recorded as a podcast and you can be there to contribute with your questions and comments.

Finally, FREE STUFF! Every young adult who comes has the chance to win a $175 value in a complete table setting for 8 that they can deploy to host their peers for meals. Get your tickets now!

Click below to hear about research and innovation with the Pivot NW team this fall.

http://archive.benchmarkemail.com/Pivot-Northwest/newsletter/Fall-2019-Digest 

To app or not to app?

One of the values of Pivot NW is a commitment to fostering a culture of innovation and experimentation among our ministry partners. This was not just an idea tied to the origin of the grant, but very much the waters in which the church swims in the Pacific Northwest. And in the spirit of being incarnational, the Pivot NW team needed a way in which we might participate, stretch ourselves, and lead in a particular area of innovation.

Simply put, Jeff, the boss, really wanted me to build an app. While that is oversimplifying it (and I promise we were thoughtful about our approach to this) there were elements of adventure, exploration, being on the cutting edge, and playing in a new sandbox that were appealing. It is also “easy to understand” innovation by the general public and has the side effect of forcing us to think through important choices. Thus, this will not be just one blog post about building an app, but a blog series about harnessing technology to both good and poor outcomes.

This process also revealed to me what a luddite I had become: I have fallen deeper in love with classic vacuum tubes as my romance with transistors has faded.

So, you will find it here: https://pivotnw.org/app/

To be honest, it is really just an easy-to-navigate version of our website and RSS content (podcast, blogs, push notifications for events, etc.). If you have no idea what that means, you are in good company. To my surprise, even the first paragraph in Wikipedia about the acronym RSS revealed a debate about what the letters actually stand for. This debate feels like a kissing cousin to the Gif vs. Jif debate.

This will be the first in a series of blog posts about creating digital content for an audience and what we have learned about it. It will have practical elements such as costs, challenges, and conveniences. But we will also write about the philosophical issues and how and why a church may consider modernizing into these tools, or deciding ultimately to decline using a custom app, a twitter feed, or some Facebook-owned property (Instagram, Whatsapp, etc.).

As with everything we do, we will pay special attention to any issues that seem to suggest a way in which these technologies appeal to young adults or, conversely, become church community off-ramps. We will highlight what we think we know about intergenerational use and relationship building as it pertains to young adults connecting to the rest of the church body. And we may add in the occasional reference to a Pivot NW podcast where a piece of technology is referenced, as our churches continue experimenting with novel ways to connect with their young adults.

This post is the first in an occasional series written by Martin Jimenez, the Pivot NW Program Manager. As part of our open-source philosophy, we reveal the decision-making process behind some of our experimentation on using new technology to aid in our research and innovation efforts. We hope that our experimentation can inspire churches toward appropriate technologies, and in other directions as appropriate to their ministry contexts.

The Engagement Platform

In the last blog, I wrote a bit about our decision to brand our grant. This was a necessary process of visualizing our app and creating a brand so that all of our content would point back to our work, our website, and ultimately the question of how the church can better engage young adults.

The task of following through with this particular effort meant envisioning what it would look like, what was on it (we’ll get to content in a later post), and also where it would live. That is to say, while we had already built a website on the WordPress platform, and had some branding and content there, a website isn’t an app. On most mobile phone platforms you can turn a web page link into a phone shortcut (aka an icon on the phone home screen that automatically opens the browser to the specific page). Yet, in the end, you are not actually providing a service as much as the user is creating their own convenience.

Additionally, web content is not always optimized for smaller screens, though that has improved a lot in the last decade.

The final thing about an engagement platform is that it can act as a single point of interaction that has its own ecosystem and fully utilizes the capabilities of a mobile phone. For instance, nowadays when you open some Bible reading app or church organization app on Sunday mornings, it can tell which church you are at and sync up the content for that day’s activities, if you allow the apps to use geolocation.

The choice of platform was easy for us. We went with Subsplash, a private, family-owned company that has been a pioneer in helping churches take advantage of the ubiquitous smartphone—an item in the hands of almost every member of the congregation. Subsplash is also just down the street from SPU and recruits a lot of SPU graduates into its ranks as they enter into their various careers: software engineering, sales, marketing, ministry, management, HR, etc.

So, we bought into the platform in 2017 at the “Core” rate that at publishing time was $99.99/month, which we pay annually (plus a setup fee). This got us into “The Church App.” While we had hoped to have our own branded app, which they do, the rate for that is double the “Core” rate.  Since we were also interested in promoting them as a partner to our work, a partner for churches looking to innovate, and as a supporter of young adult Christians whom they employ, choosing to be a part of “The Church App” made sense both fiscally and missionally. They already serve a number of the Seattle-area churches we work with which are ahead of the curve using technology to form and support their congregations.

As soon as we made the plunge, two things happened. Immediately, there were people at Subsplash available to help us get our content uploaded and create a user interface, and we realized we had little-to-no content to upload. But that is a unique problem to us as a brand-new grant, not a church that weekly creates opportunities of engagement, calendars full of events, preaching of the gospel, and recruitment into ministry opportunities.

The big question then is cost. In what ways does the app save time and money (think printed items) and what are the possible benefits such as ease of connecting, organization, and informing and/or forming of the congregation?

Recently, I discussed the pros and cons of online giving with some pastors. The transition has some interesting theological and practical implications, depending on how the congregation and pastoral leadership frames the transition, especially as it concerns donations and tithing. Because Pivot NW is not in a position to have to raise money, this set of questions is not a concern for us, but they would be important to the local church looking to make this transition. Here are a handful to get you started thinking, or to bring up in a meeting concerning stewardship:

• Do you still keep a basket available for gifts in the worship service? 
• Is passing the tithing basket an important part of your theological identity? 
• Is that identity held by people of all generations in your congregation? 
• What are you saying theologically about the weight that money has in your church culture by your decisions to visually marginalize the offering or tithe by moving it online? 
• What does that communicate about how the church views money in the congregational culture? 
• How do those concerns weigh against the needs and opinions of the young adults in your congregation who are more comfortable interacting with the world through their phone?

This post is the third in an occasional series written by Martin Jimenez, the Pivot NW Program Manager. As part of our open-source philosophy, we reveal the decision-making process behind some of our experimentation on using new technology to aid in our research and innovation efforts. We hope that our experimentation can inspire churches toward appropriate technologies, and in other directions as appropriate to their ministry contexts.

Branding
What is the first thing that comes to mind when deciding to push into the tech frontier as a faith community?

I am sure that question could be answered in a number of ways, many of which might be correct for that particular congregation or ministry team. As it turns out, when you sign up to build a custom app with a maker such as Subsplash, one of the paramount tasks is to provide a branding scheme. When I look at this task from the perspective of an internet company building web properties for a church that is anywhere from 2-months to 100-years-old, I see where they might assume it is as easy as calling up the images that populate your signage, current website, newsletter, newspaper ad, and weekly bulletin and distilling them to fit into the app format.

It seems to me that many churches in the modern era have faced the decision of how, why, and when to rebrand their community. That question is especially acute when planning for a digital strategy. Having a logo that does well as a black and white 1”x2” ad in the religion section of your local paper is very different from having one that stands out in the clutter of the mobile phone home screen.

With that challenge in front of us, we decided to employ a student worker in the design school who was near graduation and interested in building his portfolio.

We had already signed a contract with Subsplash as our “engagement platform” and now needed to get a property built in order to move forward in the publishing process. For Pivot NW, having access to the platform allowed us to see the requirements and guidelines for branding on their platform. This helped us to design within our limits. For churches that are considering this route, their salespeople and any designers with whom the church already has a relationship can probably guide the modification of an existing brand prior to signing up. This will lessen the amount of downtime between cutting the first check to your engagement platform and having an active app.

Of course, a brand is important if you are planning on releasing content that points back and defines your mission. Ours needed to reflect the complicated work we were doing. For some churches, it reflects their location to a certain community as defined by a particular geophysical feature. For others, it’s the graphical reflection of their commitment to diversity or the reality of their diversity. For some, it might be a particular institution they are near or are a part of, such as a church near a university that is associated with their denomination. And finally, there are the fortunate churches that have some sort of special architecture or art that embodies their presence and which they choose to deploy as integral to their identity.

Any of these can simultaneously tell a variety of recipients that the church is “for you” or “not for you.” The difficult task of creating a brand, especially as it applies to content and web-based engagement platforms, is how to signal to your audience, “this is for you.” And when preaching the gospel, the difficulty is multiplied, since the gospel is for everyone. How might you go about navigating this inconsistency? How do you simultaneously brand so that you say to young adults, “this is for you” but also do not alienate the Millennials, Gen Xers, and Boomers who are already part of the church? The answer may be simple in concept, but maybe not be so simple in reality.
Because we are committed to being open source, here are two documents we created that help us keep our design consistent and true to our mission: Our Design Principles and our Brand Identity. While we don’t design for absolutely everyone, we do have a rather broad audience to consider and do not want to create obstacles where they need not exist.

This post is the second in an occasional series written by Martin Jimenez, the Pivot NW Program Manager. As part of our open-source philosophy, we reveal the decision-making process behind some of our experimentation on using new technology to aid in our research and innovation efforts. We hope that our experimentation can inspire churches toward appropriate technologies, and in other directions as appropriate to their ministry contexts.

PART 3 IN A 3-PART SERIES BY PIVOT NW RESEARCHER REV. DR. ERIC FORD

Who is your favorite Bible character? For me, Caleb stands out as a faithful example I want to emulate.

In Numbers 13, we find the Hebrew people on the edge of the Promised Land. God commands Moses to send twelve spies on a reconnaissance mission. The spies return and report (and I’m paraphrasing here), “Yes, the land is fertile. Yes, the grapes are as large as your head. Yes, it’s wonderful, just like we imagined it would be. But no, we can’t go. The cities are too large. The people are like giants. It’s all too much.” And the Hebrew people begin their lament; it would be better back in Egypt.

Do you remember the good old days? I once heard an excellent preacher call this the “Back to Egypt Committee,” and folklore says that every church has one. Within every congregation there exists an individual or group that sees change as negative and/or unnecessary. Personally, I play that role when it comes to smartphones and technology. I still remember the good old days of rotary phones or my first Blackberry. And I can’t seem to bring myself to engage online giving; I still put my check in the envelope and place it in the collection plate.

I am not advocating that we simply push aside anyone who voices a cautious opinion. They are part of the church community, and their experience and perspective need to be honored. At the same time, when I was a young adult, I really didn’t like the older generations recounting their glory days. My response was usually, “Maybe the good old days weren’t really that good.” Let’s face it, the Hebrew children who were born during the wilderness-wanderings had no first-hand memories of Egypt. So, sometimes the crowd still chants, “We won’t move forward. We want to go back to Egypt!” And others look on with blank stares, not understanding the context or history.

Remember our previous blog conversations about change? Research shows that change doesn’t happen overnight (Prochaska, DiClemente, & Narcross, 1992; see illustration). In fact, there are a few stages that require contemplation and preparation before we should even begin to act on change:

• First, there is the pre-contemplation phase. Your congregation (or individual leaders within it) discerns that God may be calling you into ministry with young adults. This means someone within the church community has the intention to do something within the next six months.
• Second, the leadership of the church is contemplating what young adult ministry might look like. This is where the ministry team is seriously considering making an actual change in the next six months. Everyone will need to do their homework, have lots of conversations, and know what you are getting into.
• And then, the congregation can finally reach the preparation phase; a decision to change is close at hand. The ministry leaders are intending to act within the next month. Everyone recognizes that there is a decision to be made: Forward in ministry or back to Egypt?
  
  

And then we meet Caleb (“Mr. Change-agent,” as I like to call him), and he gives a minority report of the reconnaissance mission: “Yes, the land is bountiful. Yes, the people are large. Yes, it is just as wonderful as God promised. Yes, we felt like insignificant bugs. But no, going back to Egypt is not the proper move. Turning around is not the right direction. God made us a promise. This land is for us—the descendants of Abraham and Sarah. And God always comes through on promises. So, let’s claim our destiny. Forward into the future!”

You can see why I like Caleb. He is positive. He is certain. He is all about innovation and change. I’m guessing you have a Caleb in your congregation—someone who is championing the cause for young adult ministries. Maybe Caleb is you.

If that is the case, please allow me to offer one comment and then a piece of advice. First, this is not the time to go rogue! Trust me, after my 25 years of local church ministry, this much I know: God did not create leaders to go it alone. For example, just a few verses later in Numbers 14, Joshua joins Caleb in the change conversation. There is strength in numbers, and the Bible is full of examples of co-leadership and team contributions.

For instance, in Acts 15, the missionary pair of Paul and Barnabas returns to Jerusalem to champion the Gentile cause. After much debate, Peter rises to offer his impetuous perspective (and I’m paraphrasing again): “Why place the old rules on our new friends? This is not about us versus them. It’s not old church members against new young adults. This is about expanding the Kingdom. It’s a new day; God is doing a new thing. This is a time for leaders and teams and congregations to put aside comfortable complacency and come together for the glory of God.” (Can you hear the background music swell?!) James immediately confirms the change, and the Church refines its mission. Teamwork at its biblical best.

Second (and here is the advice), remember that change requires intentional preparation. Research states that only one-third of change initiatives actually work. I have repeatedly heard faithful church members ask, “If the success rate is so low, why even bother trying to change?” Recall Prochaska et al.’s (1992) five stages; change doesn’t actually happen until phase four. How often have good people given up just before the change is about to happen? (More on that topic in the months to come.)

We know that change takes work. A lot of thought and preparation goes into creating effective transitions and transformation. Just because God calls us into new ministries, it does not mean it will be easy. Change brings anxiety; it is not for the faint of heart. However, I implore you to remember this: In the midst of change—contemplation, preparation, and action—there is Good News!

Caleb’s words to the Hebrews were also meant for you and me, “Let us go up and take the land—now. We can do it.” (Numbers 13:31, The Message) Or, if you prefer a quote from the New Testament, let us remember what Paul said to the Church in Rome, “With God on our side like this, how can we lose?” (Romans 8:31b, The Message) The most important thing to remember is this: Before any change happens, we need to take the time to discern and pray, investigate and research, organize and prepare. God is always faithful.

But that is only the next-to-the-last word. The last word on change truly belongs to you, your team, and your congregation. The question is no longer, are you ready for change? The question is not, how serious are you about this change? The real question to ponder is this: Having worked together as a leadership team and church community—contemplating options and preparing for opportunity—what action will you now take?

PART 2 IN A 3-PART SERIES BY PIVOT NW RESEARCHER REV. DR. ERIC FORD

Change is hard. As a leader in your congregation, you are constantly facing change, ready or not! Maybe you are a new young adult leader trying to get a ministry started. Perhaps you are a tenured leader who is open to new possibilities, but you don’t want to lose any valuable traditions. And we all know at least one long-time member who has experienced change in a negative way and fears that any more change could ruin relationships and break their beloved congregation. For all of these reasons (and many more), it is important to ask the second, contemplation question: How serious are we about this change?

As we reflected in the first post of this series, the sequence and stages of preparing for change are important. Recall that the research of Prochaska, DiClemente, and Narcross (1992) outlined five stages of preparation for change.

Previously, we looked at John 5:1-18 in order to ask the pre-contemplation question, “Are we ready to change?”

To illustrate the contemplation question, let’s look at another New Testament story, this time from Luke 9:57-62. As they were walking along the road, someone said to Jesus, “I will follow you wherever you go!” Don’t you love the enthusiasm? Can you think of any leaders in your congregation who possess the same untainted courage and desire to change the world for Christ? As the story progresses, we hear Jesus invite these wide-eyed-adventure-seekers to come and follow. Unfortunately, when given the opportunity, some leaders just aren’t ready to make the necessary changes. I am a lot like these Biblical characters; I’ve responded with lots of excuses: “Oops! I forgot. I have a funeral to attend today…” or “Sure. But first let me send my family a text, letting them know where I’ll be…” or “I’m not free today, Jesus. How about I fit you in next Tuesday?”

It sounds like the people in the crowd wanted to follow Jesus, they just weren’t ready to make the necessary changes. Or perhaps they had not yet moved from pre-contemplation to the contemplation stage. They were struggling with the next question: How serious are you about change?

So, what does this have to do with your congregation and your ministry to and with young adults? Everything! As you enter this new phase of ministry, remember that the research of Prochaska et al. (1992) suggested that initiating change in the wrong phase can actually be detrimental to the end result. That means if you initiate change too early, it can backfire. If you make any changes before people are ready, chances are they won’t follow through.

Therefore, at this juncture of your leadership and young adult ministries, it is important to pause and reflect on these questions:

• How much and what kind of research have you already completed? What additional research needs to be done? Have you talked to any young adults about this?
• Have you made an assessment of your congregation’s culture? Is your church friendly, open, and inviting to young adults? Are there any barriers that young adults might encounter?
• Why is this new ministry important to you? How serious are you about making any necessary changes within the congregation for this new ministry to be successful?
• Are you prepared for any potential pushback or negative reaction to the changes? How will you respond? How will you help others engage the multiple stages of preparation that are necessary for change to be effective?
  
  

Research shows that two-thirds of all change initiatives do not work. With those odds, it’s no wonder we struggle with the issue of change within the Church. That is why this process is so important. This is not change simply for the sake of doing something different. This is change based upon the prompting of the Holy Spirit. As the Church, we are in partnership with God as something new begins to happen (Isaiah 43:19).

Eric Ford, MDiv, DMin is a first-year PhD student in the Industrial-Organizational Psychology Program at SPU. He is an ordained Elder in The United Methodist Church. His role in Pivot NW is to help congregations manage the process of change as they engage with young adults. Eric lives in Ballard with his wife Erin and daughter Skylar. He says that the best part of the move to Seattle is the wide variety of coffee choices!

Dear Pivot NW followers and participants,

We are excited to announce a partnership with an international group of scholars that are studying new church plants in the urban west. Please read this letter for more information about this effort, how it started, how it relates to Pivot NW, and what questions it hopes to answer for us locally and within the greater church.

https://pivotnw.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Announcement-of-Christianity-in-the-Urban-West-research-partnership.pdf

PART 1 IN A 3-PART SERIES BY PIVOT NW RESEARCHER REV. DR. ERIC FORD

“The only thing constant in life is change.” This pearl of wisdom is attributed to the Greek writer Heraclitus, 500 years before Jesus. And, it provides an entry-point for a conversation that often challenges the church. As an online follower of Pivot NW, you probably feel called to lead a congregation through a period of change, specifically focused on ministry to and with young adults. My hope is that this three-part series will highlight some questions and spark a conversation. As church leaders, is there anything we can do to prepare for change so that it will make a positive, lasting impact?

Full disclosure: I’ve spent my life in the church. As the son of a pastor, and with 25 years of church leadership experience as a minister, I have witnessed a lot of change. Some of it was desired; at times, the change was unwanted. Occasionally, change was intentional, but often, it was a necessary reaction to the environment. I am also beginning a new chapter in my ministry as a PhD student in Industrial-Organizational Psychology. My field of study is organizational change, and in the last six months I have discovered some research that I believe could help the Church approach the idea of change from a wiser and more informed perspective. Boy could I have used some of this wisdom back in the day.

I used to think that change was simply a choice. That is, once I decided to start exercising, quit smoking, or eat healthy, it would automatically happen. Of course, I heard about goal setting, accountability, and tracking progress. If you are like me and you have ever made a New Year’s resolution, you know how hard it is to make positive change stick. Recently, I was introduced to research that put the entire concept of change into a new framework. To make all of this practical, let’s look at change through a gospel story.

The pool at Bethesda was surrounded by sick people (John 5: 1-18). The blind, the lame, the paralyzed were all lying around, waiting for an angel to stir the waters. Rumor had it that when the water bubbled, the first person in would be granted the gift of health. One of the sick that day was a man who had been patiently waiting pool-side for 38 years. When Jesus approached, he asked the man, “Do you want to be made well?” In my imagination, I hear Jesus asking, “Are you ready for positive change?”

As I think about that question, the obvious answer is, “Yes, please!” Unfortunately, research shows that it’s not that simple. According to Prochaska, DiClemente, and Narcross (1992), beginning with pre-contemplation, there are five stages that ultimately lead to effective and long-lasting change initiatives.

What immediately caught my attention is that all five stages are necessary in order for the change to have a high probability of success. That is, change needs to follow a proper sequence and happen in the correct stage. This may be the reason that two-thirds of all change initiatives fail. It is not because of bad ideas, poor execution, or uninformed decisions; it may simply be the result of wrong timing.

That is why Jesus’ question to the man (and to us) is so important. In the church, I remember my attention getting pulled toward things that were urgent: leaking roof, broken furnace, calendar conflicts, etc. At times, I felt like change was happening to me, instead of me driving the necessary change. Have you ever felt that way in your leadership?

I wonder: What if we walked around to the other side of the pool and took a different perspective? Instead of tackling your leadership issue head-on, take a step back and contemplate. In the next two blog posts, I want to offer us the opportunity to consider change within the church from a new vantage point. But for now, the pre-contemplation question is most pressing. Jesus is asking: Are you ready to change?

Eric Ford, MDiv, DMin is a first-year PhD student in the Industrial-Organizational Psychology Program at SPU. He is an ordained Elder in The United Methodist Church. His role in Pivot NW is to help congregations manage the process of change as they engage with young adults. Eric lives in Ballard with his wife Erin and daughter Skylar. He says that the best part of the move to Seattle is the wide variety of coffee choices!

https://millenialphilanthropy.eventbrite.com

Unsure of the best practices for encouraging Millennials in philanthropy? Are you wondering about the connection between Patreon, Go Fund Me, and church tithing and mission support?

Join us on the evening of June 12th for a discussion and hands-on training. Click the link above for registration information.

Without doing an internet search, which of the following industries are Millennials accused of killing and which one are they saving?
A. tuna
B. cash
C. local bike shops
D. public libraries

What about in this list?
A. gyms
B. the baby industry
C. American cheese
D. the divorce industry

These are some of the questions we posed in our Pub Trivia night, which the Fuller Theological Seminary’s Northwest Regional Campus instigated (and footed most of the bill for; thanks, Fuller!). It was an interesting exercise taking a narrative that makes Millennials out to be the harbingers of doom and turning it into a light-hearted, nominally-educational event.

As everyone debriefed the event over their food and drinks, it became apparent that with every wrong answer (no one got them all right) each table had to re-evaluate how well they knew the plight of young adults. Even if they were themselves young adults, they had to go through the process of empathizing with the experience of the average contemporary rather than just mine their own individual experience.

Granted, many of these people were pastors, or training to be pastors, so one would hope they would have the skill of putting themselves into someone else’s shoes.

Eventually, we got into some of the questions based in our particular research, such as:
Among these off-ramps that young adults cite as reasons to leave the church, which is the top one?
A. hypocritical behavior
B. resistance to change
C. avoidance of real or controversial issues
D. holding political views that disagree with faith values
(Taken from https://pivotnw.org/research/)

The answer is “resistance to change.” How does that answer strike you? Keep in mind that all of those are off-ramps that young adults have reported. If you are a young adult who has been turned off by church, does this match your experience? And if you aren’t a young adult, are you interested in pushing back against the prevalence of these phenomena?

Reviewing the literature that is part and parcel to our work is very revealing. We see both how young adults want to be regarded, and how non-young adults want to or have learned to regard them.

We just updated our Literature page to include links to a few other books that we have read, are reading, or plan to read this year. In some ways, it shows what tact we are taking with future topical efforts such as in Welcome to Dinner Church by Verlon Fosner, a Puget Sound-based pastor who has navigated the travails of a hospitality-focused church gathering. We hope to partner with a few locals like him in the near future to do an event that might help churches learn how to plan and execute better hospitality ministries that aim at connecting young adults to each other and others in the church.

Another book finished this last year is Tribal Church by Carol Howard Merritt. This book is being used by one of our congregations as a way to have a common experience/metaphor (that of a “tribe”) to make better decisions about their particular approach to including and connecting with young adults.

Another church we are walking with is reading through Growing Young by Kara Powell of the Fuller Youth Institute. We know and love our colleagues at Fuller who are working on this same grant in their own Fuller way. We're excited to learn more about their approach and see how it translates into the congregation.

Follow the links on this site to check out the rest of the books we feature and please reach out on social media to tell us what you are reading, personally or in your church’s team.

Every fall, the Industrial-Organizational (IO)Psychology department at SPU has a class that students in the department attend, called “Hacking the World of Work”. It is not your normally structured class as it follows a structure called OpenSpace. This class was set up to reflect the type of learning and deep conversations that happen at conferences – the majority of which doesn’t’ actually happen in the conference sessions, but rather in between sessions in the hallways and elevators. These conversations are informed by the sessions but go much deeper in these other spaces. The class reflects this structure by allowing students to pitch topics of their choice and divide into groups to chat about and research those topics.
Every Thursday for six weeks, we (Mac, Gabrielle,and Eric) announced to our I-O psychology classmates that we wanted to pilot some discussion guides and we listed off several topics they could discuss. All these topics would allow young adults to have these conversations with a Christian lens. These topics are vulnerable, but we ended up getting about 10+ people each session. The topics selected were:relationships, politics, how the church has disappointed us, diversity,evolution, and LGBTQIA.

Discussion Highlights

We had so many rich discussions, but are unable to summarize them all here. Instead, we’ve provided some quotes from each session that highlight a bit of what was discussed.
Relationships and Marriage

• “My school only taught abstinence”
• “Christian schools and communities say ‘wait till marriage’ but don’t give ideas of how to move forward if you don’t do that”

Politics #JesusWentThere

• (people were afraid to disagree, or one person would hog the space)
• “Not everyone you meet is far left or far right, yet when you hear what part someone aligns with you assume that they are that far left or far right person.”

The Church Disappoints Us

• “When I was 7 my classmates started saying the prayer alongside the priest during a service one week, he came to our class afterwards to explain why each one of us would be going to hell.”
• “My church asked me to leave when I came out.”
• “The church prides themselves on their values of being open and accepting of everyone from every walk of life, but then once you get there you are constantly reminded by the congregation that you are the outsider.”

Diversity

•  “Can we have conversations about a group even if we don’t identify with that group?”
• “How do we create a space in these conversations that invites people to be honest, even with an unpopular opinion, rather than just saying what they feel pressured to say?”
• “How do we respect the specific terminology and require people to use that, but also be gracious with those who are still learning?

God and Evolution

•  “I think I used to believe in young earth creationism just because that’s what I was taught and raised to believe in a Christian home. As I’ve read more about these views and had a chance to develop my own worldview, I now believe science and spirituality are different and that creationism as described in the Bible is poetry”
• “Do you think it’s possible for Science and the Bible to be compatible? Why do we have to choose one over the other?”
• “The Bible asks the “Why?” and Science answers the “How?”questions.”

LGBTQIA

• “You get more conservative as you get older, this topic will be the norm when we are older and there will be a new progressive idea that future young adults argue.”
• “Medically there have been so many issues with whether you give someone the correct treatment or you respect what gender they identify as.”
• “Different denominations in the Christian religion interpret this part of the bible so differently, we are all reading the same words but how those words are perceived is drastic.”
• “If churches do not conform to these progressive views, they will die out because millennials will not come. If churches do conform they will lose their highest donors and longest attending members. They can’t win but they have to find a way to get all generations in the door and respecting of differences on this topic.”
  
  

Observations and Lessons

Each week we made notes of what we saw and heard,and then we discussed what we learned and how that might change our approach moving forward. Here are some of our observations and lessons.

1. Different Sample. Our group was not representative of who will actually be using these guides. Not only are we all in the same program, but the group who attended these sessions also were similar in that they all were interested in and chose to attend. What we learned from this is that (a) we need to pilot these in churches to get richer feedback on edits, and (b) we needed to change the guidelines to encourage this group to disagree. Due to our similarities, little challenging or disagreement occurred. Due to this, we ended up changing the one of our guidelines to say “challenge first, love second” instead of the original “love first, challenge second”.
2. Lots of People have Church Trauma. It was shocking for us to see so many people share about their trauma with the church. In one group (how the church has disappointed us)each person shared a very vivid memory from their childhood regarding how the church has hurt them. Many were emotional to the point of tears. Even though we know this trauma exists and have experienced some of it ourselves, we did not know it was that present for so many people.
   
   

The responses to people sharing were also impactful. Often, those in the group who still called themselves Christian would say something such as “I cannot believe other people who believe the same God as me treated you that way. I’m so sorry.”

• Storytelling is Super Engaging. Part of what led to the “How the church has disappointed us” group being so engaging was the fact that people were sharing stories. We noticed that people really listened, asked good questions, and engaged with this topic much more than the others. From this, we learned that the repetitive flow of several guides being structured the same got a bit boring, or made students hesitant to share their viewpoint without knowing the research or all perspectives. Asking people to share personal stories made it easy for everyone to engage, and made the topic very real.
• Young Adults Were Interested in Learning about the Church and Pivot Northwest. One interesting trend across the weeks was that nearly every group reached a point where students were simply asking us questions about the Pivot NW grant, the use of these guides, and about various denominations and the church in general. Several had not interacted with Christian churches before and were just curious about it all. This taught us that there is a need for these discussions so that people can understand where each other is coming from.
• Generations Don’t Understand Each Other. We frequently heard from young adults in our groups that they feel misunderstood by older generations. However, we have also heard that older generations feel misunderstood by young adults. And, we saw first-hand that many young adults who were not raised in the church genuinely do not know enough about the church to understand it. This once again highlighted the importance of these conversations as an opportunity to learn about another perspective.
• Students do not Read the Guides. Students did not read the guide, but rather briefly looked at it and then started bringing up topics or thoughts that were triggered by the guide. From this, we see the need to possibly shorten the guides and also to pilot test them in a group that goes through the shorter guides in a more structured way.

Next Steps

Here are some of our plans in moving forward with these guides:

• New sample of young adults! We want to meet with our participating churches and continue to pilot these discussions with the Young Adults in your church! Look for our email, or email us if you are interested in participating.
• Revising our facilitators guide to possibly pilot test and/or train pastors how to conduct them in their churches and surrounding communities
• Revise the guides based on feedback that was received, including getting them to one page so that you can take them with you everywhere you go!
• Continue to collect topics that are hard to have and look at creating guides around these topics, your ideas are welcome! What is a conversation that could use some guidelines with your members who may have opposing views? Some ideas we have pondered: marijuana, race, tattoos, mental health in the church, and more!

By Mackenzie Allison, Mathea Krogstad and Gabrielle Metzler

At the Fall summit, each of the 12 churches in the Pivot Northwest grant were asked to present their progress from the past year as a tri-fold (think Jr. High science-fair without the volcanoes). We analyzed the content on the tri-folds along with what the church leaders shared during their short presentations. While multiple values were seen within each individual church, three main themes emerged across most of the churches. These three themes include values, innovation process, and empowering young adults.

Values: The theme of values was reflected in several of the churches as they displayed their core values in large lettering on their posters, or frequently referred to their values in their presentations. While the exact wording of values differed from church to church, many observed values included a focus on community, relationship with God, and partnership.

How do these values compare to your church’s values?

Innovation Process: This theme was observed in multiple churches as they displayed and discussed their process by timeline or stage, noting where they have been and where they plan to go.

What has been your innovation process?

Empowering Young Adults: The theme of empowering young adults was clear in several churches who had plans for training young adults to take on more leadership roles in their congregations, specifically leadership of young adult programs.

Does this reflect what your instinct is for young adult ministry?

We love hearing stories about other churches who are following our work. Do you have something to share around these three themes that you want to share with us? Please email us at feedback@pivotnw.org

~Gabrielle Metzler

When I joined the Pivot NW data team last March, I was thrilled—I couldn’t imagine finding a better assistantship than one that lets me study young adults and the church! As a pastor’s kid and self-professed data nerd, there’s no better combination for me than statistics and Christianity. Our research started with a broad goal—“Study young adults and the church!”—and gave us more room than we knew what to do with. For the first years’ research, we narrowed our focus down to three questions:

• Why do (or don’t) young adults go to church?
• What does church uniquely provide in the lives of young adults?
• Once young adults are in church, how do they grow in their faith?
  
  

The three of us began discerning how to best approach each question, and eventually landed on our three surveys—surveys that would give us insightful data into how young adults understand, experience, and grow in church.

Once we finished designing our surveys, we used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) to share our surveys online and provide payment to the people who filled them out. Figuring out how to use MTurk was a process in itself, but we eventually ended up with plenty of data. After this came the data cleaning, where Gabrielle and I spent countless hours chugging coffee and combing through spreadsheets and data files to make sure our data was organized and accurate. Data cleaning can be a painful process, but in the end, it was worth it, because we ended up with one of my very favorite things: solid, fresh data, just waiting to be analyzed.

That brings us to where we’ve been with our research for the past few months: the storytelling phase. Seeing the findings come to life through presentations, conversations, and (future) journal articles is by far the most rewarding part of the research process for me. Our data isn’t important because it gives us absolute truth about young adults and church, but because it provides a unique perspective on what it means to engage with religion as a young adult in 2018. Data always exists in its own context—demographic, geographic, temporal—and at this stage of the research process, our team is working to connect our findings with broader narratives of what it means to be a young adult and work with young adults from a Christian perspective.

It’s been over a year since we started designing these three surveys, and by the end of the summer, they’ll be written up and submitted for publication in academic journals. It’s an exciting time in the research process because we’re seeing the story of our data coming together—and also because we’re starting to explore new possibilities for our next round of research. As much as we’re enjoying the work we’ve done so far, we can’t wait to ask new questions and build on our previous ones—and we’re excited to bring you all along for the ride!

~Mathea

To read through our research and to download the tools we developed from our study, click below.