Generation
Overwhelm
Worship with younger adults now
Amy McCreath
On
several occasions this summer, while driving my ten-year-old twins to or from
day camps, I have turned off the radio because the news being reported is
downright gruesome. And close to home. They are growing up in a very hard
world.
Of
course, there has always been violence, always been bad news. But my sense as a
parent, and as a priest with more than two decades of experience working with
young adults in pastoral and educational settings, is that we are in a
formational crisis. Few young people grow up with much stability, with any
religious formation, with any models for sustained engagement in a community or
healthy conflict. Young people are rarely taught skills for reflecting on
experience or for discerning identity, at a time when consumerism and
information overload offer unlimited options. As a result, many younger adults
experience the world as chaos and carry the emotional, psychological, and
physical dis-ease of the larger culture.
Now,
you may be wondering what any of this has to do with liturgy. I guess
that’s my question for you: what does it look like to offer life-giving,
Christ-centered worship that forms people for God’s mission in light of the
above? My hunch is that a lot of the “praying shaping believing” and
liturgy-shaping-us-for-mission that we work hard to facilitate assumes a
congregant who is regularly present, arrives with a semi-intact sense of
personhood, has enough grounding in the Biblical narrative that they can make
something of the references to salvation history in the creeds and the
Eucharistic prayer, and is not so overwhelmed by their fears that they can’t
take in the good news being offered.
Here
are some snippets of experience that lead me to this hunch:
The
parish I serve offers a contemplative prayer service lovingly and beautifully
crafted by a group of lay leaders each week. They write a new liturgy every
week, using prayers and poems and stories from all corners of the Christian
tradition. Younger adults I’ve spoken to who’ve attended report that the most
meaningful part for them is the ten minutes of silence in the middle of the
service. They rarely remember any of the words said.
When
I served as a campus minister, we did a “reverse instructed Eucharist,” asking
participants to tell us what was meaningful to them and what various parts of
the service seemed to mean. They remembered little of what the celebrants said,
did, or wore. They remembered (and liked) holding hands in a circle at the
Lord’s Prayer.
Younger
adults who offer reflection on their experience of my preaching say that what
matters most to them is that I begin with questions and invite participation
from the congregation, which often includes everyone from people with PhDs in
theology to children, newcomers and “oldtimers,” all speaking with equal
authority.
When
I asked a group of young parents in our congregation what part of the liturgy
stuck with them through the week, they told me it was the blessing I offer, which
begins, “Live without fear.”
None
of this leads me to definite conclusions. But it makes me hungry for a
conversation with all of you. Who are the teenagers and younger adults in your
life? How does or doesn’t worship speak to and form them? How are you
praying, thinking, and responding along with our God, whose children are
growing up in an unsteady and confusing world?
The Rev. Amy
McCreath is Priest-in-Charge of Church of the Good Shepherd, Watertown, MA, and
a Council Member of APLM.
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