Serving Our Young Adults
by David E. Gray

Many churches are interested in developing programs for young adults to help their congregations grow. However, there is another equally compelling reason for churches to focus on young adults – the critical needs of the early young adult population. In recent years, our society has appropriately focused on the needs of teenagers. But current trends suggest that some of the same problems we used to worry about for teenagers are now in crisis mode for young adults.

The violence at Virginia Tech last April calls attention to the challenges faced by an often overlooked age group. While the 1999 Columbine High School shootings were carried out by two teenagers, the Virginia Tech rampage was perpetrated by a 23-year-old college student. These parallel tragedies symbolize what many in the research community see – that some of the concerns we have associated with the teenage years have shifted to a slightly older population of vulnerable young adults.

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VIGNETTE

Do Not Enter
by Terry Bookman and William Kahn

When you drive east on Westchester Avenue, the first sign you see when you approach Temple Beth Am is "Do Not Enter." When we pointed this out to the synagogue's leaders, they at first denied the sign existed. They had become so used to driving past the temple's exit that they no longer even saw the sign. But anyone approaching the synagogue for the first time – a visitor or a potential congregant, someone who was "shul shopping," or even someone who had been a member but never really involved – sure did. And though perhaps they would realize it was just a traffic sign marking the exit, they had to wonder: Is this synagogue sending a subtle message? Is this an open and inviting place, or are they content to be what they are with who they are? Or as we would phrase it, Is this a community anyone can enter?

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Leaders do not need answers.
Leaders must have the right questions.

Terry Bookman and William Kahn ask a question about synagogues that all faith communities would do well to ask:

Is this the place you would come if you did not
already belong here?

Editors:  Lovett H. Weems, Jr. and Ann A. Michel
Production and distribution:  Joe Arnold

Copyright © 2008 by the G. Douglass Lewis Center for Church Leadership. Leading Ideas material may be freely distributed with attribution (exclusive of material protected by separate copyright).