By Kathy Staudt
I celebrated Pentecost this year at the church where I was confirmed 35 years ago, St. John’s, Northampton. I was back in town for my 35th reunion at Smith College, and so very available to thoughts of “then and now” and continuities and changes in myself. Their rector, relatively new, is a woman — something that was just over the horizon when I was at Smith in the early 1970’s.
I do remember well the dedication and yearning of one woman in that group, a few years ahead of me, who aspired to be ordained an Episcopal priest – Cynthia Plum. (It’s a small church – so if there are readers out there who know her you can send her this.) I was an awkward dancer in the liturgical dance group she led, and we performed at St. John’s and elsewhere. Raised a Presbyterian, exploring Quaker practice and Transcendentalist walks around the pond on Sunday mornings, I was drawn into the Episcopal church by friends who invited me to come play the guitar, and by clergy who wondered whether I’d be willing to direct a youth choir there. When I think of myself then, I realize that I was beginning on the same journey that I’m still on: at Smith I awoke to the love of learning, and the desire for God — and my life’s work has continued to center on bringing those yearnings together. But I think I grew most at that time, not only through study, but by watching how other adults, a little older than I, were putting it together. That was where my formation began.
The Episcopalians, it seemed to me at the time, had language that described my experience and my longings – and it was the language of liturgy, newly embodied in green and striped “trial service” books that the cradle Episcopalians around me had mixed feelings about. But I was right there: YES, Eucharist centered: Yes: “again and again, you called us to return,” and “open our eyes to see your hand at work in the world around us.” Some of the hymns were familiar, some of the prayers — and I learned the whole of Rite I by learning to sing it as a Folk Mass.
There were liturgical controversies whose point I couldn’t even understand. But what I was mostly doing was watching adults using those words, apparently serious about their faith, and I was being invited, without yet really knowing what I believed, to be one of those adults, leading the children’s choir. Being invited, with others my age, to share stories, often in the context of a Bible study group, helped me see that the questions I had weren’t the only questions — that we all had questions and it was good to ask them. We showed up — sporadically perhaps, but as regularly as we could — because this seemed important and we were trying to explain to ourselves why. But equally important was participating in the life of the congregation and seeing how “real” adults lived their faith — participating in church life, raising their kids, serving at the altar, caring about this because it was important. Sunday mornings, church suppers, for someone away from home but raised in a church, made the place feel like “home.” I’m interested to hear that now St. John’s serves pancakes to Smith students in their undercroft during exam week — They served almost 500 students this past year.– continuing that tradition of offering hospitality first, but probably also quietly continuing to bring students into contact with ordinary, “normal” people who are trying to work out church life and lives of faith, whether the students are actively interested in that or not.
Thirty five years later, the parish looks healthy and alive. The Pentecost service blended old and new — “Hail thee Festival Day” and “Every time I feel the spirit.” Rood screen and choir pews were gone, the sanctuary opened up, and green carpet removed to expose beautiful hardwood floors. So the space was a little different, but it still felt like a place that had been “home. “ Still a pipe organ and a vested choir, but also a hominess and informality — “then” and “now” nicely connected. In keeping with the rubrics of the 1979 prayer book, the day featured a child’s and an adult baptism and also a service welcoming 13-year olds on the “Journey to Adulthood.”
This got me thinking: We invite the middle-schoolers on the “Journey to Adulthood.” But in our 20’s and 30’s, we are beginning, have begun, our journey through adulthood. In curriculum development, I think we tend to see Young Adult Ministry as a kind of extension of Youth Ministry. Usually the younger clergy member is put in charge of “Youth and Young Adult Ministry.” But in our twenties and thirties, aren’t we already beginning the process of adult formation that we hope will continue throughout our lives? I wonder whether it makes a difference to think of Young Adult ministry this way. I’d be interested in what Café readers think.
Who I am now, worshiping at St. John’s on Pentecost 2010, was very much continuous with who I was in the 1970’s when I was awakening to so much that the church helped me understand. My formation happened as much through the life and liturgy of the church, and interaction with older Christians, as it did through interaction with people my age. ( The same was true, actually, at the Episcopal Church at Yale when I was there — where the lives and explorations of older grad students and our clergy were a source of insight for me– an opening to the way ahead. This may have been “just me,” but I don’t think so.) The mentoring and the example of older adults involved in church life was really important; and it seems to me that argues for inviting people in their 20’s and 30’s to participate in the existing church structure in every way we can, even as we also try to assemble groups in the same age and stage of life for fellowship and study. The mentoring is as important as the peer group. But we have to treat our “twentysomethings” like fellow adults – not as oversize “young people.”
There’s also a piece here about ritual and sacrament, which is what drew me to the Episcopal Church, and what I think we still offer, perhaps uniquely, to seekers in their 20s and 30s. Getting confirmed at age 22 was certainly “on target” developmentally for me: it was my way of claiming something about my identity and my path in life, of saying: “This is one part of the way I want to do life. This is the tradition I want to turn to for help in answering life’s big questions.” The ritual of confirmation was important to me. It was a way of launching my adult life of faith, claiming a path publicly, and saying: “Here I have found something real. Call it God, call it the voice of my truest self, call it koinonia/community.” I was glad I hadn’t been confirmed at 14 in the Episcopal church because this rite remained available to me..
I had of course already been baptized as an infant, in an active Presbyterian family. In this generation, far fewer young adults have been baptized — and as we renewed our baptismal covenant, at St. John’s on Pentecost this year, I found myself wondering whether there is an opportunity in the fact that Baptism is a rite available to those who have not been baptized as infants. Could adult Baptism could become a more widespread way of claiming faith identity, and the intention to try living this Way? The language of the Baptismal Covenant does reflect the kinds of decisions we are exploring, as we begin the journey through adulthood . But how often do we present it that way, to young adults? What if Baptism, or a renewal of Baptismal covenant, were to become a new and identifiable step available to people choosing an “adult” life of faith, without having been raised in a community that would have baptized them? Perhaps this is already happening: perhaps there will be a resurgence of “believers’ baptisms” in Episcopal churches in the next generation. That could be interesting.
In any case, I’m beginning to think that Young Adult ministry, and the claiming of Christian identity that has been part of it, is actually more properly thought of as the beginning of adult formation, the first unit, perhaps, in the “Journey Through Adulthood” that is lifelong formation. I wonder what difference it would make to think about Young Adult ministry in this way?
Dr. Kathleen Henderson Staudt keeps the blog poetproph, works as a teacher, poet, spiritual director and retreat leader in the Washington DC area. She is the author of two books: At the Turn of a Civilisation: David Jones and Modern Poetics and Annunciations: Poems out of Scripture.