#33: Where the Gospel Meets Emerging Adulthood

#33: Where the Gospel Meets Emerging Adulthood

Note: The Love Thy Neighborhood podcast is made for the ear, and not the eye. We would encourage you to listen to the audio for the full emotional emphasis of this episode. The following transcription may contain errors. Please refer to the audio before quoting any content from this episode. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Knowing when you’re an adult is kinda tricky. We actually went out and asked people about that — ‘When did you know that you were actually an adult?’

DAYSHAWN RUSSELL: Right after graduating undergrad, I was living at home with my mom. After about a year and a half, I was able to purchase my own home. That was a huge moment.

KARLA RESTO: For me, adulthood started maybe a little bit earlier than I wanted because my mom and my stepdad, they got divorced. I’d just turned 17. I had to make a lot of arrangements in, like, just in life in general.

SYDNEY WRIGHT: In college having to go to a counselor by myself to share some really deep and hard things with somebody that I didn’t even know. 

AUSTIN: Paying your bills. That was like maybe one of the first big adult things, you know, in my mind. 

SHILOH: Opening up a bank account. I opened up my own bank account not like — as separate of my parents.  

JESSE EUBANKS: So, Lachlan, when do you feel like you became an adult?

LACHLAN COFFEY: That’s an interesting question, Jesse. You’ve known me for a long time. I’ve, I’ve eaten terrible food. I remember my roommates in college coming in, and just they tell this story of me eating breakfast, and I just had a bag of Rolos. (laughter) I remember going to the doctor, and the doctor was like, ‘Hey man, your cholesterol numbers are off the chart. And I was like, ‘What’s cholesterol?’ (laughter) I had never heard the word, and that was the moment I was like, ‘I think things are changing.’ 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, the audience should be aware that, uh, we all have slightly different stages of when we know that we’re adults. Lachlan’s is very unique to Lachlan. (laughs)

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JESSE EUBANKS: You’re listening to the Love Thy Neighborhood podcast. I’m Jesse Eubanks.

LACHLAN COFFEY: And I’m Lachlan Coffey. Every episode we hear stories of social action and Christian community.

JESSE EUBANKS: Today’s episode is where the gospel meets emerging adulthood.

LACHLAN COFFEY: That’s right. We’re here to yell at young people and tell them to ‘get off our lawn!’ 

JESSE EUBANKS: No, that is not what’s happening, but we are going to take a look at the strange and confusing process of becoming an adult because the way that we do life in our 20s becomes the way that we do life in our 30s, our 40s, and our 50s. But what we’ve seen over the last 15 years of working with young adults is that crossing the bridge into adulthood has become incredibly complex. Welcome to our corner of the urban universe.

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JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, so back in 2010, the New York Times ran an article stating that young people are taking longer to reach adulthood overall.

LACHLAN COFFEY: Wait, you’re saying it takes longer to grow up? I don’t  get — I mean obviously I’m no Bill Nye, but time is kind of progressing the same as always, right? We’re not like stuck at age 17. What do you mean it’s taking longer?

JESSE EUBANKS: Well what they mean is that when society talks about adulthood, often what is being referred to are particular markers or milestones associated with adulthood. So these are things like getting married, owning a home, starting a career. When we say the road to adulthood is taking longer, what we mean is that people are reaching these typical milestones much later in life than previous generations. 

LACHLAN COFFEY: But I would argue that milestones does not an adult make. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Why are you talking like Yoda?

LACHLAN COFFEY: Thought it, thought it sounded smart. 

JESSE EUBANKS (laughs): Uh, how would you define being an adult?

LACHLAN COFFEY: I mean — it’s not — it’s like — it’s not like being a kid — it’s when you’re not a kid — I don’t know, Jesse! You turn 18? I don’t know. What are the rules? 

JESSE EUBANKS: So at 18, you felt like an adult?

LACHLAN COFFEY: No. Ah, this is so confusing!

JESSE EUBANKS: Welcome to what it feels like trying to become an adult in today’s context. But the good news is that you’re in good company because feelings of helpless confusion in growing up are not new.

So at the beginning of First Kings, David’s son Solomon becomes the new king over Israel. And in chapter four, Solomon says this to the Lord — ‘And now, O Lord my God, you have made your servant king in place of David my father, although I am but a little child. I do not know how to go out or come in.’ So basically ‘I’ve just had all this responsibility thrown upon me, and I have no idea what I’m doing.’

LACHLAN COFFEY: How old was Solomon?

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, historians estimate that he was just 15 years old when he became king.

LACHLAN COFFEY: Okay, yeah. I mean even though that was almost 3000 years ago, I mean that sounds like a prayer any young adult today could pray. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, and I think that the stakes are the same too. Y’know, Solomon was the king over God’s people, a leader, and that’s a pretty weighty task, but every young adult today is a future leader of tomorrow. Just as Solomon was handed the kingdom, we will one day hand our society over to those making the journey to adulthood now. 

LACHLAN COFFEY: Which is a big deal. And you’d think with so much riding on their shoulders, we’d be more inclined to shepherd and nurture young adults. But honestly, I mean, the world of young adulthood today — it feels like an alien planet to me. I mean, Jesse, do you know what TikTok is? I don’t know. I do not know. I have a hard time understanding younger generations and oftentimes I’m inclined to just, y’know, write them off. I mean they seem like lazy, like they just need to grow up.

JESSE EUBANKS: Well, you’re not alone. In fact, this guy named Steve Argue found himself in a similar situation. Okay so Steve was a youth group leader for 20 years, and he loved all the passion and excitement that youth brought to their lives. He built a ton of good relationships with his students, but he found that, y’know, when they were graduating high school, it was really just hard to say goodbye to them.

STEVE ARGUE: A lot of times, that’s the last I saw of them. Y’know, they went off and did their thing and I was onto the next group that was coming in and, um, I tried my best to set them up for success, but then that was sort of it. 

JESSE EUBANKS: At least, that’s what it seemed like, but then this strange thing started happening. Two, three, even five years later, these former students, who were now in their 20s, started contacting Steve — out of the blue. 

STEVE ARGUE: For whatever reason, uh, I think trusted me, maybe just because of the time in their lives, and so they’d come back and talk with me about life or about faith or about future or, um, things going on in their lives. 

JESSE EUBANKS: And this was strange for Steve because Steve had always operated under this model of, ‘Okay, I invest in these high school kids, I give a few years of attention to them, and then that’s it. They move on in life, I move on in life, move on to the next batch.’ Except now, dozens of these kids were reappearing in Steve’s life — but as young adults. Young adults making the same cries that King Solomon made — ‘I don’t know how to do this thing called adulting.’

STEVE ARGUE: I just began to ask some deeper questions about, ‘Well, what happens after they graduate high school? What is it about the post-18 experience? What is going on with the 18 through the 20s and who are these people and what are they like?’

JESSE EUBANKS: So as he began having more and more of these conversations with now emerging adults, Steve realized that he didn’t know much about this stage of life. But he wanted to. So much in fact that he ended up quitting youth ministry, and he actually became a professional researcher on emerging adults. 

LACHLAN COFFEY: Which, I mean, yeah, makes sense. It’s a natural path of progression. (laughter) No. It’s not. So bizarre.  

JESSE EUBANKS: So Steve joined the Fuller Youth Institute as an applied research strategist. And what he found in his research was this — just like the land of emerging adulthood felt foreign to him, it felt just as foreign to those trying to navigate it.

STEVE ARGUE: I think in world’s past, the road to adulthood was much more linear. You usually graduated high school, maybe you went to college, you were most likely going to be married at a particular age, you’d start children in a way you go, and it sort of happens. And the economy supported it, like you could work a summer job and pay for college. You could actually have a consistent job and afford a home. This is happening the same way that it used to.

JESSE EUBANKS: So here’s what Steve is talking about. In 1980, the average college tuition at a four-year, public, out-of-state school was around $9,500. Here’s what that means — is that in 1980, if you worked a full-time summer job and a part-time job during the school year, you could completely pay for college as well as all of your living expenses. But today — today we know that that is impossible. Since 1980, the minimum wage has gone up 135%, but college tuition has gone up 180%. So the landscape of reaching adulthood just looks different today. So here’s what I think we should do. Let’s take some of society’s typical adulthood milestones, the things that we’ve used for decades to define adulthood, and look at them in today’s social and economic context because I think that this will give you a good view of today’s adulting landscape.

LACHLAN COFFEY: Alright, which ones are you thinking about here?

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay so starting a career, owning a home, and getting married.

LACHLAN COFFEY: You know me, I love me a three point outline. Cue the music!

JESSE EUBANKS: So first, let’s look at starting a career. Say you’re 18, you just graduated high school, and there’s a world of possibilities out there. How are you going to get from where you are now to where you want to be in five or 10 years? Let’s say that you choose to go to college. 59% of those entering college will graduate within six years, and one in four will graduate with student debt. So you’re now 24 with a bachelor’s degree and owe the average amount of $37,000 in student loans. 

LACHLAN COFFEY: I remember Love Thy Neighborhood talking about this on a past episode.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, we did, we did a whole episode on where the gospel meets student loan debt. Okay so on top of that, only 27% of graduates get a job related to their field of study. So at 24, you’re still working entry level jobs because you need anything that can pay the bills, which brings us to the next milestone — owning a home.

STEVE ARGUE: We’re finding that a lot of emerging adults are looking for ways to save money. They’ve racked up school debt. They have in many ways ventured out on their own, and things just cost more. And so a lot of them are moving back home. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Now probably when you or I picture a 24-year-old living at home – we think of just like a loafer, y’know, playing video games all day in their parents’ basement.

LACHLAN COFFEY: Let’s call them hooligans.

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, hooligans living in their parents’ basement. Uh, but Steve says that actually is not what’s happening here.

STEVE ARGUE: The reason for moving back home is because they want to save money because they have a goal and a plan to be financially independent, to perhaps get an apartment, buy a home, invest in their education, et cetera, et cetera. So what’s so interesting is this — is you have the same icon, moving back home with your parents, a generation or two ago would be interpreted as an adulting fail, but perhaps for many of emerging adults today, this moving back home with your parents is actually a step toward adulting. It’s actually a thoughtful move to really establish themselves in such a way that they can then really launch and be off on their own in the future. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay so Lachlan, the percentage of emerging adults living at home hasn’t been as high as it is today since the Great Depression. Think about that for a second.

LACHLAN COFFEY: Yeah, you would think that we’re in the land of America and like it’s easy just to go get a house and, y’know, they’re handing them out like candy, y’know. Apparently that’s not the case. 

JESSE EUBANKS: So you don’t have a career yet, you do not own a home yet, and you’re 24. So so far, the milestones to adulthood — you are not hitting those benchmarks. Let’s go one step further. You live with your parents for two years, you save up some money, and now you’re able to rent your own apartment at 26 years old. And that’s just a step toward living independently, not actually owning a house. This all brings us to the last milestone — getting married. So let’s double this scenario and say that there’s two 26-year-olds in this position, and they’re dating. Would you get married in this position?

LACHLAN COFFEY: Probably not, Jesse. Married life is expensive. There’s a lot of variables at play with a lot of costs. Thinking not. I’m a big fan of tax breaks, but probably not going down this path at this point.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, I mean this is exactly what the data is showing.  In 1970, the average age of marriage was 22 for men and 20 for women. And today, that age has jumped up to 28 for men and 26 for women. So what all this means is that today people are almost 30 years old before they’re finally hitting some of these typical adulting milestones. 

STEVE ARGUE: The paths toward establishing — acquiring, I suppose — adulthood are much more diverse and much more, uh, challenging. This is happening not because emerging adults are lazy or because they just don’t want to grow up. Emerging adults just need more time and resource to actually get there. 

JESSE EUBANKS: So this is actually where we get the term ‘emerging adult.’ Because so much time now has to go into establishing an adult life, that simply calling it ‘adulthood’ — it doesn’t quite capture the essence of this stage of life. So ‘emerging adulthood’ is used to describe this stage of development that we go through from about 18 to 30 years old.

LACHLAN COFFEY: So maybe our old ways of defining adulthood — they’re not working as well anymore, and we need some new categories.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah. I mean I don’t think the problem is that young people in general aren’t growing up. It’s that we’re looking at them with the wrong measurements. And Steve wanted to find a way to fix this.

STEVE ARGUE: Adolescents and emerging adulthood covers — I mean, if you think about it, almost 20 years of like a human existence, right? How can we perhaps be more particular about this really significant period, and how can we talk about it in a way that might be helpful?

JESSE EUBANKS: Coming up — redefining adulthood. We’ll be right back.

COMMERCIAL

JESSE EUBANKS: You’re listening to the Love Thy Neighborhood podcast. I’m Jesse Eubanks.

LACHLAN COFFEY: And I’m Lachlan Coffey. Today’s episode is where the gospel meets emerging adulthood.

JESSE EUBANKS: So we’ve been following the story of Steve Argue. He was in youth ministry, got curious about what his students experienced after high school, and became a researcher on emerging adulthood. And what he found was that this stage of life is incredibly complex and that it can no longer really be defined well by our previous standards. So Steve and his colleagues got together. They interviewed hundreds of young adults. As to where we in the past we defined emerging adulthood as one single stage of life, Steve and his colleagues have figured out that actually it’s three separate stages. 

STEVE ARGUE: So we call them learners, explorers, and focusers.

JESSE EUBANKS: So, Lachlan, learners, explorers, focusers. Let’s walk through each one of these and look at examples as a way to sort of redefine adulthood for today’s context. 

LACHLAN COFFEY: Great. I’ve got my pen, paper out, I’ve got little kids, I’m ready to learn. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, so, y’know, we both have kids that are in that first stage, and that first stage is learner. In the learner phase, these folks are typically 13 to 17 years old. They’re living at home. They’re learning the traditional beliefs of their family, their culture. In terms of their faith, it’s kind of the default world that they’ve grown up in. In terms of their relationships, they’re learning how to navigate broadening relationships. But they’re also just learning about even vocational options that exist in the world. Everything about this phase is just about learning.

STEVE ARGUE: A young person is just experiencing rapid and physical, emotional, relational, intellectual, spiritual change, right? They’re, they’re literally trying to sort of keep up with themselves. 

JESSE EUBANKS: It’s crazy how much my daughter has changed between the ages of 12 and 13.

LACHLAN COFFEY: Yeah, yeah, me too. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Dramatic. 

LACHLAN COFFEY: Yeah, we both have 13-year-olds. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah. Her interests, her emotional intuitions, like —

LACHLAN COFFEY: Yeah, but even like the transition to like — if you have friends over, our kids used to just go play and be kids or whatever, but now they kind of want to be a part of the conversation with the adults. They linger a lot more and like —

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah.

LACHLAN COFFEY: — they think they wanna talk about 401k’s, but they don’t know what a ‘K’ is.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, and they ask so many more questions. 

LACHLAN COFFEY: Yeah.

JESSE EUBANKS: And not like shallow questions.

LACHLAN COFFEY: Some of them are hard.

JESSE EUBANKS: Like kind of intense questions. (laughter) Yeah. Totally. And it’s totally a sign of they’re learning. 

LACHLAN COFFEY: Yeah.

JESSE EUBANKS: So that goes on, y’know, from 13 years old all the way up until around 18. But around 18 years old, something shifts.

STEVE ARGUE: At 18, something happens though. The script is off. I can choose to do a number of things. I can go to college, I can take a gap year, I can work, I can join the military, I can, uh, travel the world. I really almost can do whatever I want at that point because there’s really no institutional expectation placed on me. And so there’s something quite beautiful about that, but there’s also something quite daunting about that.

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay so this brings us to the second category in defining emerging adulthood, and that’s what Steve calls the explorer phase. These folks are typically between the ages of 18 and 23, and the big thing that happens in this phase is that emerging adults are venturing out from home. So they’re out on their own for the first time, and their orientation is all about exploring. They’re exploring faith. They’re exploring new beliefs. So they’re taking the beliefs that they were raised with or that they were exposed to as a teenager, and they’re starting to remix them with these new beliefs that they’re encountering in the world. They’re exploring what they want out of relationships. But they’re also exploring vocational options. They’re trying lots and lots of things out for the first time. Everything’s about exploring.

STEVE ARGUE: Y’know, and I think explorers — they feel excited about the future but still unsure about themselves.

JESSE EUBANKS: Which perfectly sums up the experience of one of our current interns, Kirsten Cragg.

KIRSTEN CRAGG: I remember moving in and unpacking my stuff and thinking like, ‘What the heck have I done?’ 

JESSE EUBANKS: So Kirsten first came to serve with us in summer of 2019. She was just 18 years old, the youngest intern in the program at the time. It was the first time she’d really ventured away from home and been out on her own. 

KIRSTEN CRAGG: This was like gonna be like 11 weeks, and I had never been gone that long. It was just a lot of unknown that I wasn’t sure how it was all gonna play out.

JESSE EUBANKS: You know, some emerging adults experience this stage when they go off to college or when they move out of the house for the first time. But for Kirsten, she was coming to live and serve in Louisville for the summer, which meant she would be faced with new relationships, new work environments, and a whole new way of life.

KIRSTEN CRAGG: I read a journal entry from my first day a couple weeks ago, and I was like, ‘I don’t know why I’m here and I’m kind of really scared, but I’m just praying that the Lord is going to calm my anxiety, calm my nerves, and do something big this summer.’

JESSE EUBANKS: So while she was here Kirsten served at a nonprofit that works with women coming out of the adult entertainment industry, and she quickly learned that this exploring phase was going to require skills that she just didn’t have yet.

KIRSTEN CRAGG: I remember my first day there and no one really was friendly or welcoming. They kind of didn’t want us around because we were new people and they’re in their space and who are coming in to help. Honestly for the first month it was really challenging because I would say good morning to one of the women and they would kind of just not say anything back or give me a weird look and so I was like, ‘Okay, I’m not doing what I thought I was doing. I’m not making as big of an impact as I thought.’

JESSE EUBANKS: Being away from home for the first time, Kirsten was exploring relationships in a way that she never had before. This was true at her service site, and it was also true in her household. So Kirsten actually lived in a house with nine other women, two of whom she shared a room with. 

LACHLAN COFFEY: 10 women. Living in the same house. How does that work? Like what happens? 

JESSE EUBANKS: Well I’ll tell you what happens. Conflict. Conflict is what happens. In particular, conflict with one of her roommates.

KIRSTEN CRAGG: It felt like she was kind of taking advantage of the fact that I, like, was a helper, so she’d asked me to do things for her all the time that she could do for herself.

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay so here’s an important distinction. When someone is in the learner phase, what they really need is a teacher, someone to teach them about life and about how to navigate it. But explorers — what they need is a guide. Here’s Steve.

STEVE ARGUE: A guide, a really good guide, allows the explorer to look around for themselves. They have enough skill and capacity to see things for themselves, and there are perhaps more times where there’s a technical terrain where the guide may say, ‘Hey, you know what, why don’t you let me go first and you follow me because this is something you’ve never experienced before.’

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, so Love Thy Neighborhood, we provide all sorts of guides for people that are in the explorer stage. They have a mentor. They meet with a program director for life coaching. They’re part of a small group. They meet with other folks for accountability and support. And one of the big purposes of all of these support systems is to encourage these explorers to embrace the fact that they’re adults. So as Kirsten talked with her other teammates and her mentor about her conflict in the house, they were able to guide her and suggest that she talk with this particular roommate that she was having a hard time with. But that was all they did. I mean, the truth is that no one was going to make Kirsten do it. That had to be her choice.

KIRSTEN CRAGG: Yeah, I think that’s kind of when I finally realized, ‘I’m an adult. I am responsible for myself and no one’s gonna, no one’s gonna check in on me. No one’s gonna parent me. I am responsible for me.’

JESSE EUBANKS: So Kirsten decides to listen to the wisdom of her guides and do something that she’s never done before — talk to the roommate that she has a conflict with and tell her how she feels.

KIRSTEN CRAGG: I remember like my hands were sweating and my heart was beating so fast because I was gonna tell her how I felt. And I was like, ‘You know, I, you know, I feel like you’re not invested. I feel like this, this, and this.’ And she received it so well. And she was like, ‘I’m so sorry I made you feel that way. I’ll, I’ll do better.’ And then it was over, and I was like, ‘This big issue, this big thing I was so scared of — of this conflict, this confrontation — was like no big deal.

JESSE EUBANKS: So maybe adulting wouldn’t be as scary as she had made it out to be. She just needed some guides to help her along the way. In fact, at the end of her term, Kirsten decided to come back to the LTN community for the year-long program, which actually she’s a part of right now. Because here, she’s found the guides and the support she needs as she steps into adulthood.

KIRSTEN CRAGG: Kirsten here feels like an adult and I feel like I am on my own and I’m confident in my skills, and that’s the way I was treated over the summer. It was like I was treated as an adult and earning that respect and having that respect from other interns and the staff was like, ‘Okay, like I, I am an adult.’

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, so once we go through the learner phase and we go through the explorer phase, we then come to the last phase in emerging adulthood. And that is what Steve Argue calls the focuser. 

STEVE ARGUE: Usually what we see is that of this group of emerging adults is gaining a clear sense of who they are.

JESSE EUBANKS: The focuser phase is usually the ages of 24 to 29 years old. The interesting thing in this one is that they begin to re-enter their familial relationships in a new way where they’re sort of in interdependent relationship with their family. They are focused on deepening their personal beliefs, so they really build a lot of faith convictions during this stage. They combine what they were raised with with the new beliefs that they discovered in the explorer stage. They begin to refine their faith. They also begin to focus on key relationships, so they’re not as broadly spread out as they previously had been. And they also begin to focus on a more narrow set of vocational options. They stop dabbling and start deciding what they really wanna do with their life. But that doesn’t mean that the struggle is over, and we see this in the story of a guy named Paul Angone.

PAUL ANGONE: I was just miserable and depressed and anxious and feeling like nothing was working out like I thought it would. 

JESSE EUBANKS: So this is Paul Angone. And at the time, Paul was 23 years old.

PAUL ANGONE: I’m living in LA area, Los Angeles, with about five other roommates, and I still have no idea what I’m doing with my life. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Paul was moving out of the explorer phase and into the focuser phase. The job that he had at the time was at a call center for a large company receiving customer service calls.

PAUL ANGONE: Basically that meant getting there at 6 a.m., plugging into my phone, and having people yell and scream at me for eight hours straight. And so they were ready to blame me for their, you know, all their computer internet problems, but also their failed marriage, the bad weather, what they ate for breakfast. I mean, I would get cussed out and you have no really control over any of it. 

JESSE EUBANKS: And here’s the thing, like there’s nothing wrong with working at a call center. Like you’ve got bills to pay. It’s an honorable job. It’s fine. It’s good. But it’s really not what Paul wanted to be doing long term. Paul really wanted to be be an author, and he really wanted to communicate meaningful things to people.

PAUL ANGONE: I imagined, you know, making a difference, doing big things, feeling passionate about what I’m doing, and none of that was taking place. So I remember walking around and I was just praying, just like, ‘God, I, I don’t know if I can do another day of this. I don’t know if I can do a week. Is this my life?’

JESSE EUBANKS: Lachlan, have you ever read the book Are You My Mother?

LACHLAN COFFEY: I don’t wanna sound snooty, but I’m more of a Netflix kind of guy. (laughter) I don’t wanna be condescending to your audience here but…

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, to clarify, uh, Are You My Mother is a little kids’ book.

LACHLAN COFFEY: Oh, okay.

JESSE EUBANKS: A little bird falls out of its nest and the whole book it’s looking for its mother, so it walks up to all these different animals it comes across and asks each one ‘Are you my mother?’ Well Paul said that this felt like a perfect analogy of life at this point.

PAUL ANGONE: And I felt like I was that bird, except I was kind of walking around and saying like, ‘Is this gonna be my life? Like, this can’t really be my life, right? Like when do I find my life?’

LACHLAN COFFEY: Which is a question that emerging adults often ask themselves.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, I think that most people can relate to Paul here. I mean in fact, Paul is gonna end up helping a lot of people through his experience.

LACHLAN COFFEY: What do you mean?

JESSE EUBANKS: Well, stay with us.

COMMERCIAL

JESSE EUBANKS: Love Thy Neighborhood podcast. Jesse Eubanks.

LACHLAN COFFEY: Lachlan Coffey. Today — where the gospel meets emerging adulthood.

JESSE EUBANKS: We’ve been looking at three phases within the broad category of emerging adulthood. The first was learner, the second was explorer, and the last is focuser. And that’s the stage where Paul Angone found himself frustrated and miserable because it didn’t look the way that he pictured it — which according to Steve Argue, is really common.

STEVE ARGUE: I find that a lot of emerging adults say that they feel behind in some aspect of their lives, whether it’s their beliefs or their relationships or their careers, and so there’s sort of this, um, this clarity that they have, that a focuser has, but also sometimes a bit of a lament because they feel behind in a particular area of their lives.

JESSE EUBANKS: Paul felt behind in his career because he was working at a call center but what he really wanted to do was be a writer. So Paul decides to go for it. 

PAUL ANGONE: And I’m just gonna tuck away and write this book.

JESSE EUBANKS: In fact, he was gonna write a book about being an emerging adult and that whole experience, hopefully as a way to help others who were experiencing the same things that he was.

PAUL ANGONE: I would go through many rounds of edits. I would get a complete manuscript together. We’d send it out to publishers. And about two years worth of rejections then came in. So for two years it was waiting for that email that I was hoping was gonna kind of change the course of my life, and it was just a consistent ‘No, I’m sorry. We’re not gonna publish your book.’

JESSE EUBANKS: So like obviously, this was really, really discouraging, but Paul felt like this is a really important topic. It’s a topic that a lot of people need to hear about. So he kept going.

PAUL ANGONE: Yeah, I just kept coming back to that pain that I felt and feeling like I know what it’s like and I know people are suffering and struggling and they’re doing this alone. So I kept asking myself this question — ‘Who will I not be able to help if I give up now?’

JESSE EUBANKS: So now he’s 27 years old, four years past when we first met him at the call center, but Paul is focused. He has decided that this is what he wants to dedicate his life to. But he keeps getting all these rejection letters. That leads him to decide ‘I need to go back to the drawing board.’

PAUL ANGONE: So that’s when I started a website called AllGroanUp.com, g-r-o-a-n like you’re groaning in pain. I went back and got a master’s degree. So for four years, it was just like another training and equipping season. 

JESSE EUBANKS: So Paul keeps plugging away and he keeps publishing articles on his website, he keeps working on drafts of a book. It’s slow moving. But eventually — it actually happens. Paul gets his first book published, and it released almost ten years after we first met him at that call center.

PAUL ANGONE: The book that I was trying to get published for years ended up being my second book that got published. My first book that got published was 101 Secrets for Your Twenties, and that book I created through my website, through my blog really, and writing articles. It was all the lessons, it was all the failure, it was all the struggle. It was all the stuff I was learning while trying to get that other book published and failing.

JESSE EUBANKS: In fact it’s a book that we actually give to our interns who serve with us, and it’s full of all the lessons that Paul learned as he made his way through this life stage known as emerging adulthood.

PAUL ANGONE: You know, I feel like success in your twenties is more about setting the table than it is about enjoying the feast. Or, y’know, if you put in a different metaphor, it’s really success in your twenties is about planting seeds in the ground, seeds that you’re then gonna have to water and feed and care for for a long time. It’s like planting an avocado seed. It’s gonna take about 10 years before you see any fruit from that one action.

JESSE EUBANKS: Today Paul is still an author. He’s a speaker on emerging adulthood. Because just like Steve, he has so much compassion and empathy for people in that awkward stage of emerging adulthood.

PAUL ANGONE: It is kind of a lost group in every facet of life. You know, it’s just kind of this transient group that’s waiting and searching for a place to call home again. 

JESSE EUBANKS: So, those are the three categories of emerging adulthood — learner, explorer, and focuser.

LACHLAN COFFEY: But Jesse, I don’t wanna, y’know, throw a proverbial wrench into the process here, but I think we’re missing something in this conversation. 

JESSE EUBANKS: What do you think we’re missing?

LACHLAN COFFEY: So far we’ve focused on emerging adults themselves, but I actually think there’s two crucial relationships in the lives of emerging adults that I think we’d be remiss not to acknowledge. 

JESSE EUBANKS: What are those?

LACHLAN COFFEY: Well, Jesse, I’ve done a little bit of journalism myself. And the first relationship I wanna talk about — parents.

HILARY NOLTEMEYER: I think I wanted her last year at home to feel like a series of all the fun last things, and it didn’t really feel like that.

LACHLAN COFFEY: Okay, so this is Hilary Noltemeyer. She is the mom of an 18-year-old daughter who is transitioning out of that learner phase and into that explorer phase. Y’know, she’s graduated high school, going off to college. She’s got expectations of what this new phase of life is gonna look like. But not just for the kid, also for the parent.

HILARY NOLTEMEYER: It felt a lot more like letting her explore who she is, helping prepare her for things, but also when she was resistant, letting it go. ‘I really wanna show you how to make this meal or whatever,’ and she’s like, ‘I don’t have time for that.’ In my mind I’m thinking like, ‘You’re gonna wish you’d done that.’ But I’m also realizing she will also figure it out. It was sort of a constant in my own heart, checking, ‘Am I just doing this because it helps me feel better, or is it what she really needs?’

LACHLAN COFFEY: It’s important for parents to make that transition with their kids. As they go from learner to explorer, we need to go from teachers to guides, just like Steve Argue talked about — which is something Hilary tried to embody when she finally left her daughter at college.

HILARY NOLTEMEYER: She’s like, ‘Please don’t go.’ And I was like, ‘You’re gonna be fine. You’re gonna get your feet under you, and you’re gonna be fine.’  And she was like, ‘I just don’t know if I can do this.’ And I was like, ‘You totally can. You’re so ready.’ So I think that slow untethering of it’s really not my choice to make anymore. I don’t get to choose if she eats Chick-fil-A every single day or drinks way too much coffee at 10 p.m. and then is up all night or decides to bomb out a paper because she just doesn’t feel like doing it. I don’t get to say that’s a bad idea. She knows it’s a bad idea. It’s kinda like when you send your kid to kindergarten. They’ve been with you so much, and then all of a sudden you realize somebody else is with them all day every day and they’re with them more than they’re with you. She’s never really gonna be in our home the way that she was before. And that’s hard. You know, it’s hard, but it’s, it’s good.

JESSE EUBANKS: I love hearing her tell her daughter, ‘You can do this.’ And I think that so many parents just underestimate how much power they can give to their emerging adult child, y’know, by affirming them in that way. Okay, so you said there were two relationships that you wanted to highlight. So if parents was the first, what was the second one?

LACHLAN COFFEY: Yeah, the second one, equally important — the church. The church has to be involved in the development of emerging adults. But, Jesse, that’s not happening. I mean just three years ago, Lifeway Research put out this study and it showed that 66% of Americans in their twenties — they stop attending church on a regular basis. Just stop. 66%, two-thirds. 

STEVE ARGUE: I think that emerging adults don’t know where they fit in the church. They live in this sort of in-between space, and, y’know, church structures oftentimes reinforce the in-betweenness. Sometimes I find that emerging adults, even though they want to go to church, don’t know where they fit in the church because they don’t have children, they’re not married, they’re not a teenager, they don’t wanna serve in the children’s ministry, and the church doesn’t necessarily know where to put them.

LACHLAN COFFEY: And here’s the thing — our faith life isn’t separate from the rest of our life. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Well at least it shouldn’t be. You know, I think the thing is this, is that as emerging adults are getting older and their life just keeps becoming more and more complex — if the church isn’t speaking to that complexity, it makes them wonder what’s the role of faith in this really hard life I’m living. 

STEVE ARGUE: And I hear this all the time with emerging adults who are like, ‘Well, y’know, my Christian experience worked well when I was younger, but I kind of grew out of it. Like can our faith keep up with our increasingly complex world?’ As adults, it’s just by definition becoming more complex. And my emphatic answer is yes, it can. 

LACHLAN COFFEY: So think about how complex emerging adulthood has become. I mean, how long — you went over a span of a decade, and that involves career changes, home life, student loan debt. Sometimes I struggle to think that the church is responding well to that.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, I feel like if we were just more empathetic towards people that are in this stage of life, just understanding how hard it is, I just feel like we could serve young adults so much better. And I really do feel like the church is the perfect place for that empathy and that equipping to happen.

STEVE ARGUE: I hope that the church realizes that, um, they are, can be a tremendous resource to emerging adults. I say to church leaders all the time, ‘I wonder if there’s a community in our, say, Western world that values working toward intergenerational relationship, that is willing to bring the collective wisdom of the elders together, and to care for young people with no strings attached. I wonder if there’s any sort of organization in the world that does that.’ And then I look at these church leaders and I’m like, ‘You know, that’s the church.’ Like you have so much to offer emerging adults.

JESSE EUBANKS: Young King Solomon was overwhelmed by the stage of life he was in and the responsibilities that were now piled on him, but he wasn’t alone. God answered Solomon’s prayer by asking him what he wanted. And Solomon — what did he ask for? He asked for wisdom. He knew he needed help navigating this confusing road. And I think many emerging adults today are looking for the same thing — for wisdom and guidance.

You know, where does this leave us? If you’re an emerging adult yourself, our encouragement to you is this — whether you feel like an adult or not, it doesn’t change the fact that you are an adult. We just wanna encourage you — embrace that. Embrace the stage of life that you’re in. It probably at times feels like you’re playing dress up in your parents’ clothes, but the truth is that you were made for this moment. God in his sovereignty has made you the age that you are and in the context that you are for this moment. 

LACHLAN COFFEY: The other thing that I would say is that I think emerging adults need to give older generations just a tad bit of grace, just a little bit of understanding that life has changed with this generation and we’re all trying to figure this out together.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, I tell the young adults in our program all the time, y’know, in the same way that you’re trying to figure out what it looks like to be an adult, your parents are trying to figure out what it is to parent an adult. It’s a whole new stage for them too. And for those that are older and you’re trying to make sense of this new era of emerging adults, I just wanna remind you — these are our future leaders. These are the people who will be carrying our Christian faith forward after we’re gone. Are we willing to come alongside them and help them along in their journey?

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JESSE EUBANKS: If you wanna know more about Steve Argue and his research, check out the book Growing With — Every Parent’s Guide to Helping Teenagers and Young Adults Thrive in Their Faith, Family, and Future. Also, check out more from Paul Angone by visiting his website, AllGroanUp.com. That’s G-R-O-A-N, AllGroanUp.com. And of course you can pick up his book 101 Secrets for Your Twenties wherever books are sold. For even more resources or to hear past episodes of this podcast, visit our website at lovethyneighborhood.org/LTNpodcast.

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JESSE EUBANKS: Special thanks to our interviewees for this episode — Steve Argue, Kirsten Cragg, Paul Angone, and Hilary Noltemeyer.

LACHLAN COFFEY: Our senior producer and host is Jesse Eubanks.

JESSE EUBANKS: Our co-host today is Lachlan Coffey.

LACHLAN COFFEY: Anna Tran is our media assistant and audio engineer. And our media director and producer is Rachel Szabo, who also doesn’t know how to pronounce marshmallows.

JESSE EUBANKS: Additional reporting by Alex de Freitas and Annelise Collins. Music for today’s episode comes from Lee Rosevere, Podington Bear, and Blue Dot Sessions. Theme music and commercial music by Murphy DX.

LACHLAN COFFEY: Apply for your social justice internship supported by Christian community by visiting lovethyneighborhood.org. Serve for a summer or a year. Grow in your faith and life skills and become an adult. Learn more at lovethyneighborhood.org.

JESSE EUBANKS: Which of these was a neighbor to the man in need? The one who showed mercy. Jesus tells us, ‘Go, and do likewise.’