Garrett-Evangelical Receives

GARRETT-EVANGELICAL RECEIVES $1.25 MILLION RENEWAL GRANT FOR MINISTRY FOCUS WITH YOUNG ADULTS

Recognizing the outstanding contributions made in helping congregations strengthen their ministries and outreach to younger adults, Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary has received a renewal grant in the amount of $1.25 million from Lilly Endowment Inc. The “Holy Yearning, Holy Listening, Holy Partnerships” project, established in 2017, was formed out of the Lilly Endowment’s Young Adult Initiative, which aims to help congregations develop and strengthen congregational ministries that build relationships with young adults, nurture their religious lives, and foster their engagement with religious communities. Since 2017, GarrettEvangelical has received $2.75 million from the Lilly Endowment Inc. to focus on this important work.

For the past five years, Garrett-Evangelical has embarked upon a bold initiative to help congregations design and launch new ministries that would attract young adults – a population that congregations often struggle to reach. The project has been led by its director, Reverend Dr. Reginald Blount (G-ETS 2005), who also serves as the Murray H. Leiffer Associate Professor of Formation, Leadership, and Culture at GarrettEvangelical, and associate director Dr. Jennifer Moe (G-ETS 2019), and supported by a team of widely respected scholars and researchers. Through deep and intentional listening in a series of interviews with young adults, seven themes emerged and a curriculum for training teams at thirteen congregations was created. What resulted at the congregational level was new experiences and events, new ministries, new spaces, and an entirely new focus, which centers the spiritual lives and yearnings of young adults.

In phase two, Garrett-Evangelical will focus on sharing the seven themes uncovered with a broader audience while continuing to partner with six of the original congregations to disseminate learnings and further develop young adult leaders. Specifically, Garrett-Evangelical will:

• Inform congregations, judicatories, and other collaborative partners of the themes, proven practices, and key insights gleaned from our congregations who participated in the work in phase one. This will include partnering with

Garrett-Evangelical’s department of Lifelong

Formation in producing podcasts, webinars, open online courses, and more. • Support, cultivate, and empower the theological and leadership development of young adults.

This work will be done in collaboration with the seminary’s faculty and course offerings, the department of Field Education, and community partnerships.

Blount and Moe will continue to serve as director and associate director respectively of this project. “We are confident phase two of this work will have a far-reaching impact on young adults, our organizational and congregational partners, and the Garrett-Evangelical community,” said Blount. “We will consider phase two to be of great success if we have extensively expanded our congregational reach and assisted them in developing and improving their ministries with young adults, cultivated a new cadre of young public theologians committed to putting their faith into action, and contributed to a seminarywide culture shift that builds on its expertise advocating for and ministering with young adults.”

The aim of the Lilly Endowment’s Young Adult Initiative is to establish innovation hubs that will assist congregations in launching innovative ministries that nourish and encourage the spiritual and religious lives of young adults, particularly between the ages of 23 and 29. Garrett-Evangelical is one of twelve innovation hubs the Lilly Endowment helped to establish.

The hope of the Young Adult Initiative is by learning about and building relationships with young adults, congregations would be better prepared to design and launch innovative new ministries for and with young adults and begin to change this narrative.

Garrett-Evangelical began its initiative by engaging in Holy Listening, a method of qualitative inquiry developed by phase one research director, Reverend Dr. Dori Baker (G-ETS 1990). The project employed ten young adults who we called Congregational Fellows in a year-long fellowship to equip them to use ethnographic methods to listen deeply and to learn from their peers about their understanding of spirituality and their relationship with the church. The interviewees came from diverse faith backgrounds. As the fellows analyzed the transcripts of the interviews they had conducted, the following themes were the ones that emerged frequently:

• Welcoming and accessible. Interviewees found communities where they felt accepted being themselves and places where they felt truly seen. • Relevant and relatable leaders. Young adults value pastors who take the time to cultivate relationships, and they hoped that pastors would be approachable role models that they could emulate and with whom they could connect.

• Relationships, connection, and community.

Our interviewees appreciated being seen, known, remembered, and sought out. They wanted to feel cared for without judgment and connected to God in community in a way that was powerful. • Spiritual practices. Our young adults were already creating and adapting forms of prayer and rituals to fit their schedules, lifestyles, and preferences. They were interacting with prayer as a way of encountering the world and as a way of managing stress and anxiety. • Social-justice oriented. They were attracted to congregations struggling to interpret the

gospel through the lens of social issues such as racism, mass incarceration, sexual orientation, gender identity justice, poverty, and climate change. • Painful past experiences of church. Many of those interviewed had spent a period of time away from congregational life. They had experienced Christian communities that were limiting and painful and grappled with belief and belonging. • Ambivalence about the Christian label. Some young adults were hesitate to call themselves

Christian, being acutely aware of the stigma of the label and wanting to avoid being associated with folks who do not share their values. There were also some who struggled with feeling like they were not Christian enough.

To continue the work created in the first phase of the initiative, Garrett-Evangelical will focus on sharing the seven themes uncovered with a broader audience and continue to work with six of the original congregations to disseminate learnings and further develop young adult leaders. There are also plans to invest deeply in young adult theological and leadership development through the ongoing work of continuing education, field education, and curriculum offerings at Garrett-Evangelical.

The research at the intersection of congregations and young adults unearthed a hunger for accessible practices to help people adapt and transform Christian meaning-making traditions to specific, on-the-ground contexts. Pastoral leaders desire models of ministry that take church beyond the walls and into the worlds where young adults live, work, and play. They yearn for practices of meaning making around the issues of everyday life such as vocation, activism, friendship, and justice-making. An opportunity exists for creatively engaging in a curriculum of meaning making that helps people name, revise, and reclaim gems of Christian story, tradition, and experience for better living in the here-and-now.

To learn more about the Young Adult Initiative at Garrett-Evangelical, go to Garrett.edu/YAI.