Young Adults: Showing Up For Purpose

Many young adults in our church and in our culture are filled with purpose.  They have a vibrant sense of meaning for their lives and a desire to benefit others.
At times, however, young adults go through seasons where they lose connection to identity, mission, and meaning.

Dr. David White, C. Ellis and Nancy Gribble Nelson Associate Professor for Christian Education at Austin Seminary, has recently written an article about feelings of purposelessness in teenagers and young adults.  How are we called to be witnesses and mirrors for young people, so that they can recognize their worth and purpose?

Here is a quote from David White:

"Purposelessness in young people represents, in a sense, a failure of the Christian church to communicate a robust gospel.  We are guilty of attaching God like a paper-clip to a forgotten corner of our unreflective, middle-class lives, reducing God to brief of dreary table graces rather than the revolutionary love that changes us utterly, lifting us from mourning into dancing, from silence to joy, from purposelessness to purpose.  The domestication of God inevitably leaves Christians adrift, without purpose, in a life collapsed in upon itself.  Yet, the Christian tradition, at its best, insists that every Christian has a call to participate in God's purposes.  The theological notion of vocation frames human purpose as subject to God's call upon our lives."

-"Finding Purpose: Igniting Sparks in the Lives of Young People" in Windows:Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, Spring 2012