Mr. Steven Christoforou: Hey, everybody, this is Steve, and welcome to a special episode of We Are Orthodoxy. We’re almost 30 episodes into this podcast. We’ve talked to a lot of young adults. We’ve had conversations full of joy and conversations full of sadness, conversations full of triumph and conversations full of struggle: real, honest conversations with real young adults, real stories and real struggles. Christian recently visited Ss. Peter and Paul Orthodox Church in Glenview, Illinois, to share what we’ve learned from the young adults who’ve shared their stories with us.

And even though everyone who’s been on the podcast is unique and has a unique experience and story to share, it’s been interesting to see some common elements, some common threads that seem to be shared by many young adults in the Church today. Christian boils it down to three things in particular, three threads that seem to run through the conversations we’ve had so far. First, we’re seeing the quest for an authentic identity. Second, we’re seeing the need to belong. And finally, we’re seeing that almost everyone, regardless of their current relationship with the Church, seems to carry an abiding respect for the Divine Liturgy.

As I’ve said before, We Are Orthodoxy was a long time coming. We spent years developing this podcast, and we at Y2AM are extremely pleased with its current iteration. And I’m so proud of the way that Christian has shaped this project. I’m so amazed by the way he’s created a safe place where young adults can open up with honesty and vulnerability. None of us take that space for granted. I’d even say there’s something holy about a place where people can open up to each other and allow themselves to be seen as they really are. That said, some of the conversations have been difficult and may leave us wondering what exactly to make of it all.

In this talk, Christian manages to process some of our experiences with the podcast so far, even quoting the young adults who’ve opened up to us—but he does so with a lot of care and a lot of respect. None of us take this space for granted, especially not Christian, who even wondered if we should post this talk at all, out of respect for those who’ve shared themselves so openly. So, to all the young adults who’ve already joined us on the podcast and to those who will in the days ahead: thank you. We are so grateful for the courage you’ve shown in letting yourselves be shown in such a public way. Thank you, really. Thank you.

This is a really fascinating talk. I’m proud of the young adults who’ve joined us on this podcast. I’m proud of Christian, who’s an important young adult leader in the Church. And I’m grateful for everything God has helped us to do here at Y2AM over the past few years. After you’re done with the talk, please give the podcast a five-star rating. Your review helps us get this podcast and these stories to a wider audience. Please reach out to us. Let us know what you think about Christian’s talk and the things that we’ve learned from this podcast. And please, share this with someone that you think should hear it.

So, all that said, I’m going to turn it over to Christian as he shares what we’ve learned so far from We Are Orthodoxy.

[Applause]

Mr. Christian Gonzalez: Hello, everybody! I’m very excited to be with you all here. If this was a wedding, though, I think the groom would probably be very sad, and the brides would be very supported, so I’m not sure what’s happening, but I’m glad you all love the bride so much. [Laughter]

Anyway, I’m very excited to be with you guys. As Fr. Panagiotis mentioned, I am the young adult ministries coordinator for the archdiocese, and as part of my work I travel around with my friend, Steve Christoforou—there he is! [Laughter] We’re basically the same person, as you can tell: we’ve got glasses and hair and beards and the same shirt. But anyway, we lead these day-long retreats that we call “Be the Bee” retreats or Bee-treats for short. And he spends the day with young people doing some ministry of different kinds, and I get to spend the day with youth workers and parents, just talking about what ministry is and why we’ve got to do what we do, or what we’re here for.

But invariably what happens—because we always stick around for the next day and go to church on Sunday, and what happens is that somebody at coffee hour, usually an older adult, will come up to me and say, “Hey, how’s it going? I’m so glad you guys are here. Wish I could have been here yesterday, but my kids had soccer so we couldn’t make it. But how’d everything go? Everything go good?” And we say, “Yeah, it was great. It was awesome. Thank God,” whatever. And they’ll almost always then finally ask me the question that they came up to me to ask in the first place, and it’s that question I think that really haunts all of us church people and keeps us up at night, and I think you all know what it is. “How do we keep our young people in the Church?”

This I think, above all other questions, is the question that haunts people. They tell me these stories about their children, about their grandchildren, about their godchildren, and they’re usually stories of heartbreak, stories of sadness, stories about their kids falling out of the Church. They’ll tell me about little Yianni, Yianni who was so involved in Sunday school and so involved in GOYA and participated in all the basketball tournaments and he wanted to be a camp counselor—then he went off to college, and we never saw him again.

Before I can respond, usually people will offer their own suggestions as to why they think that Yianni might have left the Church. They’ll say things like, “It’s the gay agenda! It’s the liberals! It’s evolutionary biology!” But they almost always come down to this one kind of blanket term: secularism. “Secularism! Aaaugh! It’s the secular world that we live in!” This is an interesting idea to me, this idea of secularism. It’s one that we’ll come back to, but I want to put that in your ear for right now.

Needless to say, I started wondering where these answers were even coming from, because they never sounded like— I couldn’t imagine that if somebody asked Yianni, “Hey, Yianni, why don’t you go to church any more?” and he would have gone, “Well, you know, it’s because of evolutionary biology and the gay agenda.” [Laughter] It just never seemed to match with what I believed intuitively. Maybe that’s right, maybe that’s true: maybe it is because of evolutionary biology and the gay agenda. Maybe that is why little Yianni isn’t going to church any more. But the answers they were giving me didn’t seem like the answers that they had heard from young adults themselves. It seemed like they were stories that they had made up to make sense of what was going on, stories that they had invented because they were too sad and too scared to go on otherwise.

And so I decided that I would begin asking young adults myself. I wanted to know. If they weren’t going to tell me what young adults themselves were saying, I decided that I wanted to hear from young adults why they either went to church or why they didn’t go to church any more. I was very curious about this. And so in 2018 at Y2AM, we launched our podcast, We Are Orthodoxy, and it has been a really, really interesting journey. I’ve talked to young adults who’ve been involved in church their whole lives, who have left the Church. The title of this talk, “It’s Complicated”: it’s complicated in talking to young adults about their relationship with the Church.

The reason this talk is titled that is because the podcast itself revolves around the central question that I ask everyone that I interview, and that’s: “If you were to describe your relationship with the Orthodox Church as a Facebook relationship status, how would you do that?” Some have said, “Married,” others have said, “Engaged,” others have said, “In an open relationship,” but the one that kind of sticks out is: “It’s complicated.” It’s a complicated relationship, and the reason I entitled this talk, “It’s Complicated,” is because the kind of total of their responses has been, well, complicated! It’s a complicated response. It’s a complicated question.

But as much as I find it difficult sometimes when I’m in these conversations to not fight back or give answers to someone who might be saying something that I don’t think is exactly what the Orthodox Church believes or thinks, I usually bite my tongue, because I really want to understand what’s going on. I want to understand where young adults are coming from. I really want to get it.

And while the stories are complicated and in many ways quite diverse, they do have—I have seen—some narrative threads, some themes that have begun to emerge in the responses that people have given, things that have shown up for young adults who are still in the Church as well as for those who have left the Church. They all have some similar answers. So tonight what I want to talk about is some of those themes, and then I want to talk about why some of those themes might be showing up, and then I want to offer us maybe a scriptural story that can give us a framework to understand what ministering to young adults today might look like. Does that sound like a good plan? Cool. Let’s do this.

So here’s the three themes that I’ve seen, and while I wish that I could talk about all of the stories in depth, I just— time just obviously won’t let me. So the themes that have shown up in these interviews, the ones that I have seen most readily are this one, a quest for an authentic identity, that is, looking to know who they are; two, a need for belonging—there’s a desperate need for them to feel like they’re a part of something—and three, an enduring respect for the Liturgy. So let’s dive in!

The quest for an authentic identity. The quest for an authentic identity is I think what we tend to believe or what comes to mind when we think about that perennial question that adolescents ask: Who am I really? They’re searching for who they really are. I myself in high school tried on all kinds of masks and different selves trying to figure out who I was. I remember that I went through this heavy metal phase where I wanted to wear nothing but black Puma tracksuits. [Laughter] And then shortly after that, I went through a power-pop, fake-punk phase where I wore Dickies and Chuck Taylors. And then I thought I was a beach bum, so I wore sandals everywhere. And then I did theater… It was a really confusing time, for sure. 100%. I’m still pretty confused. [Laughter]

But as I turned out, this quest for an authentic identity is not something that is simply limited to adolescence. This question of: Who am I really? What do I really believe? What do I really think? It’s one that still extends into young adulthood, trying to figure out who we are. And as it turns out, there’s actually several cultural sayings and ideologies that we kind of throw out commonly. One of them is just this one: “You do you.” “You do you” is kind of the cultural benchmark of authentic self-expression, right? Who am I to tell you who to be? You do you. Behind this idea is that each person is entitled to express themselves authentically, and no institution or person has the right to infringe upon anyone any sort of belief or ask them to somehow live inauthentically or against what they believe. Does that make sense?

For this reason, being authentic and being real is the one virtue of our day. It’s really the only thing that’s right, culturally speaking, which is why intolerance, or not accepting somebody for who they are, authentically and really, is really the only sin of our time, culturally speaking. Right? It’s the only real sin. Perhaps we might say that the only other real sin would be being inauthentic, being not-real, being fake. My friends, welcome to the age of authenticity!

In the age of authenticity, you cannot get away, whether you are a believer or not, from the reality that you get to choose for yourself all kinds of things that you want to be and believe. That’s just what it means to be a young adult in America today: you get to choose. We’re expressive individualists, and there are many, many, many different options for us, and Orthodox Christianity is just one option among many. We’ve got to face that, culturally speaking, that there’s tons of things that we can believe. In the age of authenticity, though, it’s important to recognize that even though somebody might still choose to be Orthodox, even though they might choose something, a spirituality of which the content is not individualistic—Orthodoxy is not individualistic—the framework of them making that decision is inherently individualistic.

Today someone will still have chosen to be Orthodox as opposed to being something else. 1500 years ago, 500 years ago, this was unthinkable. You just believed what you believed, like everyone around you believed, because belief had societal implications. Not today. 500 years ago, people were burned at the stake for being heretics. We don’t do that any more. It doesn’t even make sense; that doesn’t even resonate with us, culturally speaking, because this is what it means to have an ethic of authenticity.

So if at the center of authentic identity is the ability to be able to choose for oneself, we need to bear this in mind. The quest for authentic self-expression is essential, then, for young adult spirituality today. There’s no escaping it. The spiritual journey remains just that, a journey. That’s how a lot of young adults that I’ve spoken to have described themselves in this quest: they’re on a journey; they’re trying to figure out what they believe, what they think. Spiritual, but not religious. Trying to figure out what suits them. They’re not wed to their current place spiritually.

In episode three of We Are Orthodoxy, I interviewed a guy named Michael, and Michael’s a recent graduate of college who describes himself as being in an open relationship with the Church. When I asked him to describe his relationship with Church and with God, he says:

My relationship with God is that he understands and wants me to learn what I want and what’s best for myself, and he’s not going to punish me if I take a break or try new things or other things. It’s between me and God and the spirit that’s within my heart. There are so many rules, but it’s like: Dude, the Creator of the universe isn’t black-and-white. I’m on a journey to find what brings me life and where I find myself to be alive and well.

When I asked him what brought him to this understanding, he told me about his time in college, and how he and his friends would stay up late into the evening and talk about contemporary issues like same-sex marriage and abortion, and how he found himself continually coming up against a wall as he continued to try to explain the Orthodox mind on these things. He ended up saying that while he felt like things like fasting in the Church made a lot of sense, because this is just good to do all the time, to learn that you don’t always get what you want, and he also feels a strong need to do more fasting, but apart from this he says that:

A lot of the things that I was told in church about what was going on in the world didn’t really mend with what I actually believed, because in a lot of these discussions I was kind of agreeing with them more than I was with what I was saying. And this made me think: What do I really believe? Do I really believe this? Does this really make sense to me, or am I just spitting out what I was told to say and believe?

Do you hear what’s going on here in him? At the core of what he’s saying here is this issue of authenticity. Michael is trusting the voice in his own heart more than he is in trusting what the Church has to say, because at the end of the day what matters the most is that he be true to himself.

One young adult, Stephanie, when she questioned the same issue of same-sex marriage with her priest, her priest continued to ask her, “Who’s the authority here?” This is her priest talking to her: “Who’s the authority here? You or the Church? You or the Church? You or the Church?” Now, we might be tempted ourselves here, right, and say, “The Church is the authority.” I mean, we’re all here on a Wednesday night; I bet we would tend to agree: the Church is the authority. But Stephanie realized that, culturally speaking, she couldn’t say the Church. Even if she did say the Church had authority, she was still going to be the one deciding that the Church had authority over her life, so in some real sense she was still the one who had the authority, because she was choosing to put the Church over herself. This is what it means to believe in an age of authenticity. Does this make sense? Okay, awesome.

Incidentally, Stephanie no longer identifies as Orthodox, but Michael does. In fact, several young adults that I’ve interviewed continued to identify as Orthodox in their hearts even though they no longer go to church or even necessarily believe the same things that the Church teaches. This is fascinating.

One young man named Daniel no longer attends church but says that he still wears his Orthodox cross because he doesn’t want to forget who he is. But in the age of authenticity, you get to pick for yourself. You get to express who you are. At the end of the day, you’re the authority. You do you. You get to do what you want. Even for those who believe in Orthodoxy and come to it, there’s a sense— even the narrative that’s told is that they became Orthodox. They found Orthodoxy. They chose to become Orthodox. In an age of authenticity, there’s no getting away from the fact that each person is responsible for choosing for themselves. Indeed, to spit out what one was told to say and believe, as Michael said, would be wrong. That’s kind of just the thing that’s in the air. This is what I’m picking up; I’m not saying this is right or wrong. Hear me out. I’m not saying this is good, bad, right, wrong yet. What I am saying is: this is what’s going on.

Young adults appear to be searching for who they are and what they believe, and this is a quest that doesn’t end. As young adults search for what’s true for them, they appear—and this is what I found to be really interesting—they either appear to be consulting their peers to decide what’s true, or, more often, no one at all. No one at all! They’re deciding for themselves! They’re trying to figure it out with what feels right—what feels right to them. They’re not in book studies, they’re not in Bible studies, they’re not in relationships with priests and mentors. They’re stumbling away from the Church by themselves.

On the other hand, though, when they have asked these questions, when they’ve authentically expressed themselves, when they’ve expressed their doubts in the safety of a community, when their priest has allowed them to stumble around, inside the Church, these young adults, they remain engaged. How interesting is that! And when they have a place to stumble and to be themselves, to bring themselves, they stay engaged.

So this brings me to my next point. The second theme that emerges is the need for belonging. This is a big question I think for all human beings. Where do I fit? Once I determine what I believe and who I am, who are the people who are like me that I belong to? Is there room for me at the table? This is the question that we’re asking, but in a lot of stories of disengagement, it seems that many young adults believe the Church doesn’t have a place for them.

Ed is 29 years old. I interviewed him in episode 25 . He says that even though he believes—and this is what he says: “I still believe the Church is good for me. I believe it would be good to go.” But he says without a community of people that he’s committed to or feeling that he has a place to fit in at the church, he’s less willing to make himself go, even though he knows it’s good for him, because he just doesn’t have anywhere that he belongs. When he was in OCF, he would help out at local parishes as needed, and he could drag himself out of bed, knowing that people were counting on him. But the relational buy-in that existed for Ed in college no longer exists for him in his young adulthood.

So when he’s faced with going to a place where nobody seems to care if he’s there or not, or sleeping in and getting much-needed rest, he chooses to stay in bed. In this we might be tempted to hear that young adults don’t feel that they have friends at church, but that’s not what they’re saying. They’re not saying, “I don’t have any friends”; they’re saying, “I don’t have anywhere that I belong. I don’t have anywhere that I fit.” If we listen, they’re saying, “I want to know that my presence matters. I want to know that my presence matters, that somebody feels my absence when I’m not there.” That’s what they’re saying. Young adults are seeking to make this world a better place, and they’re seeking to find places where they can do it.

In episode eight, 32-year-old Sean describes how he started feeling that he didn’t really believe the same things as his parish. Not only did he struggle to believe the stories of Scripture, kind of like these normal doubts that begin to show up, but increasingly he started learning about social issues that were affecting his nearby region. The next county over, even, he knew was experiencing unprecedented rates of high-school dropout. By the time that kids had reached tenth grade, 50% of the kids at that district had dropped out of school. Half the kids dropped out of school by their sophomore year of high school! That’s unbelievable! So Sean is learning about all of this, but what he begins to see in his parish—and they’re a quite affluent parish—is that they were more concerned with their parish festival and educating neighbors about Syrian heritage than they were about doing something about this social issue that was happening literally next door. It wasn’t even on their radar at all. They had no idea what was happening in the world around them.

And while Sean has no hostility towards his community—he doesn’t hold it against them in any real way: he’s like: “Oh, well, they didn’t— whatever”—Sean felt that he no longer fit in at that parish because they just weren’t concerned with the same things that he was. And what’s more, he didn’t feel like it was his place to even bring anything up at the church, to say, “Hey, maybe we should pay attention to the people who are needy next door.” He just saw that the church wasn’t concerned with what he was concerned with, so he found his way to other places that he thought he could fit in better.

In episode four, Emilie, a 21-year-old, shares that she wishes that she was part of a community in LA, but shares that in the parishes there’s a sense that people are almost shocked when a young adult shows up. [Laughter] How sad! Because that’s the story: young adults falling out of the Church. “Oh, the young adults, they don’t come to church! They don’t come to church!” And then a young adult comes to church and they’re like: “What are you doing at church? Young adults don’t come to church!” [Laughter] It’s baffling!

She even sums up her experience of looking for a church by saying—and this is really a heart-breaking statement: “There’s just no place for me.” Isn’t that sad? “There’s just no place for me.”

Conversely, in episode 18, recent college graduate Hannah shares about how she went through a really tough time in high school, or as a youngster, watching her parents get divorced, and her then priest father being laicized. It would be very easy, I think—and I don’t think anyone would blame Hannah—for being angry at the Church, because a lot of the issues that she cites for the parents’ divorce were related to the Church. I don’t think anyone would blame her for being angry at the Church for breaking up her family, right? And yet, she talks about another family who came and got her, 20 minutes out of their way, to take her to church, because nobody else was going to church any more. She spent Holy Week living with them and Pascha with them to the point where now they call her their Pascha daughter. Isn’t that lovely?

Elizabeth, a med student in her 20s, discusses that she was having a crisis of faith one night. She even describes it as those moments in college where you’re walking around campus at three o’clock in the morning. I love it: she says, “And everything’s just weird.” [Laughter] Like, I know exactly how that feels, for sure. But she was trying to figure out what she believed. But instead of figuring out what she believed on her own, she decided to reach out to mentors, to reach out to her parish priest, and they just let her ask questions. They would stumble around with her. And she’s still in the Church today and recently just got married in the Church.

But again, while I mentioned Stephanie earlier, I do feel that it’s important to share that since she eventually conceded that while she wasn’t willing to outright submit to the teaching of same-sex marriage—remember the priest who said, “Who’s the authority? You or the Church? You or the Church? You or the Church?”—well, she wasn’t willing to outright submit to the authority in the Church. She began to take this to mean that she therefore had no place in it. Very shortly after this she said she started thinking of herself as being “not very good Orthodox,” and even shorter after that that she described herself as no longer Orthodox any more at all.

At the end of each episode, I ask interviewees what they want clergy and people in authority to know or what they want them to do. And their answers almost always have to do with creating space: creating space for vulnerability, creating space for questions. Creating space for questions. Again, I want to emphasize it’s creating space for questions, not for answers. They’re not looking for answers. They’re looking for a place to ask questions. For people who will stumble around with them and to create space where they can be known and where they can belong. I want to emphasize that this need for belonging to me seems to be one of these linchpin issues. It’s a tipping-point between what allows for people to stay engaged in the Church and what leads to them being disconnected from it, whether or not they feel that they belong.

Young adults are seeking places where they can be known. They’re looking for places to express themselves, because in many ways what they’re looking for is to belong to something bigger than themselves, something bigger, which brings me to the next point, of this enduring respect and love for the Liturgy. This is the final theme that I’ve seen so far.

Of all the things that have come up in these interviews, of all the things that people have complained about, of all the reasons that they’ve said they hate the Church, of whatever, the one thing that they have never, ever, ever said anything bad about is the Divine Liturgy. Not a one of them has had anything bad to say about how the Church worships. They’ve discussed political issues, they’ve discussed social issues, they’ve discussed hierarchical issues—they’ve discussed all of this kind of stuff, but never once have they said, “You know, the Liturgy is just kind of… boring.” [Laughter] In fact, it’s the opposite. Even those who are no longer Orthodox still talk about the Liturgy with longing and respect.

Sean, the one I was telling you about, who left his parish because they weren’t doing anything about the high school drop-outs, he says that he still feels a deep respect for Liturgy and was moved and affected by its beauty, and even went so far to say that he believes that it is good for humans to worship. This guy doesn’t believe in God, really. So I asked him: worship what? He said, “I don’t know. It’s a good question, I guess. The mystery of life. It’s good for them to worship the mystery of life.”

Elizabeth, the med student who said everything was weird, describes eagerly longing, wishing that she could stand at the altar herself—not because she’s trying to make a point about how women should be able to stand at the altar because they’re just as important as men—it’s not that issue. What she is describing is wanting to stand close to the mysteries. She wants to handle them; she wants to touch them because she loves them so much.

In episode nine, Natalie, a 34-year-old woman, shares how she left the Church after entering into a same-sex relationship, and discusses how she continually feels a tension between her love for her partner and her love for the Church. This tension is so strong, though, that despite knowing that she could not go to church and receive Communion at Pascha, she still felt the need to go be at the Paschal Liturgy. She couldn’t help it. She couldn’t keep herself away from it, even though there’s this tension in her and she knows that she can’t really go and fully participate. Isn’t that unbelievable?

I’ve even interviewed a 32-year-old priest from the Chicago-land area. For the sake of protecting his identity, we’ll call him Fr. P. Boznos. [Laughter] No, no, no, that’s too specific. We’ll call him Fr. Panagiotis B. [Laughter] Our interview remains one of my favorites, especially as it pertains to our discussion of the Liturgy. In that interview, Fr. Panagiotis beautifully describes his love for the Liturgy and says that it’s the best that humans have to offer the Lord. When I asked him to further articulate this, he says that he struggles to rationally explain what’s so amazing about it. He just knows that it’s the fulfillment of what he was made for. Isn’t that cool? I don’t know. I don’t know what it is, but I know it’s what I was made for. Because this is huge, because time and time again, this respect and love for the Liturgy, is it doesn’t show up rationally. It shows up in the gut, in this kind of a felt sense that what’s happening is important. Does that make sense? It’s not like a thought that happens; it’s an intuition. It’s a gut feeling, not an emotion. I’m not talking about an emotion. When you know you just know something? Like, “I don’t know, I just know”? “I don’t know how I know; I know”? That’s how they know, you know? [Laughter]

St. Augustine said that you should never teach new material after lunch. I wonder how he felt about teaching after dinner. [Laughter]

I want to point back to Sean when it comes to this felt sense. Sean doesn’t really believe in God, so by all rational thought he shouldn’t care about the Liturgy at all. It actually doesn’t make sense for him to care about the Liturgy at all, yet even still, in his gut, there is this felt sense that it is good for human beings to worship something. It’s good to worship—something. All right. You guys doing okay?

So these are the themes that I have noticed. These are the three major ones. I’m sure there are other ones, but these are the big ones that I’ve seen.

I said that I would ask this question: Why are these the ones that are emerging? Why is it that some of us, when these themes come up, lean toward the Church while others lean away from the Church, even though it’s the same themes all across the spectrum? And the answer is? Secularism. We’re back. I promised you we’d come back here, right? The answer is secularism. This is why these themes show up, and it is also why some lean toward the Church and why some lean away.

Some people want to blame secularism as the reason why some young adults leave the Church, but I don’t want to do that. I don’t think that that’s true, because I’m trying to say that secularism isn’t so much the enemy of faith as much as it’s the air that we breathe culturally today. It’s just in the air. All of us are secular, every single one of us sitting in the room today. This quest for identity, this need to belong, the respect for the Liturgy—all these themes that show up? These themes are here precisely because we live in a secular age.

But this word, “secular,” what does it mean? What do I mean when I say that we live in a secular age? The definitions are important, because we can have different understandings of this word. Generally, when people use the word, “secular,” they take it to mean “non-religious.” They refer to a person or an institution that is neutral, unbiased, objective, rational, non-religious. That’s generally what we mean when we say “secular.” So when we talk about secularism or the secularization theory, we’re talking about this idea that, as societies became more technologically advanced, as we learned more things about science, that what we would find was that spirituality and religion would decline and decline and decline and decline until it altogether disappeared, and then finally one could say that that that society had been secularized. Does that make sense? That’s generally how people think of the word “secular.”

But I don’t think that that’s what we’re in today. I don’t think that we’ve seen a world where religion has disappeared and spirituality has disappeared. I don’t think that that’s what’s happened. I think our time is far more complex than that. While a specific religion may no longer be at the center of society, I think the choices that we have are not simply to believe in God or to not believe in God. We actually now have a plethora of third ways of believing.

There’s so many different things that you can be out there. You can be Orthodox today, Catholic tomorrow. You could decide that you don’t want to be a Catholic any more and go be a Baptist, or you can go look at the Bahá’í faith, or you can be a Hindu if you want. There’s so many things that you can be, if you put your mind to it! [Laughter] You can do it. So I, along with philosophers Charles Taylor, James K.A. Smith, and Andrew Root, do not believe that this idea of secularism is actually accurate. So when we say “secular,” I don’t want us to think of unbelief and non-religion. You with me so far? Cool.

Instead, what I want to focus on and what I want to hone in on are two particular characteristics of our secular age that I think explain why an emerging adult is believing this way—why emerging adult belief is emerging the way that it is. Again, it’s best to think of secularism as the cultural waters in which we swim.

So the first characteristic of our secular age is not that disbelief is running rampant, as I’ve already said, but rather that because of this explosion of ways to believe, the net impact of that, of having all of these different things that we can believe, is that all beliefs today are contested and contestable. Every single one of them: contested and contestable. No belief in particular can be taken as the default for society any more. That’s what it means to live in a secular age. And what that means for you practically, it means that in your apartment building and on your street and in your school, that there are people who don’t believe what you believe—and they’re good people, and they’re smart people. Some of them might even be better and smarter than you.

But you realize—and all of you realize—that none of you, none of what you believe, can be taken to be the default for society any more. None of what we believe can be taken to be axiomatic any more, and none of you feels the need to believe what somebody else believes. That’s what it means to live in a time when all beliefs are contested and contestable, because these stories all live in proximity to one another, and everybody is pushed and pressed from all these different sides with these rival stories of who we are and what we’re for. Does this make sense? Do you all feel it?

To live in our secular age today is to live in what Charles Taylor calls cross-pressure, living between doubt and belief, living between enchantment and disenchantment, between immanence and transcendence. We feel all the pushes and pulls on us, and so what this means is that doubt is not the enemy of faith, but rather doubt is the companion of faith. Today we’re all doubters. We all believe while doubting. For some of the Church, this may seem scary, but I think it’s an opportunity, because I think it means that if believers are tempted toward unbelief but we’re all doubters, then that means that unbelievers are sometimes tempted toward belief. It’s a really interesting cultural moment that we’re in.

So the second characteristic, then, that I want to turn toward was what Charles Taylor calls disenchantment. What Taylor describes here is less of an ideology and more of a felt sense that fills the background of our lives. To live in a secular age that is disenchanted means that we live in a cosmos, in a universe, that has been flattened, that has been stripped of transcendence, that has been stripped of mystery, and we’re closed within what Charles Taylor calls the immanent frame. A good way to think about this is that we’ve unhooked creation from the Creator, and we’re left with nature. We’ve made this shift even in our language. We talk about nature, not so much creation. It’s just part of our social imaginary. Doesn’t that make sense? It’s taken for granted. It’s not even something that we necessarily consciously think about.

The implications of this shift in our imaginary, this shift from a divinely ordered cosmos to a naturally expanding universe means that we human beings no longer find ourselves to be in a divinely appointed place in God’s creation. That’s how it used to be. We used to believe that we were in this divinely appointed place in the creation of God. Talk about security, right? “Oh, and he’s put us at the center of the universe!” Now, however, we have this, where we’re left to float aimlessly in space! [Laughter] We no longer have any place. We’re always on the move. We’re just floating aimlessly through space, and we know the universe is ever-expanding, and we’re like: do you have any idea of how fast we’re just hurtling through the cosmos at this point? It’s really scary when you stop and think about it, right?

The cold sterility of naturalism and modernity has left our Western world stricken, and despite our best Eastern Orthodoxy, in America we remain Westerners. It has left the West stricken with a cosmos that has been evacuated of transcendence and mystery. Unfortunately, I feel like a lot of this has actually happened in the Church as well, and a lot has happened in our ministries. So we cram people into lecture halls to feed them perspectives and information, and we flatten Christianity as well, in a dynamic that Taylor calls ex-carnation. You know about the incarnation, Christ taking on flesh? He describes this as ex-carnation., the removing of the flesh. Our concept of faith thus becomes less embodied, less communal, less sacramental, and it becomes more about ideologies and world views. So we live in a secular age when nothing can be spoken of as axiomatically true and where the general sense is that the world is flat.

But what secularization theory didn’t predict was that this flattening of the world would be too much for the human spirit to bear. It’s too much for us, because there’s moments when the transcendent breaks through. There’s times when there’s cracks in the immanent, like when one holds one’s first child; when a parent dies; or when finally sees U2 live in concert. [Laughter] These are moments when the transcendent breaks through.

However, when we live in a world that is pressed upon by disenchantment, that is void of transcendence, when we live in an age when nothing can be spoken of as axiomatically true, and you have that moment when the divine breaks through, the best that people are left to do is to come up with their own explanation of what happened, to give their best account of what they’re experiencing. Does that make sense? They’re just left to “do you.” It’s all that they can do. If nothing can be spoken of as true and we’re surrounded by disenchantment, then this is what’s going on.

For Church people, I think this can cause us a lot of anxiety. [Laughter] And so we try to give answers and Orthodox perspectives that I think usually end up amounting to clothing political views in Orthodox vestments. We flatten Orthodoxy in a lot of ways, and what’s more is that we’re competing with flattened voices in the world that are also trying to offer certainty, trying to offer “I alone can solve this”-type solutions, trying to bring some resolution to our deepest existential fears.

But I think this is why young adults tend to resist the easy answers that are thrown at them from the Church: they don’t want to exchange one flattened understanding of the world for another. The easy answers ring as hollow, and they feel like the Church isn’t being honest about this rising sense of cross-pressure that they feel every day in their lives, and so they feel like we’re hiding something. In other words, they feel like we are being—inauthentic. So the best that people can do is find out what resonates in their own experience.

But what I find far more powerful to the secular mind is reaching toward mystery. I think this is why the Liturgy is so important in our time, why people continue to respect it: because they’re reaching outside of the frame. They’re reaching towards something else. They’re reaching beyond something that is oppressive. If all there is is the natural world and your parent dies, who wants to live in that world, where they’re just gone forever? That’s too much! That’s too much to bear! And so the Liturgy offers something that perspectives don’t. It speaks to our deepest human desires, to our deepest longings: to believe that we’re headed somewhere, that we’re a part of something that’s bigger than us, that we’re held securely in some kind of eternal plan. We want that.

I think this is why those who have left the Church cannot deny the impact of the Liturgy, because there they’ve reached beyond and touched something eternal. But because everything is contestable, even our experiences are things that we can’t believe. This is what it means to believe in a secular age. It’s like this cycle. It’s so hard.

So here’s the question for us, then, is: What does it look like, then, to do ministry in a secular age? What does it look like to reach out to young adults, to care for young adults, in our time? Don’t you all want to know that? I do, too. See you next Lent. J/K. [Laughter] So what does it look like?

I think we need to here turn to a story in the Scriptures that might give us some valuable insight, and that’s the story of Jacob wrestling with God in the wilderness. In Genesis 32, Jacob’s preparing for what he thinks is going to be this show-down with his brother Esau. He sent his wives and his children on ahead of him, and he’s just kind of like getting ready for this this, and then verse 24, the way that it reads is really kind of like this “all of a sudden”-type moment. You don’t even know how it happened, but it really is this all of a sudden, verse 24 reads: “Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him until the breaking of day.” [Laughter] Because that’s what happens when you’re like: “Hey, honey, why don’t you go ahead? I’ll meet up with you in a little bit”—and now I’m in the middle of a wrestling match. [Laughter]

Jacob and the man continue to wrestle, wrestling all through the night. Wrestle, wrestle, wrestle! Until the man realizes that Jacob is not going to give up. Jacob is not going to quit! And then the Scriptures say: And so the man touched the hollow of his thigh, and Jacob’s thigh was put out of joint as he wrestled. But even then, Jacob continues wrestling with him. And at this point, the man even says, “Let me go! The day is breaking!” But Jacob refuses. “I will not let you go until you bless me!” This is a very strange story, right? [Laughter] “Bless me!”

So here the man asks Jacob his name, and the man renames him. He says, “You are no longer Jacob; you are Israel, for you have striven with God and with man, and you have prevailed.” And then Jacob asks the man his name. “What’s your name?” But the man responds, “Why do you need to know my name?” And then he disappears. He’s like gone. It doesn’t say where he went, but it doesn’t mention him any more, because what happens next is Jacob now realizes what has happened. So he names the place Peniel, saying, “I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved.” And then the sun rises, and Jacob walks off into the sunrise with a limp for the rest of his life. Isn’t that a great story? [Laughter] Because that’s the punchline, right? Because it looked like he was wrestling with a man, but in reality he was wrestling with God, all night long. Jacob was wrestling with God, and he walks away from that encounter with a limp.

In my mind, this story is a great image of what our ministry should look like. If we’re ministering to young adults in a secular age that’s characterized by cross-pressure, then we need to have a paradigm for what it means to wrestle with God. I think one of the primary issues that we run into is that when people come to us, they’re in the middle of a wrestling match—they’re in the middle of a fight—and all too often we’re trying to break it up, trying to get the fight to end by giving them quick answers, by saying, “This is how it is in the Church. This is the Orthodox way. This is the Orthodox perspective.” But it’s not that easy! God himself doesn’t even end the fight! God is God who is God, and tried to end the fight by touching the guy’s hip, just like—boop! Fights with him all night long, and even then Jacob doesn’t give up. He doesn’t try to shut down the fight. God lets Jacob wrestle. At any moment God could’ve ended it. He could’ve beaten him into submission; he could have turned him into dust. He could’ve smitten him, right? But he doesn’t do that. He joins into the fight and wrestles with Jacob. He wrestles with him, just like a good dad wrestles with his kids.

Young adults are hungry to wrestle with God. They’re caught in between all kinds of cross-pressure, and too often we try to end the fight by offering perspectives and worldviews, hoping that this will end the wrestling. But here is what’s really sad, is that sometimes we’re right. We give them perspectives and answers and ideologies that they don’t like, and it ends the fight. They give up. They walk away. They do stop wrestling with God, just like we wanted them to. They decide that maybe this God is too fragile to wrestle with them, too weak to handle their deepest questions, not smart enough for them, that he’s afraid of the questions that they have to ask. Sure, he has some answers, but they’re not very good ones. Whatever the case is, whatever they believe, the message is clear to them that even though they want to wrestle with God, God doesn’t care to wrestle with them. God doesn’t care to fight back. He doesn’t want to spend the cold, dark night with them, that’s for sure.

And this is a tragedy. It’s a tragedy! Because this is the paradigm that we’re given in the Scriptures, right? We want young adults to own their faith, we say. We want them to own their faith, but we don’t want them to get messy while they do it. We don’t want them to try things on and fail at it. We don’t them to stumble around or people to not know what’s going on, but if they are going to own their faith, if they’re really going to try to get it and become something different than they are, then they need to wrestle. There needs to be wrestling, and wrestling is going to get messy! You’re going to knock stuff over! People are going to get hit in the privates! [Laughter] I’m a dad. I know that that happens! [Laughter]

Wrestling with God often carries lasting consequences: a limp that just won’t quit, right? That’s what it looks like. It’s not this neat and tidy thing. We look around: we see young adults wrestling; we see them limping—and we don’t like it. We don’t want it. It’s too messy for us. We don’t like to see them struggle. But here’s the thing, is that the struggle that Jacob goes through is the very thing that gives Jacob his new name. It’s the very thing that makes him different than what he was. And his limp is the evidence of a divine encounter.

If we’re depriving young adults of a chance to wrestle with God and with the Church, then we may very well be depriving them of a chance of coming to know themselves and to know God in a new way. I’m going to say that again. If we are depriving young adults of the opportunity to wrestle with God and to wrestle with the Church, then we may be depriving them of an opportunity to know themselves and to know God in a new way.

As Orthodox, we frequently feel the need to have it all together, especially as Orthodox Christians, because our cultural narrative is that we’re right. It’s really important to us as Orthodox that we’re right. We were established in AD 33. 2,000 years of history. Church of the Fathers. Ancient faith. These are the things that we hold onto to prove our correctness. We don’t want to have limps. And for the most part I would say it doesn’t really seem like too many of us have limps. And I have to ask maybe part of the reason that we don’t see very many people limping is because not too many of us are actually wrestling. Not too many of us are really engaged in the fight.

But what if we don’t need to stop fights? What if we just need to let young adults wrestle? I mean, I don’t always have the energy to do so, but when I do, I love to wrestle with my daughters. It’s fun, and it brings us closer together. I’m their dad, and here’s the thing: they’re never going to beat me. [Laughter] They’re small, tiny humans. One is eight; one is almost four. And they’re not strong. [Laughter] If I were scared to wrestle with them, that would be sad! [Laughter] Right? Well, the reality is that God is our Father, the King of all, the Creator of heaven and earth, the One who sent his Son to be abandoned, mocked, beaten, bloodied, and murdered. Do you really think that this God is threatened by some kids who have questions about why two guys can’t get married? Do you think that that scares him? Really, I’m asking. Yes, it scares God?

Let these kids—let these young adults, excuse me— Let these young adults wrestle with their Father. Let them struggle. Let them push against him as hard as they can. They’re not going to win. They’re not going to knock him over. Let them duke it out! God wants to fight with them all night long because he loves them. And even if they keep fighting forever, even if they never quit fighting, even if he touches their hips and he gives them a limp and they never let go—they’re never, ever, ever going to win—but they will be renamed and transformed. That’s what the Scriptures tell us. That’s what the Scriptures show us. What are we so scared of?

The Church is strong and has stood for 2,000 years. It doesn’t need a lot of defending. It’s not going down. The Church believes that certain things are good and proper for the human spirit, and we’re not bending on that. What are we so worked up about? When my kids tell me that they would rather have dessert than dinner, I’m like: “I get it! Me, too.” [Laughter] No matter what I tell them about dessert being better for them than dinner, they’re never like: “Oh, thank you, Father, for explaining that to me. That was so kind of you. Now I definitely want to eat these carrots.” [Laughter] They’re like: “I don’t want it!” I know, but I have a couple options as their dad. I can either dominate the struggle out of them and make them eat the carrots by intimidating them. I can send them away from the table until they stop crying about the carrots so I’m not bothered by their struggle. I can cave in and give them dessert. Or I can let them struggle with me at the table. I think only one of those is the response of a loving father.

So let’s try to land this bird tonight. What does this mean for opportunities for ministry? I want to look at these theme by theme, shortly. In the quest for authentic identity, there is one major lesson that I’ve learned, and that is to make sure that all of your youth group gatherings are with very attractive people. [Laughter] Isn’t that a hilarious picture? No, I’m just kidding. In the quest for authentic identity, the major lesson that I have learned from We Are Orthodoxy is that we need to learn how to shut up. We need to learn to shut up. We need to learn to listen. Almost every time that I have one of these conversations, I’m amazed at how people are just like: “Thank you. Thank you. Wow, thank you for just listening to me.” We get off, and I’m like: “That was great. Thank you for doing that,” and they’re like: “Thank you. My life makes sense to me in a way that it didn’t make sense before.” I’m like: I didn’t even… It’s not like I organized anything. I just listened and told them what I was hearing. Somehow that’s this really moving, helpful ministry.

We need to make room for people to be messy. We need to learn to shut up! People don’t care how much we know until they know how much we care. They need to know that God and the Church can handle whatever they throw at them, that they’re stronger than them. They can handle it! Ask it all! Bring it on! Bring it on! That should be the name of a young adult ministry: Bring it on! So somebody can go: it’s already been brought on.

We need to welcome everything. With God and Jacob, we see that Jacob fights all night long. He won’t let go. We need to create spaces for young adults to be honest, to struggle with questions and to not let go until they want to let go. We need to be okay with it. We need to make sure that young adults have places where their entire personhood is welcome, as they try to integrate a vision of who they are and what they’re for. Jacob gives God his all, never backing down. Young adults want to give us all.

So what if, alongside of teaching the doctrines and the stances of the Church, which I think are things that absolutely matter—we need to know what we believe, right? But what if we also have support groups to wrestle with these issues, to wrestle with these things and how hard it is to believe some of them. Is anyone here—? If I’m going to be honest, there’s some things in the Church where I’m just like: I don’t… I struggle with that! That’s hard for me! Because I’m a sinner and dumb, and I don’t see things the way that God sees them, and I’m kind of okay with that because I trust him and I trust the Church. And I don’t get it, but maybe one day I will, and maybe one day I won’t. Either way, God is still good; either way, the Church is still our mother. The question is whether or not we know that we can trust God as Father and trust the Church as mother.

What if we can make places where our doubts could be shared? There’s a raw kind of vulnerability, and it’s hard, and it demands that we shut our mouths, because we need to learn to be comfortable feeling uncomfortable. We cannot rush to fix issues. We cannot take people out of the fight. People are not problems to be fixed; they’re persons to be loved and known. And if the Church isn’t a place where they feel like they’re going to be loved and known, then they’re going to go to other places where they do get that. It’s just what’s going to happen.

Secondly, the need to belong. What I love about the story about Jacob and God is not only that Jacob gives us his all, but God gives Jacob the entire night. He sticks it out with Jacob. As much as young adults need a place to fight, an arena, they also need people who are going to fight with them. God doesn’t just walk away from the wrestling match with Jacob; he struggles with him all through the night. His body and God’s body are entwined in combat all night long. And who are we if not the body of Christ? We are that body that is engaged with wrestling with Jacob, willing to stay engaged in the fight. Can we stick it out with young adults as they struggle? Can we go through the long night? Will we make room for them to limp in battle, to hang on desperately? Or are we tired of them and we just want to get rid of them, shut them up, send them to Orthodoxy on Tap, give them their own space?

Are we really that impatient in begging them to let go? Let go! Let go of this, let go of that! And if so, why are we so shocked when they listen to us and finally do? We’ve been telling them to shut up and let go of the fight, stop fighting with it—so they do. The scriptural story is embodied. A fight. Names are exchanged—well, one name is exchanged. A new name is given. Jacob says he sees God’s face. It’s a personal combat story.

Young adults who have had people engaged in a wrestling match with them walk away from an experience changed. I can even tell you myself. When I was going to Wheaton, I was surrounded by Protestants. So they all went to their Protestant churches, and I was kind of like: Well, I think I want to be Protestant again. I don’t like being the only person that goes to church from my school. That sucks! I’m lonely. It’s sad there. And so I decided to call my priest and tell him that I didn’t want to go to church any more, because I had kind of stopped going to church at that point. I said, “Hey, could we have a meeting real quick? I just want to talk about this with you.”

So we got together and I told him, “You know what, all my friends, they’re going to this Anglican church and I want to go with them.” And I told him all of the reasons I didn’t want to be Orthodox any more. He just sat there very patiently. He kind of nodded his head and listened to me. He was like: “Okay. All right. Totally valid. 100% valid, Christian. I get it. That makes total sense. But here’s the thing. You haven’t been coming to church lately, right?” I was like: “No, I haven’t been coming to church.” He was like: “Well, if you were in a relationship with a girl, would you just not call her any more? Or would you break up with her to her face?” I was like: “Well…” I know what I’m supposed to say. [Laughter] “No, I would break up with her face-to-face.”

“All right, great. So I’ll tell you what. Why don’t you come back to church on Sunday just one last time. Break up with the Church face-to-face. Come back here and tell the Church you don’t want to be here any more. Tell Jesus. Tell the Theotokos. Just tell them. Own it.” “All right, Father, I will.” [Laughter] 15 years later… [Laughter] Here I am.

You know what I mean? It never dawned on me again that I didn’t belong there. Never again. I’ve changed as I have wrestled with God. I do not believe the same things that I believed ten years ago. I just don’t. I’ve grown up a little bit. I’ve been changed by the Church. Does anyone here believe what they believed ten years ago, like exactly? Exactly exactly? Things change. We change. And so I think that there’s a part of us that maybe—and this is going to sound kind of condescending for the young adults in the room; I apologize: I am a young adult—when they come to us and they say something that maybe the Church doesn’t believe, I think there’s a little part of us that might need to just say, “That’s cute. I remember when I had my first beer.” [Laughter] You know? We might just need to be like: “You’re young, and it’s cute that you think that, but it’s also honest that you think that. You’re not going to think that ten years from now. I don’t know what you’re going to think, but it’s probably not going to be that.” Does that make any sense? It just happens, just naturally. We change.

Finally, when we do this, I think it actually does make room for a divine encounter, because God is known to us in the wrestling. Finally, I think that we need to draw on this respect for Liturgy and find ways of continually reaching beyond the frame together. Only something that reeks of transcendence is going to have the power to break through that brass ceiling in the immanent frame. That’s going to be the only thing that does it, because after wrestling with God, Jacob walks away with a bad hip, and the people of Israel are affected by it forever. They no longer eat the sinew of hips of animals, because that was where God touched Jacob. It’s just something that they keep in mind.

Young adults are longing to be touched by the divine, and the Liturgy opens this to them. Our ministries and parishes must not just be places of Orthodox expression and ideologies; they need to be true places of prayer, true places where we come face-to-face with God, and practices that reach beyond the frame. We need to be able to pray for one another, to stand together, to turn to each other and say, “Hey, I’m really struggling right now. Will you pray for me? Not like when you get home, like right now. Can you just—? I need help. Can you pray for me right now?” What would it be like if we knew we could just all reach out to the Father together?

We don’t just need more worldviews and Orthodox perspectives; we need to engage in practices that reach beyond the frame. We don’t need to simply explain why Orthodoxy is pro-life. We’ve done enough of that; we get it. The Church does not want you to abort your babies. We get it. Instead, maybe what we need to begin doing is praying for the victims of abortion in a way more specific way, to reach beyond the frame together. I’m talking about all of the victims of abortion: those who are unborn, fathers, mothers, the practitioners. Maybe this is what we need to do. Maybe this would be a better witness to our pro-life-ness. We don’t need to preach more politics. We need to cry out to God in lament. We need to reclaim the word “lament.” “How long, O Lord! How long? How long?”

Reaching beyond the frame, because if our worldview never reaches beyond the level of politics, if it never reaches beyond the frame, what makes us different from any other political party, except that our politicians dress funny. No offense, Father. [Laughter] I mean, if you are just a politician, then you dress funny, right?

Fr. Panagiotis Boznos: Yeah.

Mr. Gonzalez: That’s what makes us different. So why would young adults want to exchange one flattened understanding of the world for another? Why!? It doesn’t make sense to me. If we can learn to let young adults express their deepest questions and longings, if we can stay engaged with young adults and all the messiness that their life brings, if we can hold onto them and hold them close and embrace them and wrestle with them, then I think it’s from this place that we learn to reach beyond the frame with them. Our ministries must be liturgical.

So I leave you with this. What if our parishes could be places where people could be known authentically? What if our parishes were [places where] people could feel free to express their fears, to share their stories, to share their pain, and to know that people would receive it? What if we didn’t just say, “Oh, okay, I’ll pray for you,” as a nice religious way to get out of an awkward conversation? [Laughter] What if we actually did churchy things together and said, “Let me pray for you right now, because that sounds horrible, and I’m in it with you. Let’s wrestle with God together. Why, Lord, are you letting this happen?” What if? What if we did that?

I wonder if people across this parish and all parishes in the United States where they also, with Jacob, could say that they have truly seen God face-to-face. That’s all I’ve got. Thanks, guys. [Applause]

Mr. Gonzalez: Hey, everybody. Christian here. Thank you for listening to this talk. I am so grateful to Fr. Panagiotis Boznos, the pastor of Ss. Peter and Paul, for bringing me out to give this talk. I’m grateful to all the folks who attended the event, and I’m grateful to you for taking the time to listen to me try to piece together some of the stuff that we’ve seen in the first two seasons of We Are Orthodoxy.

One thing that I do want, however, is to offer an apology. If I were to give this talk again, I’d definitely say one thing a little differently than how it came out. Toward the end of the talk, I said that young adults’ ideas and beliefs will change, and the way I phrased it, it sounded like I was suggesting that they’ll see things differently when they “grow up.” This isn’t at all what I meant. I would never downplay the very real questions that young adults are asking and the very real searching that they’re doing. What I was trying to say, rather, is that simply what we think, what we feel, what we believe, well, it changes. I mean, it might not, but, given enough time, it generally does.

Many older adults and folks in leadership in the Church seem to be nervous that if they don’t root out un-Orthodox thinking in young adults right this very moment, that those young adults are going to get lost. But I just don’t think that this is true. I think that people evolve, and I think that their thoughts change so that we don’t really need to be super scared when people aren’t totally in alignment with what the Church teaches. Where young adults are today isn’t necessarily where they’ll be tomorrow or even the day after that.

Moreover, who among us fully agrees with and lives the life that the Church prescribes? I mean, it’s really hard, and if we’re honest I think we’ll be able to see that all of us fail to get it right absolutely all the time. In fact, it might even be God’s grace that we get it wrong, because otherwise we might begin to believe the lie that somehow we’re saving ourselves by our own correctness or our own righteousness. Thank God that he is far more confident in the process of our own spiritual formation than we are with the spiritual formation of others.

I wish that I would have chosen my words more carefully and communicated a sense that I deeply believe that we can trust the process of young adults’ spiritual development. I believe that we can trust what is going on in young adults if they remain fully engaged in a wrestling match with the Lord. Sure, they may not at this very moment totally agree with everything that the Church teaches, and maybe they never will, but maybe that’s not the most important thing. Maybe what matters most is that they continue to stay engaged in a wrestling match with their Father. Maybe what’s most important is that we simply allow them to wrestle, and that we don’t get so worked up when things get broken or they don’t look exactly like we think they should. More and more, I really do believe that God is good and gracious, and that one day everything’s going to be okay.

So let’s relax. Let’s let people struggle. Let’s love them enough to let them flounder in their own thoughts and in their own sense of what is right and wrong. And let’s trust the Holy Spirit to guide them. Let’s trust the process. Let’s trust God to change in them whatever needs to be changed. I know that I am not the same person I was ten years ago, and thank God! So let’s all just relax a little bit, and ask whether or not we’re trusting that God is enough for this process.

We Are Orthodoxy depends on gathering the stories of young adults. Every story matters, and every story deserves to be heard, whether that story has led to involvement in the Church or whether it’s led away from the Church. We want to know about it either way. So if you or someone that you know has a story that you think should be shared, tell us. You can contact Y2AM by email at y2am at goarch dot org. You can message us on Facebook, or you can Tweet us @Y2AM_official. Didn’t like the podcast? Tell us why. We welcome all comments and suggestions. If you did like the podcast, please do a few things. First, be sure to subscribe to this podcast on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts for future episodes. Second, share it with a friend. Share it on Twitter or Facebook. And finally, please give us a rating on iTunes to increase our visibility so that these stories can be heard. We want to share your story, and, more importantly, the Church needs to hear your story. Thanks. I’ll be back with you all soon with a brand-new episode of We Are Orthodoxy.