Where Are All the Adults?

Where are all the adults? It’s a strange question especially if you attend a church like the one I pastor. Our membership demographic includes various generations. Since we are a legacy church located in an older part of our county, we do have a higher percentage of median and older adults than children and teenagers.

The latest demographic numbers for our area show that tens of thousands of people will be moving into our county over the next decade. Our county has steadily been growing since the early 1970s and currently we have just over 235,000 residents. In five years that number will be 254,000 and by 2050 it is expected that almost 300,000 will reside here.[1] Those numbers only cover our county, not the surrounding ones which are growing at a greater rate.

The numbers reveal that younger families with children are moving here. Thus, more young adults will add to our demographic.

Yet, the question remains, where are all the adults?

This is not a question related to one’s age, but to something much more important.

In 2008 author Diana West published her book The Death of the Grown-Up. West is an accomplished writer with columns and essays appearing in a variety of newspapers, magazines, and online publications. She goes head-first into the plight of the current stage of adulthood, not as one crying to live in the past, but as someone revealing a very real issue in our cultural makeup.

West reminds the reader that which I studied in seminary regarding the creation of adolescence and the teenager. We are far enough along now that it seems the concept of teenagers have always existed. While people have always aged from 12 to 20 and thus entered the teenage years as far back as Cain and Abel, the construct of a demographic identity known as adolescence is only about one hundred years old. The post-World War II era fueled such. The word “teenager” did not pop into the modern lexicon until around 1941.[2] Even in Scripture there are only two main categories of people related to age—children and adults.

As suburban life grew and the post-war industrialization continued, family experiences changed and church life did as well. Youth groups were created in local churches, somewhat modeled after the larger community youth organizations such as the YMCA and the denominational ones like the Baptist Young People’s Union (BYPU) of the early 1900s.

I am a proponent of youth and student ministry, but I understand that even this type of ministry is a somewhat recent creation and not something defined in church history. Healthy youth ministries focus on not creating a sub-church that orbits around the main family of faith, but on incorporating teenagers into the full body of Christ with people of multiple generations.

Former US Senator and President of the University of Florida, Ben Sasse’s book The Vanishing American Adult addresses the issue of waning adulthood in the culture as well. Much like West, Sasse recognizes the shifting trends. People are aging and becoming older, but the expansion of adolescence is now firmly somewhere between age 20 and 25 for many. Sadly, it increases even higher in some cases with the nest in which mothers and fathers are to thrust their children out and into the world become the safe haven due to a myriad of reasons. Not every adult remaining in the home with his/her parents is refusing to grow up, but to say none fit that category would be wrong.

Leisure is sought. Escape is the norm. Just take a trip to the “Happiest Place on Earth” and you may be surprised at the number of people in the park wearing the logoed shirts, mouse ears, and running from ride to ride who have no children in tow. The park is not for the kids, it’s for the non-emerging adults who have the disposable income required. Don’t get me wrong, such trips are fun, but somewhere in the past few decades the target audience shifted from the child to the “child within.”

Marketers know that adult’s failure to launch is occurring throughout the culture. Young people are moving into adulthood later, and young men even later than young women. Psychologist Jeffrey Jensen Arnett of Clark University has defined this young adult age range as distinct much like adolescence. He calls it “emerging adulthood.”[3]

This is not a “back in my day” argument, but even at my age I can identify the warning signs of a growing adult aged population seeemingly with no desire to engage in what they have termed “adulting.”

West, Sasse, and numerous other authors give detailed information on the crisis our nation is facing with some options for growth and change. As a pastor of a local church, I will not be able to impact or influence the national population, but I do believe it is wise shepherding to offer insight to those who call our church home.

I may be overanalyzing, and I could be totally wrong, but I wonder if even some of the ministry projects and plans I developed in years past have done more to fuel the crisis of non-emerging adulthood in the church.

For example, when it comes to men’s ministry, a shift in focus began decades ago and eventually birthed movements such as stadium-filling Promise Keepers and various other conferences. Even now churches will have men’s events designed to offer everything that does not look like church just to entice the men in the community to give Jesus a try. Call it outreach, but it feels like an adolescent bait and switch. The draw has been a message that promises men can be a gladiator or war hero rather than a “Mr. Rogers” version of faith. It sells. It may be fueling the nostalgic teenager within the grown man while saying “grow up and act like a man” but selling “pretend you’re something you’re not and just have fun.”

I totally understand the pragmatic reasoning for having a car show, a wild-game dinner, a raffle for a rifle, an event with a honky-tonk band and a mainstream comedian on stage. These draw crowds and look like successful ministry. However, churches hoping to grow godly men as legacy leaving fathers and strong, loving, godly husbands may be selling a version of Jesus that is little more than “Christianity light” rather than the biblical Christ who will transform them into real men.

In my early years in youth ministry I would teach that churches need to give significant tasks to students to lead out in ministry (I still believe that and wrote of that recently here) and that all too often the local church’s youth group is really an adult group with men and women volunteering to serve and creating little more than an audience of adolescents. I would half-joke (because it’s true) that many adults in the local church serving with teenagers just don’t want to go to their adult Bible study classes because they are bored too easily. Thus, somehow, we have created a Peter Pan syndrome within the local body.

The delay of adulthood that now seems to be normal creates havoc in the home. Husbands and wives cannot fulfill the commands of scripture related to how they are to serve, submit, and love one another if “adulting” is avoided at all costs. Mothers and fathers run the risk of trying to be their children’s best friends which will short-circuit so much in the life of a child. Simply put, children need parents to be parents, not their best friends.

This is no lost cause. It is something that few are talking about for fear of hurting feelings perhaps. I am now at the age where nostalgia is strong for the past, but even so, I cannot go back. Nor would I really want to do so.

Where are all the adults? They are here, but unless they are called out to serve, to grow, to grow up, take responsibility, have a yes that means yes and a no that means no, and to be who God has created them to be, the local church may look more like the culture surrounding us with thousands of people old enough to know better, but settling for pleasure, ease, entertainment, and comfort disguised as faith rather than that which must be embraced for the glory of God.

To the young men and women reading, I am not saying you must abandon fun and adventure. What I am saying is you must embrace the calling God has for you as his child who is an adult.

Take to heart what the Apostle Paul wrote to the church in Corinth…

1 Corinthians 13:11 (ESV)

When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.[4]

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[1] Rayer, Stefan, and Conor Comfort. “Projections of Florida Population by County, 2025-2050, with Estimates for 2023.” Bureau of Economic and Business Research, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, University of Florida, Jan. 2024, bebr.ufl.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/projections_2024.pdf.

[2] West, Diana. The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2008), 1.

[3] Mohler, R. Albert. “Why Aren’t ‘emerging Adults’ Emerging as Adults?” AlbertMohler.Com, 23 Aug. 2010, albertmohler.com/2010/08/23/why-arent-emerging-adults-emerging-as-adults/.

[4] The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2016), 1 Co 13:11.