Date: June 7, 2023
As many of you know, I travel quite a bit for work. One of the things that I love about that is that I get to talk to many people doing the work on the front lines. And I love to hear about their problems. This isn’t because I am a glutton for punishment. Rather, in those stories we can hear opportunities for a new way of doing things.
One of the things I often heard about was that the church felt out of touch with young people. As fewer churches have official young adult programs and the leadership is often composed of volunteers and a less-than-full-time clergy person, it’s hard to keep up.
This year, TryTank launched the Young Adult Ministry Trend Report (YAMTR) to address this problem. We teamed up with YPulse, [https://www.ypulse.com/] the leading research organization on youth behaviors and norms, to get access to their data. We look at trends among young people that overlap with the work of the church and produce monthly reports that cover those trends, theological questions they pose, and provide actionable insights for ministry.
While the monthly in-depth report requires a paid subscription, you can also subscribe to the weekly snapshots that provide snippets of information (“Insights”) that can still inform our work. I hope you’ll subscribe to the free work (and then upgrade if you want) and share it. The more we know about the next generations, the better we can reach them for Christ.
The Rev. Lorenzo Lebrija
Chief Innovation Officer | Virginia Theological Seminary and the General Theological Seminary
Executive Director | TryTank Experimental Lab