Virtual Church for Young Adults

Some years ago, a middle-aged priest known to both of us was assigned to campus ministry work at a major university in the southern part of the United States. One day one of us debriefed him by phone about the experience of his first few months. While he thoroughly enjoyed working with the students, he nonetheless acknowledged a certain perplexity at what he perceived as their scattershot view of the world, their lack of ambition for responsibility, and their odd lurches, for instance between ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ values, or between religious commitment and the lack of it. ‘I feel like I’m from a different world’, he told one of us. He, of course, is not the only one to feel this way. In our travels across the US and Canada, and in our discussions with people from other parts of the world, we found dozens of parents, grandparents and church leaders expressing similar incomprehension about the attitudes and outlooks of those whom religious groups call ‘young adults’.