The Youth Cartel last week held their Extended Adolescent seminar in Atlanta. I would have attended if not for an anticipated NCYC-related tiredness hangover. I was a kickstarter backer of the event and look forward to seeing some of the materials.
Recently, Mark Oestreicher wrote about the issues of extended adolescence indicating that Adolescence is now, on average, an almost 20-year trek, lasting all the way through the 20s. Of course, there are 20somethings who are fully living as adults long before they reach the ‘used to be the marker of entering middle age’: 30. But then, there are plenty of young 30somethings still living in an extended adolescence.
There are hundreds of questions we could ask about this, and thousands we could ask about the implications. But I want to zero in on one:
What impact does extended adolescence have on the faith formation of teenagers? Ok, a second question: How should we respond? Read more in this Church Leaders.com posting
D. Scott Miller
D. Scott Miller is the dean of Catholic Youth Ministry bloggers which is a polite way of either saying that he is just plain old or has been blogging for a long time (since 2004.)
Scott recently married the lovely Anne and together they have five adult young people and also grandparent three delightful kids (so, maybe he is just plain old!) Scott presently serves at Saint John the Evangelist in Columbia, MD as the director of youth and young adult ministry.
He has previously served on the parish, regional, diocesan, and national levels as well as having taught within a catholic high school. He is one of the founders of RebuildMyChurch and has returned to posting regularly (keeping regular is important to old guys) at ProjectYM.
D. Scott Miller
D. Scott Miller is the dean of Catholic Youth Ministry bloggers which is a polite way of either saying that he is just plain old or has been blogging for a long time (since 2004.)
Scott recently married the lovely Anne and together they have five adult young people and also grandparent three delightful kids (so, maybe he is just plain old!) Scott presently serves at Saint John the Evangelist in Columbia, MD as the director of youth and young adult ministry.
He has previously served on the parish, regional, diocesan, and national levels as well as having taught within a catholic high school. He is one of the founders of RebuildMyChurch and has returned to posting regularly (keeping regular is important to old guys) at ProjectYM.
The Youth Cartel last week held their Extended Adolescent seminar in Atlanta. I would have attended if not for an anticipated NCYC-related tiredness hangover. I was a kickstarter backer of the event and look forward to seeing some of the materials.
I’ve been serving in the youth ministry since 1975, and this is one of the saddest social changes I’ve seen happen. But it is what it is, and so the church must approach it as an unfortunate reality. It wouldn’t be so bad if this meant that youth ministries and churches had a longer time frame in which to connect young people with Jesus Christ, but the sad truth is that the majority will be disconnected from church before they even hit high school. So we better focus much of our time, resources and prayer on infants-thru-8th-graders, or we will lose countless young souls to the enemy.