[C*UUYAN-Chat] 8 Models of UU Young Adult Groups

[Adrian Winchell]

Thank you for bringing this to light.
My biggest beef with my local congregation is a persistent focus on 
so-called "social action" (mostly going on and on and on about helping 
local charities and national charities and other causes), without ever 
stopping to consider issues within the UU community. The last service I 
went to, there was even talk that sounded much like "Well, now we've 
figured it all out, it's time to formalize our message so we can teach 
it to others" - which seemed to me like a gross violation of the spirit 
of the church I grew up in.
I think it's also rather sad that there's been almost no activity on 
this list since I signed up for it many months ago. Seems to me that for 
the most part, wherever UU Young Adults are, they're *not* looking for 
other UUYA's...or they'd be here, at least giving occasional "Anyone out 
there?" messages.
The local UUYA group that I found a listing for last year was 
campus-only, for a school I didn't attend, and said quite specifically 
in its charter that "only school affiliated members would be granted 
voting rights".

I'm reminded by all this of Robert Pirsig's description of 
de-accreditation, "What would happen is that the real University, which 
no legislature can dictate to and which can never be identified by any 
location of bricks or boards or glass, would simply declare that this 
place was no longer "holy ground." The real University would vanish from 
it, and all that would be left was the bricks and the books and the 
material manifestation."

It would seem, then, that the "Cliff" described in that article is a 
similar phenomenon. I can't quite imagine that those of us who simply 
drop off from the experience of YRUU then no longer practice our 
spirituality, or wind up in the gutter. What I can, however, imagine is 
that the *real* church that we learned, the spirituality that we wanted, 
simply declared that the "recovering Christian" UU churches are no 
longer the place it calls home. That likely seems why the majority of UU 
congregations I've met all have a "Young Adult" gap. Some of us turn to 
online communities, where rampant spiritual experimentation is often the 
norm. Some of us wind up clumping together in our career-related 
conferences - or go on a several year "religion crawl" instead of a pub 
crawl.

I tried to attend my church's path-to-membership class. It just about 
made me sick. Everyone else in the class was looking for a safe place to 
raise their children, or be with their partner. They weren't stuck in 
the post-YRUU Young Adult 'gap'. Most weekends, I find a walk in the 
park, even if no-one else's around, more socially fulfilling than a trip 
to church, where everyone wants to know where I'm going to college. As 
if that's what happens at my age - you go to college, then *poof*, all 
of a sudden you're coming into church with a fully-developed career, a 
family, and kids.

At any rate, thank you so much for pointing me to this article. At least 
now I have a vocabulary with which to *say* the problems that I've been 
seeing. I've forwarded the link to a handful of people that I think need 
to see this - in my family, and in my church. Several of those pages 
were familiar enough to me to make them very hard to read.

Thanks again,

Adrian Winchell
adrian at winchell.us

joel fox wrote:
> Has everyone seen this site?:
> 
> http://www.circlemaker.org/cdt/toc.html 
> 
> A friend of mine brought it to my attention a little while ago, and I'm 
> quite taken with it. The author is so right on! She has analyzed and 
> dissected UU culture very thoroughly and laid out issues and needs and 
> solutions in clear, plain language. It's actually the transcribed book 
> "Children of a Different Tribe - UU Young Adult Developmental Issues" by 
> Sharon Hwang Colligan.
> Here you will find everything from
> Liberal Religious Young Adults: Developmental Issues to
> An Anthropology of UUYAN to
> Naming: Toward a Language of Our Own.
> In particular, I highly recommend, of course, 8 Models of UU Young Adult 
> Groups. I think you will all love this.
> So, do go check it out.
> 
> joel
>