"My Vision for the UU Young Adults, 2000" by Scott James

I've participated and helped the Young Adult Group at the Unitarian Universalist church of Arlington, Virginia for nearly three years. But it is only now, as I near the end of my term as a YA coordinator, as well as slipping away from young adult-"ness" itself, that I've come to realize what is and has been the primary theme o four group.

In the past few years we have performed community service: baby-sat children, made sandwiches for a soup kitchen; we have performed services for our church; moved books and boxes, served Sunday morning coffee, organized church dances; we have created and presented worship services for the church congregations: made songs and sermons and skits; and we have managed to find enough collective energy to present a weekly Friday night young adult service for nearly two years.

But the theme wasn't service.

For I forgot to mention the parties, the evenings at the coffee houses, the scandals, the weekly discussions, the game nights, the gossips, the concerns about cliques, over-inclusion and under-inclusion, hikes, shooting pool, church politics, the struggles and misunderstandintgs. Did I mention the great parties?

What has crystallized, in my mind at least, as a theme for UU young adults, is the lack of any vision. I don't mean this as a kind of nihilistic shrug any more than I mean it to symbolize some kind of deep enlightenment. It's just that we don't have any vision, and for now, that realizaiton will have to suffice. Sure, there are problems we could address: the same poverty issues that have also troubled society for ages, the ancient forests being turned into charcoal, the sexual injustices and religious intolerance and so on, but looking back to the near past and nervously into the near future, there has been no clear cry around which the young adults, as a whole, have rallied: no terrible outrage to fight, no noble path to follow, no simple wrong to right, no mark to make, no new society to create.

Instead there are questions, murky issues. We, like most people, would like to see harmony among all peoples, but what are our positions in a world of silent aggression and lawsuits? We would like to see less economic suffering, but waht is the proper method to right economic wrongs? What is the utility of the death penalty? What are the tradeoffs between global industrialization and worker exploitation, the consequences of drug wars and drug legalizaiton? And where do we fit, in between deciding on a career, a family, and the daily commute, to all of this?

Our spirituality is similarly clouded. We have the incredible fortune of being able to exlore religions and belief systems from around the world, from various times (possibly various realities). But wouldn't it all be just a little easier if there were not quite so many options to explore, a couple fewer things we had to sort through before we choose our own spiritual path from this metaphysical morass? With the danger of repeating an already overused generalization, this lack ofa focussed vision likely echoes the condition of a good segment of today's young adults, at least of the constituency of which we are largely a part: middle class, educated, curioius and with a tendency toward lighter toned skin.

This condition is further intensified by another factor: the vast majority of UU young adults, active as "young adults", are not married (although not necessarily without marriage experience). Related, they are not bringing their offspring to Sunday School, are not entirely settled, are still searching [sic]. So young adults come in and out of the group, searching for friends, lovers, and the secret to Happiness. Some find what they are looking for; some don't. There is concern that young adults are little more than a dating pool. But who would have expected that it would be the leaders of the gorup to be the ones to exit in pairs? And what precisely is wrong with the UU young adults serving as a dating club? It is a cost, to be sure, to spend time and energy on people only to have them leave the organization, after all, dating clubs charge thousands of dollars for the same opportunities. But viewing UUism as a meta-organism, perhaps spinning off these apirs to make homes and babies, will result i nthem bringing their babies back to Unitarian Universalism- to learng about the connection between Hinduism and Christianity and their own burgeoning sexuality, restarting the cycle all over again.

As the group ages, there are concerns about mixing old young adults with young adults, about potential sexual predatory behavior, but the reality turns out to be more unpredictable. Tensions come from a variety of relationships and situations, and the mixing of a large group of people with ages spannding 2 decades has turned out to be largely beneficial.

The UU young adults' position within the church is also confused. At times we are viewed, and view ourselves, as separate; at other times, we feel fully involved; and at still other times we form a kind of foyer whihc we pass through on our way to the larger church. Our relationship with the church proper is as a pair of symbiotic organisms, each dependent on the other for their mutual, continued existence, yet each with parasitical tendencies: the young adults utilizing church resources, the church recruiting, involving, and ultimately absorbin the best leaders from the young adults.

In short, the UU young adults are a colleciton of unsettled members of a visionless group of an alredy confused generation. Moreover, it might not be all that meaningful to have a vision for young adults, for the young adults are not like a gender or species, we are a state, and the moment we get a vision, "we" will have reincarnated into something else entirely.

This being said, my vision for the UU Young Adults of 2000 is simply to keep it going. To nurture it, help it, hopefully find some heroes and heroines with the courage to lead and the ability to provide some consolidating force. To hold this generation through these times of confusion, so that as the next generation arrives in whatever state of confusion they are, doing whatever things they feel they need to do, there will be some environment in which they can explore and fret about and ponder their own vision for themselves and their world.

Scott James is one of the newest leaders C*UUYAN and is serving as Worship co-ordinator for ConCentric & Opus 2000. He has sreved for several years as a coordinator for the Arlington VA Young Adult Group, and was involved in the early 90's in Washington DC Campus Ministry.