- Creating dedicated young adult spaces
- Facilitating storytelling between generations
- Elevating young adults to leadership positions with real decision-making power
- Implementing intergenerational relationship building
- Forming diverse teams to guide these initiatives
They explore key learnings from research, the impact of social media on young adult theology, and the importance of intergenerational relationships. The conversation also touches on the challenges of polarization among young adults, the influence of figures like Mark Driscoll, and the need for compassion in church communities.
Martin also shares details about Pivot Northwest’s upcoming intergenerational pilgrimage to the Camino de Santiago, designed to build trust and connection through months of preparation, the journey itself, and ongoing reflection.
Whether you’re a pastor, lay leader, or simply interested in strengthening intergenerational community, this episode offers practical wisdom and research-backed insights for engaging young adults authentically.
About our guest:
Rev. Jimenez serves as the Program Director of Pivot NW Research at Seattle Pacific Seminary. Originally born and raised in the SF Bay Area, he moved to Seattle just before the iPhone was released and has earned his “mossback” status by sailing and fishing Puget Sound waterways, learning to drink coffee black and reading theology, and going to various shows from his 90s and 2000s musical heroes. His night and weekend job is Associate Pastor at Northminster Presbyterian Church (Loyal Heights) and raising Petra and Valencio with his wife Ali.
Related Resources:
https://www.youtube.com/@pivotnworg
https://transformingengagement.org/
Episode Transcript
Rose: Welcome to a special episode of Transforming Engagement, the podcast. I’m Rose Madrid Sweatman, the Programs Director for the Center for Transforming Engagement, which is housed at the Seattle School of Theology and Psychology. And today we have a special episode and we’re joined by Martin Jimenez from Pivot Northwest. And I’m so glad that we get to hear from Martin and the good work that they’re doing. So Martin, welcome to the podcast. Would you mind introducing yourself and just begin telling us about the work of Pivot Northwest?
Martin: Yeah, yeah. So my name is Reverend Martin Jimenez. My day job is managing the Pivot Northwest Research Grant. We’ve changed our name several times now. We’ve settled on Pivot Northwest Research. And then my night and weekend job is, I am the Associate Pastor of Development at Northminster Presbyterian Church, which used to be Ballard Presbyterian, so we’re kind of in that northwest corner of Seattle. But yeah, so it’s sort of a bonus year of programming for Pivot. We’ve been around since 2016. That was when the grant originated and November, 2016. I’ve been on staff since 2017. And the first five years of the grant were really about listening, watching being side by side, shoulder to shoulder with churches in the area. So lots of local Seattle churches, but some also a little bit far flung, but really focused on what the Pacific Northwest young adult religious scene looks like. Right. And by young adult we mean 20 somethings. And so after that first five years, we were one of 12 organizations that were doing this. Seattle Pacific Seminary was one, but there was also Princeton and Fuller, and there’s Catholic diocese and school from Indiana. There was a Pan Orthodox school in the Northeast, so it was a really great diverse project that Lilly was funding. And after five years, we were all like, well, we’ve learned all this stuff. We haven’t actually applied it, we haven’t tried anything. And so the last three or four years since 2021 has been the application of what we’ve learned to kind of confirm findings, to kind of help churches stretch their wings a little bit. And learn or relearn is often the case and relearn how to engage young adults. So yeah
Rose: No, that’s wonderful. I’m so happy to be listening and learning from what you all have learned from your research and from the application of it. Could you give us just some high level points on what you’ve learned and how it’s being applied in churches?
Martin: Yeah, I mean, the high level stuff, we actually summed that up. It’s on our website so people can check it out as they’re listening. So pivotnw.org just in case you want to dial up right now, if you’re in the car, don’t do that. Just keep listening, dial it up later. So we had five things you can do, and one of them is create a young adult group where young adults can just be together. Another one is share stories. So young adults and older adults sharing stories and older adults, they were young adults too once, so sometimes their stories can be really illustrative of what stayed the same. And also what’s changed since the sixties, the seventies, the eighties, whatnot. Another thing is elevating young adults to positions of money-making, money-spending decisions. So church councils, I’m Presbyterian, so we call it the session, and not just as a token who’s representing their voice, but one of the stories that I love to tell is Lake Burien Presbyterian Church, they elevated some young adults to their session and it really transformed the culture of the church because when you’re in that position in a church, you are not just called to represent your people, like your peers. You’re called to care for the entirety of the church. And so all these adults who don’t necessarily see 20-somethings in position of leadership out in the world, at least, maybe they’re not looking for it and they don’t notice it, right? Cause their coffee shop is probably managed by a 20-something. There’s lots of examples out there, but when they’re on the church council and they’re working shoulder to shoulder with the other elders of the church, I think people are really impressed and they’re like, oh my gosh, this person really does have the maturity to be a leader. We don’t have to teach them that they already have it. The only things they haven’t learned is maybe some of the assimilation aspects that churches often push. So dressing like us, acting like us, and that diversity that they bring, as well as the quality of leadership can really be a really great healthy spark for a church. And also as they’re leading those ministries, the rest of the congregation sees them in that leadership position. And it’s very inspiring.
Rose: When you’re describing that the first three points that you described, like young adult group, the storytelling, always storytelling, the narrative arc of things always resonates with people. We connect through story. But just that last one of putting young adults on the council to where the council is caring for the whole congregation. I could see where young adults today, ones that I know would be brilliant in those places because it would be such a reciprocal place of them learning to receive wisdom, but also giving out from their perspective and learning. I just think that’s brilliant and such a reciprocal, beautiful way to engage them in leadership. What was four and five? You said you had five?
Martin: Yeah, actually I’m glad. Gave me time to bring up the website. I was like, what is four or five? I got to remember them.
Rose: That’s alright.
Martin: No, no. Let’s see. Okay, so elevating young adults leadership, listening to stories, elevating… so budget and implementing intergenerational relationship building. So that can actually go really well with the listening of stories. You could build out intergenerational retreats and other things like that. I already talked about creating a space for young adults, which means giving them a budget. Frankly, that’s really what we’re saying is give 500 bucks, give them a thousand dollars, let them make the decisions be. I’ll veer off that point in a second. The last one is build an intergenerational team to kind of create these things, but back to giving young adults a budget. I don’t know if you’ve been noticing the amount of theologizing that’s been happening on social media lately, but…
Rose: No, I haven’t noticed. Oh yes, right?
Martin: The speculative theology that’s happening on social media is incredible because a lot of people, I feel like there’s a few different prototypes of this that I’ve noticed. One is the person who I was listening to this person last night give her bonafides, and she grew up in a conservative household. She went to Liberty University. She had all these things that she had done, and she has all these hot takes on the Bible and everyone’s like, oh, you don’t know the Bible. And it’s like, no, actually I have been immersed in this and this is what has radicalized me. And then you have the people who are not radical or who are radicalized, but they’re not from a biblical background and they’re 20-somethings and they’re like, I just opened the Bible for the first time because I wanted to check if this is really the way things are supposed to work. And they’re realizing the truth about the Bible, either by their own self-study or by listening to other influencers, how wrong Christianity has gone in this country,
Rose: Right.
Martin: And they’re just blown away. There was a gentleman who was an influencer, I think he was actually a pastor who was talking about how there’s thousands of verses that talk about social injustice and only a few hundred that talk about sexual immorality. And so young people are coming into their biblical education now through social media or through podcasts. That’s the other side of this, all the Joe Rogans and other people like that who are bringing on guests who have a very clear agenda and who are using scripture in dubious ways. So it’s a really fascinating time. I think pastors should really have a lot of fun engaging young adults right now because they don’t know what they’re going to bring to bible study, to a discussion over coffee. But by giving them budgets, you give them a reason to gather. You give them, they can go to a pub, they can go organize their own retreat and they will do their own research. They don’t need the pastor to come and teach them and feed them, spoonfeed them theology. But if you are a trusted person and an honest person about scripture, about you think about the Wesleyan quadrilateral, which is really big here on SPU campus reason, scripture, et cetera. It’s like if you come in honestly, then they will invite you onto these retreats and they’ll engage you. And it’ll be probably an enlightening time for both the pastor and the young adults, the pastor, understanding where the adults are, the adults kind of being able to maybe find some footholds for their own personal theologies.
Rose: I think the world has changed so much, Martin, as far as I am 69 years old today. And I think, when I was…
Martin: Oh, happy birthday!
Rose: Thank you, thank you. But when I was a young adult in the early seventies and there wasn’t social media. There wasn’t all the external ways in which I was able, and even then I was in parochial schools, I was raised Roman Catholic. I was asking questions. I was so curious about, wait, you say this, but show me where that is in the Bible. So I think there’s this natural curiosity in young people, and like you said before, now today, they’re just getting an influx of all the opinions through so many different avenues now. So it’s an interesting thing for churches. The research has proven giving them a place where they can use their voice, where they’re being formed in community.
Martin: In community. Yeah, it’s key.
Rose: So key, right. And honestly, I have 28 grandchildren. A lot of them are young adults right now. Some of my most beautiful conversations are with them to hear what are their thoughts about the world around us, the neighborhoods they live in. Young people really care about what’s happening. And so inviting them in to have these conversations, hearing their perspective just seems so important for congregations right now.
Martin: Yeah, I think there’s a lot of theologizing happening right now about who our neighbors are, and this is really the ICE, the way the ice is conducted itself in many different neighborhoods in LA and Chicago and now in Portland, which I’m actually driving down to Portland tomorrow to be a guest of a pastor of mine who’s just like, you should come down and practice presence with me. But the point is that the way they’re going about going into these neighborhoods, and suddenly Seattle of course is as this weird space where you never get to know your neighbors because of the way the social network works here. I don’t think it’s like that as much in LA and Chicago. I’ve got family down in LA. People are much more able to engage their neighbors. But the way I think folks are starting to learn about each other because they’re being put through this crucible of, and they’re starting to have to really negotiate what their values are and they’re thinking the value choice that seems to be offered is do you want to pursue some sort of weird ethnic purity that is being, or do you want neighbors who are diverse, who have lots of different gifts? And I think a lot of young adults are like, we’ve grown up. Every generation of young people grows up in a more diverse situation. And so in a way, there’s no way to sort of put the lid back on the Pandora’s box of diversity in America. It’s going to continue. No matter what you do to manufacture something that isn’t diverse, you’re going to continue to create that. And young adults are really good at navigating that. And churches need young adults to help them navigate that, right? Because you talk to folks who are boomers or old Gen Xers, and they will admit, I was born and raised in a neighborhood that everyone looked like me. And that isn’t necessarily a White experience. It could be an Asian experience, it could be a Black experience. And so they don’t have those skills that they learn in their formation or core identity in school, in the playground. But that isn’t the case anymore in so many parts of this country. And you could see it in Congress. We have all these octogenarians who are leading and they don’t know how to deal with diversity. You could see it in business, you could see it in all sorts of spaces where when they bring in women leaders, when they bring in diverse leaders, they bring in a different empathy, they bring in different experiences, different efficiencies, and the church desperately needs to catch up with what’s naturally happening in the corner coffee shop or at the brewery or in these startup businesses.
Rose: Martin, there’s so much polarization right now in the church in America. What have you learned about young people in the, are they drawn to these extremities? Where are young people in this? There’s so many extremities are just huge right now.
Martin: The temptation. No, this is a great topic to touch on because the temptation is to say all young adults are liberal and getting more liberal or progressive or to say, well, look at all these young adults who are latching on to the MAGA movement or whatever. Or the third temptation is look at all these young adults who don’t vote. They seem apathetic. And really, first of all, we can’t paint a broad brush with young adults. They’re just as diverse in terms of their experience and where they’re growing up and all their different formational things as we all are and every other generation. The second thing is, the one thing I do notice about millennials, young millennials, gen Z, and I would assume Gen Alpha will probably follow suit is boomers and Gen Xers are really big on like, oh, my generation is this way. But that really stopped pretty hard with the millennials and they’ll be like, I can’t speak for my generation. I can’t speak for even my friend. If you want her experience, you got to talk to her directly. And it’s been a really interesting shift in how we see ourselves, which I think is somewhat of maybe a pendulum swing, maybe an overcorrection, but it also is I think, a good correction in terms of not painting the whole population with the same broad brush. And so I think what young adults are looking for, especially in your twenties, you’re looking to find who’s your social network, what is your career, who’s your family going to be? Who are you going to marry? Are you going to have kids? Where are you going to live? Those used to all be things that the church helped us with, right? Mid-century. Even if it was sort of a mythical thing. But I think it was true, even in the eighties, I remember we had real estate agents in our church. We had doctors in our church, we had tech workers, and I’m from the Silicon Valley area, it’s from the Bay Area. So I grew up with lots of IBM employees, and it was a pretty highly college educated space, but there were also teachers and nurses, and there was really a cross section of the community. And through that cross section, you had access to lots of different things. And as churches have shrunk, that cross section has shrunk as churches have gotten older. Now you’re like, oh, these people aren’t working anymore. They’re mostly retired and they don’t have the energy to do the ministries that the church used to do. And so a lot of, I think young adults also are showing up to church and they’re not seeing the wealth that churches used to be able to offer on one hand. On the other hand, we’ve all got phones now. So all the things that the church used to offer they can look for through their phones, of course, it very quickly becomes internet dating is horrible or finding a job on the internet. It’s this really grueling experience no one wants to do. They want to just walk in and fall in love with the person across the bar, or they want to get a job offer over lunch that they weren’t expecting. And so I think that what we need to do is think about what the task is of a 20-something. They’re building their life, and then we need to ask ourselves, are we interested in being a part of that?
Rose: Right. Wait, wait, wait, wait. That is so good. Honestly, what you just said is I hope everyone listening, if you are in a community setting church congregation that you just heard that, do you want to be a part of that task with them? Honestly, that’s a really, really good question to be asking.
Martin: And one way, you can measure whether or not you are part, whether you want to be as one question whether you are or not. When was the last time you were at a wedding for a bunch of 20 somethings? When was the last time that you visited someone at the birthing center and brought them something or were at a baby shower. And these are indications of how plugged into an intergenerational community you are. And I’m not trying to put anyone on blast here, but a lot of older adults also like, well, they don’t want us around. You don’t know that you haven’t created a relationship, you haven’t listened to them, you haven’t given it a chance to blossom and once bring them some food, invite them over all these things that kind of used to be expected and now it feels like an imposition or something that is not the young adults aren’t excited about. And it’s like, no, actually the opposite is true. They actually really want intergenerational community.
Rose: I think when you talked about storytelling, that is another way you could be a part of their lives by being curious about their own story, and they would probably be curious about your story.
Martin: Absolutely.
Rose: They would want to hear how did you first become a follower? They want to hear the story.
Martin: Did you protest in Vietnam? My parents, they helped shut down UC Santa Cruz, right? They’ve got bonafides as far as this moment goes, right? But yeah, so this is actually something I talk about a lot within a church because the first thing that churches want to do when young adults show up is they want to create either a young adult group for the young adults or they want to assimilate them into the main congregation. And we kind of watch these churches in our initial research kind of naturally go to one side or the other. What we really learned is that there’s sort of a golden middle that churches really want to aim for. And the reason why is because if you create a young adult group and it’s just a bunch of young adults together, they all have the same problems. And it’s really nice that they don’t have to explain themselves to each other. They all share the same situations more or less. Around here, it can be a little weird becasue you’ll have a Microsoft person who is making six figures and then a bunch of baristas who are making not a living wage at all. And so it can be a little weird the way that works in certain areas where there’s a huge wealth gap in the different opportunities for a job. But on the other side of that is asking the adults to join the choir, which is intergenerational or go to women’s tea or the men’s Bible study or whatever. And then they’re constantly having to explain themselves. They’re constantly having to translate their experience. And what the young adult can get from that intergenerational relationship in that other group is perspective, is hope. They look at these older folks and they, oh, they survived their 20-somethings. They maybe have some regrettable decisions, but who doesn’t? They figured it out. They are trying to, they’re in the same vein as me in terms of trying to be Christlike, going to church, trying to create shalom in their community. But if you are vacillating between those, or if you’re in the middle, if you get an equal dose of both, then you have times when you don’t have to be explaining yourself. When you’re with your peers, when they understand what you’re going through, you can relax, but you also don’t have to live in that space where everyone has the same problems and no one knows how to get out. And then you go to the other side of the spectrum and you’ve got your older adults who have maybe a paid off house who maybe can take you out crabbing or fishing on the sound casuse they have a boat. Both those experiences are really important in young adult’s life because they need to be seen and known, but they also need to have a sense of escape and a sense of what forward movement can look like. And so that’s what we really try to help churches understand how to create that balance instead of just saying, here’s a bunch of money and adults go and do your thing. We’ll see you in 10 years when you get older. What young adult wants to hang out with a church that’s completely uninterested in their life and doesn’t want to learn and share?
Rose: It seems at point, we could probably go back and look at history of the church in America, but we don’t need to do that right now. Because what the reality is in many churches, the generations are siloed. We have kids programs, we have adolescent programs, we have young adult program, we have newly married, we’ve siloed, married everybody. So what you are describing where you have some, you’re with alike people in the same stage of life, but you’re also in an intergenerational where people are learning from each other just seems like is so, so needed because of the way we’ve siloed everyone out.
Martin: This is why the shrinking of the churches isn’t necessarily a bad thing. And this is also why church plants are really instructive, because church plants, we studied a fair number of church plants and of course the history of church plants in Seattle, like since 2000, it’s just been this wild west and they’re still being sent here. Southern Baptist church planters and Free Methodist church planners and UMC church, I mean, we’re still getting our regular dose of it. And the one thing, no matter where you are in this cultural political spectrum, the one thing that it does is it’s all hands on deck. And so you really do have young adults in leadership making decisions. You really do have intergenerational reality happening at these church plants. And people are wondering, why is this conservative church plant really working well in liberal Seattle? Well, part of the reason is it’s intergenerational. And so all the adults who are showing up there are getting fed both peer relationships and intergenerational relationships. Another thing is there isn’t a whole bunch of simulation you have to do, right? Because they’re all kind of making it up. I mean, even church plants that are somewhat structured and have a real sense of this is how we do community, and it’s not up for debate. There’s still a lot of room within that to interpret how that looks and how that feels, especially in a city like Seattle where you’re not meeting necessarily in an old church that’s been around since the Revolutionary War or the Civil War. I mean, the state is 1889, or I forget when it was 1885, 1880s, because all of our churches and buildings and universities all say they all the same anniversaries cause they all started when the state started. But my point is that one of the ways that churches aren’t hospitable to young adults is they don’t understand all the assimilation they’re asking young adults to do. They don’t understand that young adults do want to have that intergenerational relationship. They leave them alone. And it’s kind of self-defeating, right? Because it’s not the body of Christ. I mean, let’s just put it just biblically speaking. We should be able to be better at this as people Christ because we’re literally called to it. It’s not necessarily even a choice. It’s a calling. And yet I find that my agnostic, atheistic neighbors do it better than a lot of churches. So…
Rose: Since we’re talking about, we’re in Seattle, you and I both live in the Seattle area, and I think a few years ago I had asked you, and I’d like you just to maybe speak to this a little bit, because of course, we had a gigantic church in Seattle that crumbled and burned, and there was a lot of abuse. And probably everybody that understands us knows who we’re talking about. But you said something to me, our research is inquiring why so many young adults were attracted to that church.
Martin: Yeah. So I mean, can I say his name?
Rose: I don’t care. Absolutely.
Martin: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think Mark Driscoll in a lot of ways… there are people who say he’s a prototype for a lot of conservative thinking across the, you have to be funny. You have to have that comedic timing, which he had. But you also have to kind appeal to this mid-century mythology of gender roles and other things. And I think Seattle’s identity is just so up for grabs, both by the people who’ve lived here for a while, and the people who are moving here. At one point, we had more people moving to Seattle last decade than anywhere else in the nation. We still have a lot of flux because of the tech industry and all the other things that are happening. Our little secret of being a beautiful corner of the nation is out. Everyone knows. So one of the things that Seattle didn’t have when Driscoll hit the scene in 2000’s, and this is before the housing crisis, this is just after the tech bubble. So things are kind of still getting ramped up here in terms of we just have Boeing and Starbucks. Back then. One of the things that was up for grabs was what young adults should look like, how they should model themselves, what are their role models? And this is true in churches. I tell churches, you need to get young adults in the pews just so that your kids know what they should be trying to grow into. And so Mark Driscoll comes on the scene, and this is just when Twitter was starting. So he was telling everyone to tweet out his tweet out during his sermons and talk about what he’s talking about. But he gave a really clear vision, and it was compelling for a lot of people who didn’t feel like the church was offering a vision and no one was offering vision. I mean, Seattle is a pioneering, it’s the wilderness. It was created by the silver and gold rushes. It’s the Oregon Trail. There’s all these mythos about the northwest, and this just isn’t Seattle. This is Oregon. You can buy your piece of property an hour out of the city and never run into anyone if you wanted to. So he comes in into what is kind of a vacuum, and he says, this is what you all should be doing as young adults. I don’t agree with the vision he gave, but he was giving a vision and lots of people were compelled to that. And there’s a lot of churches that, from the fallout of the Mars Hill implosion that have continued to, I mean, they’re less bombastic, they have better guardrails. They’re a little bit more political with our neighbors and stuff. But they continue in that tradition of what the tradition he comes out of, which is centrist, right of center, I don’t know, where you want to put it. And those churches are still thriving today. And I think a lot of guys, because young adults are coming to Seattle, they’re getting their tech job or whatever, and then they’re looking for something to hold onto. They’re looking for something familiar. And if you’re coming from Ohio, if you’re coming from Florida, if you’re coming from anywhere in the south or Texas or the Midwest… I love my church. We are very progressive. I feel extremely comfortable there. But I know somebody who just came from Ohio, maybe if they have any queer members of the family, they’re in the closet and they’ve kind of lived in a space that’s been reflective of who they are and their family, and they move to Seattle and they’re like, oh, this is not reflective of anything I know. That church, that Sunday morning experience becomes a refuge for them and for them, they feel the cultural difficulty fitting in here where they have to have the right ideas, the right perspectives. They have to be able to navigate all these different things. And it’s not just the city and the progressiveness city, it’s also the international scene. We’ve got so many international people here with all the visa talk, we’ve been talking about Microsoft and the other internet tech companies and stuff. And so Seattle’s not an easy place to land. And so I have a lot of empathy. I have a lot of sympathy for young adults who are coming here who are just, it may take ’em a decade to adjust, and they may move home before they do that. They may say, it’s lonely here. I can’t date. No one holds the values I hold, and I don’t know that I want to trade them in for the values I’m being offered. And I wish we could have compassion instead of being
Rose: Judgmental
Martin: Instead of giving them lectures. Exactly,
Rose: Yes. Right. Another thing that I was thinking about, I think it was either Stanley Hauerwas or somebody, I can’t remember, back when Mars Hill was really big in Seattle, I had read in one of their books about missional leadership… It was like during the emerging, all that stuff. But one of the things that stuck with me was when society goes into times of chaos, about 15% of the population, especially young adults, will gravitate toward a conservative theology that gives them guardrails because they feel like all of life is out of control. So they gravitate to where people are telling them, this is right and this is wrong.
Martin: Yeah.
Rose: Have you found any of that?
Martin: I mean, I think we’re all just trying to hold on right now, right?
Rose: Yeah.
Martin: Well, there’s a few things I want to address. Lemme try to organize my thoughts for a second. Number one, I want to make really clear that even as people are renegotiating their experience and renegotiating maybe their values, there’s no room for them to be disrespectful. And that’s been something we’ve had to face in the city for a while, is sort of this exterior influences coming into the city and saying, you’re living life wrong. And everyone in the city’s like, we’re living it the way we know how and the way we like. So thank you for your input, but please go back to wherever you came from and leave us alone. So I want to be really clear that we can have compassion, but we also have to be protective of the vulnerable around us. And that’s important across the board, right? Because if you’re doing that, then you’re also being compassionate to the person who does feel like a stranger in the land. You are saying you’re just as vulnerable in some ways it’s because of the forces that helped produce your worldview. And those can be negotiated, but that’s important. As far as, it’s really interesting. I was thinking a decade or two ago, I was in relationship with this person and they were like a lot of people, it’s easier for people to go from conservative to liberal rather than liberal to conservative. And I feel like I’ve noticed that isn’t the case in this present day and age, and I’d love to understand better why that is. I think some of it does come to, back to that point I made earlier about a young adult trying to figure out how do I survive in my context? And if I am in a context where there’s this ascendant right wing and there’s this sort of evangelical blessing of it, are asking me to sacrifice myself as a 20-something on the altar of this, there’s no one else I can do it with because everyone else has already chosen this thing. And it’s like there’s all these other pressures that are being applied and industries that are bowing to these pressures. I don’t feel like I can ask a 20-something to make that before I’m doing that myself and all of my cohort that are older that have maybe mortgages and marriages and jobs and all that. So I find that when I was in undergrad, I was in undergrad in San Francisco state. It was when the 9/11 happened and the Iraq War started Afghanistan, Iraq war. There was lots of protests and it was all young adults, and it’s always, the young adults were the ones who were protesting the Israeli military occupation of Gaza a year ago. And we just got a peace plan. But people are pointing out that the Flotilla is a year after people were doing this protest that we’re young adults. And so I think in some ways, we as older adults are allowing our young adults to sacrifice themselves on the altar of creating the world that we want to be created, but we’re not standing up there and right next to them. And again, that points to that intergenerationality that we need to figure out ways to come alongside and let them lead, but also be their backstop, be their safety net, even as they’re renegotiating it. And I feel like that’s what, when Christ was doing his ministry, he didn’t have a place to put his head. We need to give meals. We need to give beds. We need to practice that. And if we’re not practicing it, they’re going to go to whoever is.
Rose: That’s right. That’s right.
Martin: Frankly, I don’t blame them.
Rose: Right? That’s exactly right. I wanted to bring up with you, I’ve been reading reports. There’s been some new reports coming out, especially in the evangelical church spaces about a bunch of Gen Z young men returning to church. Some of them, I’ve even heard call it a revival of young men returning to church. So then I hear some young women going, not us. Why is it they’re being attracted? So where I sit in the work that I do, I work with the breadth of the body of Christ. So from one end I hear, oh, all these Gen Z young men are returning to church. It’s a revival. And others are like, yeah, no, our churches are being emptied of Gen Z. Young people. So what you hearing?
Martin: Yeah. I’m actually not surprised to hear that. A few years ago, we were doing our own podcast and we paused that actually, I think that was before 2021, I think it was in the last phase of the, because we were talking to different folks about what they were experiencing. And one of the times I did an interview with it was four men who are living in a house that was owned by the Seattle Archdiocese, and there are four young men who are navigating their life. And I forgot how I learned about that. But then I ended up going to a dinner and it was the young man and then a bunch of women who were living in a communal, it used to be a nunnery in Lake City on one of the churches properties, and they had a group dinner. And it was the men and the women coming together, there were some priests, and at least one was a Franciscan, I want to say. And they let me come and just hang out and talk and listen. And they showed me their quarters. And the Catholic church has a very specific calling that everyone’s called to. You’re called ministry or you’re called to family, just to put it simply. Either you’re called to that celibate ministry or you’re called to have a family and grow the church in that particular way. And you can correct me if I’m saying anything totally offensive, but that’s what these young people were doing. They were thinking, what is my calling? And they were seriously considering it. And those are two options. There maybe were more that were more nuanced that I’m not, but for them it was like, I have all this space and time and people and community to do that in. And I’m like, who wouldn’t want to be part of that? And that’s not my jam. I’m Presbyterian, so I’m very much, I can have a family and do ministry. I don’t have to do one or the other.
Rose: That’s right.
Martin: But I’m like, how cool is it that the church was creating space for these people and they weren’t necessarily going to go to seminary? They weren’t. But the church was valuing that time in their life where they’re reconstructing what they’re doing. Another church that does that is UPC, University Presbyterian Church. They have a few houses, and they have, of course, a university housing, they’re called to the university, which is generally speaking, undergrad ministry. They’ve had the in, but they also have a house where grad students or international students, I think they’re grad and undergrad, but these are people who are not undergrads. They’re kind of more navigating the world by themselves, and they’re in a relationship with each other, and they’re in relationship with UPC and they do these intergenerational events. They go out just on peer events. And when the church is doing things like that, when the church is offering space, in this case literally being really great landlords, probably really cheap rent. Then these young adults have the capacity, and especially in this city, think of what a gift that is.
Rose: Yes.
Martin: The capacity to just be together, to cook together, to share life, to talk about their concerns, to come home and be like, that date was incredible, or that date was a disaster. I was just like, if it’s the conservative churches that have property that are doing this, then why wouldn’t you sign up for that? And that’s what I wish. I wish churches across the spectrum would do this. I was doing a video call with some Quakers in Indiana, and I was like, surely the rent there is cheaper here, and the land there is cheaper. Can you guys just start buying property and hosting young adults? If you really want to put your money where your mouth is and tell young adults, we want you in our church. We need you in our church, we want to help you get ahead in life. And I mean, that’s what a good parent might do, co-sign a house or introduce a child to a business partner and say, this could be a route for you, for your… so yeah, I think that’s a war that is being fought. And the question is, do you want to win that or do you want to sit in the sidelines?
Rose: What do you think? Do you think that we’re seeing an influx of young people back to church? Do you have any idea? And it’s okay if you don’t. I just wonder from where you sit.
Martin: Yeah, I think I’ll say yes and no. I think it might be a mile wide and an inch deep. I think people are always going to be curious about spirituality and religious… There’s this great comedian, and I said this to a few of my pastor friends, and he was talking about the Jewish feasts festivals, and he was like, they created Friday nights for Jews for the Jewish community. It’s a standing date to hang out with friends. He is like, I can’t get that anymore with any of my friends. I’m trying to connect with them, and I could go on and on about capitalism and disconnecting us from our community and our friends and the way that all that works. But he is like, how smart is that? And the Catholics do it. The Protestants do it, and the Muslims do it. And it’s like they just want to hang out and eat with their friends, and they have these standing dates. And I think that that’s a little bit about what’s going, there’s some wisdom in the church that young adults see, whether it’s MLK and nonviolent protests right now, whether it’s just the rhythms, the very human rhythms of feasting and gathering and celebrating, even just on a rhythm, things don’t have to be great. You just do it. So Sunday morning, maybe not so much.
Rose: That’s right.
Martin: But that sort of stuff. Absolutely.
Rose: Yeah. I don’t want to leave our conversation today without asking you your thoughts on the leak chat of the young republicans. Can you just speak to that for a minute?
Martin: Oh. Yeah. That’s the hot thing on the news. I mean,
Rose: Yeah.
Martin: The parent in you, like the parent in me, just part of you just is like, oh, mijo, mijita. Why were you doing that? You knew, you talked about it. But I think this is, again, when I talked about it earlier, and I’m glad we already had this conversation, I could just refer back to it when I talked earlier about echo chambers, about having the same problems and about not having a sense of movement, not having a sense of hope, not being connected into an intergenerational community that might be looking out for you and looking out for your best. I think the content aside, I think any of us can get caught being dumb because we want to look into our peers or because of whatever. And so this is where I really, this is when we started this grant back in 2016… Do you remember the guys carrying the torches in the South forget if it was Memphis, it was on some campus.
Rose: Oh, yeah, yeah. Yes, I do. Jews will not replace us. That one.
Martin: And I wrote a blog post about it back when we first started, and I was like, this is why the church needs to pay attention to young people, is that there are forces out there that will manipulate and use people and for their own purposes. And so if we’re not out there, and even the church can do that, but if we’re not out there accompanying young adults, if we’re not out there listening to them and what’s hard, then they’re going to go to these unhealthy places and people who would use them to further whatever their agenda is, but not look at them as humans. So again, it’s right back to that same point, accompaniment is huge.
Rose: That was in Charlottesville.
Martin: Yeah. Charlottesville. Thank you.
Rose: Thank you. That’s in Charlottesville. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. I think the thing that, I was sort of on a news break for a few days, so I didn’t even know until we were going to do this podcast. I wanted to see what were, what’s happening out there. But I think the most disturbing thing to me is the dehumanizing language you had talked about, we can disagree all we want. We can be polarized in our ideology, archeology, but we cannot dehumanize.
Martin: Right? It’s kind of a hard line. Yeah.
Rose: It’s a hard… and so again, with the advent of social media, chat rooms where people can be radicalized just sitting in your bedroom, your parents think you’re playing video games, or your roommates think you’re playing video games, and you’re on some of these chat rooms that are really just echo chambers of hate and dehumanization. And so what do you say to young people that might be listening?
Martin: I mean, in general, what is my direct message to young people? So here’s the thing. I’m usually telling churches I’m not in the business of telling young people that they have to do more than what they’re doing. My message to young people is, I am not here to give you a list of tasks. You’ve got enough on your plate. But find, try to be open to people who can help you. Try to practice vulnerability. And not just to your peers, but to other people who are older, who you respect, who you admire, who maybe you’re afraid of, and they’re actually, they’re probably more afraid of you. They’re going to be like, I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what skibidi means. I don’t want to get canceled. Right. Actually, this is a really great segue to what we’re doing this year. So let me just jump into that. So we’ve done these fellows programs. It’s an intergenerational hangout monthly, and it’s been themed. The first year was art and artists, and we used Fuller Brehm Center programming. It was really great. I really am indebted to Shannon Sigler. She’s a good friend of mine. And she was like, yeah, let’s get you all set up with some programming. We’ve got facilitators. So that was a great start. And then the next year we did social justice, and we worked with a gentleman who we found from University of, what’s the, oh man, I’m forgetting the state north of Illinois, Wisconsin. University of Wisconsin, sorry. And then last year we did business and entrepreneurship, and we kind of loosely partnered with the School of Business here on campus. Each year, we ended by going to Canlis, which I wrote about in the blog in the Christ and Cascadia Journal. So that was fun. It was fun to actually, I’ve been wanting to write that essay for a few years now. But the idea was to give space for young adults and older adults to be together to tackle some things, and then to celebrate it to sort of consecrate it. So when Jeff Hughes left, he has been the PI up until this last April of the grant. PI stands for principal investigator, and that’s the person who receives the grant and runs it. So Brian, the dean took over and he said, what are we going to do next year? And I was like, I don’t know. The sky’s the limit. What do you want to do? And he’s like, well, what’s the most effective thing? And I was like, oh, you know what the important things are? Retreat and pilgrimage. Those were the important things that we learned. Some of the churches used the money that we gave them in the first part of a research iteration to go on retreat and to go on pilgrimage. And the formational thing that happened with those things we’re huge. And so that was, for us, a huge education, because a lot of people think of young adults as going off to Europe, taking a gap year or whatever, and people dismiss that as, and people come back and, oh, it was amazing. It’s transformative, blah, blah, blah. I don’t think people really unpack or really bite into what is happening. First of all, what’s happening in psychology to the brain when you’re out of all your elements, but also with retreat when you’re just, even if you’re just removed for a weekend intensely with a group of people. And the real lesson we had was that a bunch of two or three churches had winter retreats in January and February of 2020. Now, if you recall, COVID hit the Seattle area on March 8th. That was the Sunday morning that every church said, we’re not meeting this morning. We’re all shutting down, going to Facebook or Zoom or whatnot. So all these young adults who had just gone on a winter retreat had these relationships that buoyed them through the first six, eight months of the COVID-19. And it was an incredible learning for us because what it really showed is that, first of all, you can’t predict when chaos, when disaster is going to strike your community, but what you can do is build in rhythms that make you resilient in the face of that chaos. Resiliency is a big thing with you guys.
Rose: Yes. Yeah. Yes.
Martin: So this is a data point. You guys could tell this story, feel free because it’s so important. And so one of the things I thought we should do is just try a year of not just going on a pilgrimage, but one of the things about pilgrimage and maybe somewhat for a retreat is it’s like a vacation. The preparation, the experience, and the unpacking of the experience is all part of the experience. So you might be gone for a week to Hawaii in the middle of summer, but you’re planning and getting your bathing suit and booking your tickets. You’re doing that for months. You’re anticipating it, it’s buoying you. And then afterwards, you’re looking at the pictures for the next few months and you’re reminiscing about the experience of being on a week long vacation can resonate for a year or more. And even more if it’s a particular event, like a destination wedding or an anniversary or whatever it could be. So we wanted to look at that in real time, and that’s what we’re doing this year. We’re building cohorts right now. Well, really one big cohort is because we want everyone to know each other so that we can go on pilgrimage in June. It’s the Camino De Santiago. So we’re going to go to Spain and we’ll be there, we’ll do it right after graduation, which is after June 8th. Sometime in the middle of June, we’ll be there. We’re playing for a nine day trip, and we’ll have a break day right in the middle. And we’ll probably, we’re working right now to book a travel agency that’ll help us with bags and all that. But we’re not going to have a guide. We’ve got some veteran Camino people who are going to be facilitating this year, and we’re going to go on the trip. But the point is that starting probably next month, we’re going to be having these monthly meetings, and we’ll probably have two or three in different times of the month so people can choose the one they can get to, and we’ll ask a few questions. We’ll ask, do you have boots? The simple, everyone pick up and show us your boots. Maybe tell us a story if they’re special or whatever. And then what’s a big event that’s happened in your life recently that you’re probably going to take on the Camino that you’re probably going to end up thinking through? And this isn’t just for older adults who maybe retired, because again, as an intergenerational community, it is also for young people who say, I just graduated. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. Or I’m dating someone and I don’t know if this is the one or not, and I’m trying to figure that out right now, or my whole world is being rebuilt, or maybe even I just came out to my family. All these things that are germane to what it means to be a young adult. So we will be unpacking those November through May so that when the pilgrimage happens, people aren’t going to be caught unaware or unprepared. They’ll be ready to harvest the fruit that has now ripened in their mind. Because I guarantee, I mean, every time I read about a pilgrim experience, I’ve read about a few to kind get my mind around it. People are like, I’ve met someone and they reminded me of my dead mother. Or I met someone and they reminded me of this friend I haven’t talked to since college, or I saw this tree and it reminded me of my childhood and a tree I fell out of and broke my arm. You have no ability to fully prepare for it, but if you’re going in a community and you’ve all done the work, I’m hoping that this could be a really… and frankly, I don’t even think most churches, when they do pilgrim to the holy land or to Rome, I don’t think they even do this much work. Right. And some of it is going to be that intergenerational older adults learning what can and can’t I say to younger adults and vice versa. How do I become a trusted individual in this relationship? And what church does that work? Very few.
Rose: Not many that I know of.
Martin: I’ve been to one church. I think one church I’ll say, and that was Finney Ridge Lutheran Church. And when I was there, there’s a great pastor, and he created this whole system called The Way, and you had spiritual grandmothers and grandfathers and love Paul Hoffman. He’s a legend in the North Seattle Lutheran community. But most churches don’t do that. They don’t facilitate relationships, and they don’t even have to be years, and they don’t have to be super deep, but they do have to be built on trust and a sense of, we’re in this together and we’re going to be forgiving, and we’re going to be graceful, and we’re going to have empathy for one another.
Rose: That sounds amazing,
Martin: Right?
Rose: I mean, honestly, I have friends. I have one very good friend. She actually takes people in the Camino and has written a book like returning
Martin: Is this Jen?
Rose: Yes. Is she going to be…
Martin: No, I’ve talked with Jen. I don’t know if she’s going, but I’ve talked with Jen. She my, I was like, what do you think of all this, Jen? She’s like, that sounds great. That’s exactly what I would do. So yeah, we’re in communication. No, she’s great.
Rose: I love it. So Jen and I have a couple of other friends that have done it, and I mean, I have not done it, but it sounds amazing. It really does.
Martin: I think it’s grown in popularity recently. I’m surprised how many people I know who have done it. And for Europe, it’s the Pacific Crest Trail. It’s their version of that. And what’s funny is if you actually study the James, the particular James, this is son of Zebedee, James, brother of John, the gospel writer. He has almost nothing in Bible that he says, and then he gets killed in Acts. He’s a first disciple to be martyred. I did a little sermon on him. I was like, I got to know who this guy is that we’re trying, and it’s like there’s almost nothing about him in scripture. It’s a very interesting figure for people. But people, most Europeans aren’t doing it because they’re doing it because the trail exists. They’re doing it because it’s a way of meditation. And in a lot of ways, most of the people who are going, they’re not going, they were raised Catholic, or they even know who James is. They’re going, because this is a chance for them to put a stake down in their life journey and say, this is a sacred time of reflection that I’m going to take. I’m going to treat myself too, because it’s necessary. Not even because a treat, but because it’s really an important practice to know. And I have a feeling everyone who goes is going to be like, I need to go either somewhere else, or I need to go again, and I need to bring other people. And that’s our hope through this whole journey, is to help churches reimagine how they do young adult ministry. And if a church committed to this every three years, I can’t imagine what kind of incredible growth a church like that could do.
Rose: Beautiful. One thing that I have experienced in intergenerational groups is, and I don’t know if you have come across this, but group spiritual direction with five people, and it’s a mix of generational… So anyway, that’s been a huge practice that I’ve been involved in. That is I’ve been with young people. You know what I mean? It’s very intergenerational. I think I was in one group that had a 20 something, 30 something, 40 something, and 50’s. There was one from each generation women, and it was beautiful. Martin, so something, yeah. That I’ve been involved in that has really been fruitful.
Martin: That sounds like it ticks off several of our five things you can do right now. It kind of combines the, I mean, and in fact, the sort of building a young adult initiative team at your church, that’s the fifth one. I mean, you wouldn’t necessarily want to burden a group like that with that mandate, but how could you stop things from coming out of it? How could you stop them from saying, let’s organize a retreat for the church and the five of us from our different generations will encourage everyone to participate equally. Instead of it’s just the pastor or the session or some sort of hegemonic group saying, we’re all going to do this. And everyone’s like, did you even think about hard that would be for me, whether it’s the families or the young adult who has to work and pay their rent or whatever.
Rose: Yeah. Okay. As we come in for a landing here, you have a book. Do you have a book? It’s on your website.
Martin: Yes. Yeah, A book and a video. And so that’s important. We wanted to, the book is, it’s a collection of chapters. Each one written by a different person who was involved in the grant at that time. I’m the only one who’s still around of that whole original group, but it’s got some great wisdom in it. It doesn’t encapsulate the whole of our wisdom. So that’s important to know. There’s a lot… In fact, if you read the book, and listen to this podcast, you’d be like, oh, there’s some things that didn’t make into the book clearly that we’re still very important. But it’s a great book to start with if you’re just starting this journey. And we wrote it more for pastors and seminarians. It’s not so much for lay folks, although it’s certainly legible. It’s not written in theological seminary speak, but there’s also a video on our YouTube and people can watch that. And each chapter has its own section in the video. And you could sit down with a church council, watch that in an hour and a half and have most of the stuff in the book kind of introduced to you. It doesn’t have all the detail, of course. And we really, when Jeff and I created this, we wanted it to be open source, which is unfortunately hard to do in this society where everything has to be subscribed to and bought and stuff. But that was really important to Jeff. We felt like it was important, especially for the Pacific Northwest churches, which is where our focus is. So some of this might sound like wisdom elsewhere in the country, and that’s fine. But a lot of it is really about what are the issues that we are specifically dealing with here. And we’ve been a cultural exporter for the last two decades, even to the whole world. So it’s important we know what we’re doing.
Rose: Exactly. Well, I so appreciate this and all of these mentions, we’ll make sure to put in the episode notes so people can just click on things. But Martin, thank you so much for this conversation.
Martin: Yeah, this was fun. So appreciate. I’m excited. We got to have it.