Lifestyle & Culture Religion Uncategorized
For Gen-Z men, a surge in religious faith
By Danny Chung-A-Fung
Health, relationships, finances, spirituality. Of those four self-professed pillars of 30-year-old Alex Gittens’ life, the last is what’s first in his heart and mind.
It has not always been that way for Gittens. Especially while working three jobs to help pay his way through college, his faith fell through the cracks. He disconnected from the young adult ministry at the Bronx church where he grew up.
“My faith took a back burner to everything else,” Gittens said.
His return to church and a spiritual life came in his mid-20s, when he examined how he was living.
“Little by little, I was just like, ‘What kind of life do I want to lead?’” said Gittens, young adult ministry co-leader at Christ Alive Christian Fellowship in the Bronx. “And that’s when I was just like, ‘Enough is enough. I’m not doing this half in, half out. I’m going to fully commit myself to the things of Christ.’”
Young men in the United States — more than young women — are prioritizing their Christian faith. The number of 18- to 29-year-old men surpassed the count of women in that age group to say religion is “very important in their lives,” according to a Gallup survey released in April. That is a 12% increase from two years ago.
The Rev. Chris Palmer’s duties as associate pastor for young adults at Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church include organizing Wednesday night meetings where they discuss the Bible, pray for each other and, as one example of how they socialize, eat ice cream.
He’d endured his own crisis when, as a college freshman, he could manage being away from family, feeling alone and figuring out what God wanted him to do in the world.
“One of the things I take from that experience into my ministry is the kind of fragility of your young adult years,” Palmer, 34, said. “A lot of what I do is I try and, kind of, minister to those moments of anxiety for people.”=
Being a corporate employee, as some of his church’s young adults are, can be stressful, he added. So can navigating life in New York City.
“One of the things that New York does especially is, like, everything is so urgent,” Palmer said. “Sometimes, people really miss having a sense of deep community.
Jake Aldridge is barely on the verge of adulthood. The 15-year-old was born into a Baltimore family of practicing Catholics. Only in the last year, though, has his personal faith really begun to develop.
“Over time, something changed,” Jake said. “Being around people who actually cared about their faith … started to affect me more than I expected.”
Jake, who serves at Church of the Nativity in Timonium, Maryland, has a newfound appreciation of the power of consistently showing up on Sundays.
“Most … grandmas go to church every single Sunday for their life,” Jake said.
“And I always like to think of it, like, ‘OK, if they’re doing this, is there something that we need to ask ourselves? Like, what aren’t we doing that?’”
His church’s youth group meets on Sunday evenings. Jake tries to attend regularly.
“When you have a community that extends beyond the hour during mass, it’s something people want to come to,” Jake said. “It’s something people want to stay for.”
Drawing youth to the sessions takes some effort, said Palmer, the pastor. But he keeps on. “If Jalen Brunson,” he began, using the Knicks point guard to make a point, “stopped playing basketball when it got hard, he never would have been a professional athlete. Christian community requires us to be inconvenienced. It’s not easy.”
“I feel that our generation,” Jake said, “and young men especially, are looking for meaning and purpose in their life. Christ offers … that … meaning and purpose.”
Christian faith, said Gittens, a financial advisor, helps some young men to fill voids in their lives. It keeps them away from gambling or drugs or other negativity.
“There’s a yearning and desire,” Gittens said, “for the things of God [in] this generation in particular.”
“I would hope,” Palmer said, “that our church just continues to listen to the faithful experience of that generation. There’s so much that we can learn about God and God’s faithfulness through listening to their voices.”