Adultolescence

"Adultolescence" is the emerging trend of twentysomethings postponing adulthood into the thirties. As a twenties pastor, I can attest that this trend is both real and troubling. Below is John Piper's list of how the local church ought to address the trend of adultolescence. I believe numbers 3-6 are especially important. Click here to read the whole article.1. The church will encourage maturity, not the opposite. “Do not bechildren in your thinking. Be infants in evil, but in your thinking bemature” (1 Corinthians 4:20).2. The church will press the fact that maturity is not a function ofbeing out of school but is possible to develop while in school.3. While celebrating the call to life long singleness, the churchwill not encourage those who don’t have the cal to wait till late intheir twenties or thirties to marry, even if it means marrying while inschool.4. The church will foster flexibility in life through living byfaith and resist the notion that learning to be professionally flexiblemust happen through a decade of experimentation.5. The church will help parents prepare their youth for independentfinancial living by age 22 or sooner, where disabilities do notprevent.6. The church will provide a stability and steadiness in life for young adults who find a significant identity there.7. The church will provide inspiring, worldview-forming teaching week in and week out that will deepen the mature mind.8. The church will provide a web of serious, maturing relationships.9. The church will be a corporate communion of believers with God inhis word and his ordinances that provide a regular experience ofuniversal significance.10. The church will be a beacon of truth that helps young adultskeep their bearings in the uncertainties of cultural fog and riptides.11. The church will regularly sound the trumpet for young adultsthat Christ is Lord of their lives and that they are not dependent onmom and dad for ultimate guidance.12. The church will provide leadership and service roles that callfor the responsibility of maturity in the young adults who fill them.13. The church will continually clarify and encourage a God-centeredperspective on college and grad school and career development.14. The church will lift up the incentives and values of chaste and holy singleness, as well as faithful and holy marriage.15. The church will relentlessly extol the maturing andstrengthening effects of the only infallible life charter for youngadults, the Bible.