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Don't Call Us Slackers!

By Andrew Black

     In the season-opening episode of the ABC sitcom “Dharma and Greg,” the free-spirited and idealistic Dharma, daughter of 1960s hippies, learns that the young woman checking her groceries at the supermarket is pregnant, single and unable to take care of her child. Dharma immediately agrees to help her, then tries to convince husband Greg to adopt the baby.
     Greg’s initial response — and that of his conservative, country-club parents — is shock. They later show some sympathy for the “check-out girl’s” predicament but, they point out, there are “organizations set up to handle this kind of thing.”
     Greg: “I’m sorry, Dharma, but you can’t help every human being on the planet.”
     Dharma: “Yeah, but, Greg, you can help the ones that are right in front of you.”
     That theme may become the mantra for social involvement in the next generation. Dharma and many other twenty-something Americans are part of a growing trend toward social action that is hands-on and close to home.
     Confounding the popular stereotype of “Generation X” as lazy, cynical and not interested in solving problems, new research suggests this generation may merely be looking for new ways to serve others. There is indeed apathy toward big programs, big ministries, big ideologies and big solutions. But there is growing eagerness to work together to address problems on a more manageable level.
     For Sally Sarratt, 24, that meant spending two years in New York City as a volunteer, mostly teaching English to international students at Columbia University.
     “I feel like I can invest in one person’s life at a time and can make a difference in that life,” says Sarratt, originally from Spartanburg, S.C., who served in New York as a missions volunteer of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. “In New York the needs are right in front of your eyes.”
     Although Sarratt says she is called to a career in missions, she’s not plotting global strategies and is more comfortable working with individuals and small groups. She says young adults are well aware of global needs, and are often overwhelmed, but they want most to make a difference in the lives around them.
     “It’s a hands-on generation that wants to be a part of that work.”
     “New York in particular is overwhelming,” she says. “But the only way you can make a difference or make an investment is in individual lives — not in things or institutions, but in people.”
     A new survey of 18-to-30-year-olds by Washington-based Public Allies concludes that these baby busters are developing a new approach to service and leadership — one that puts people before programs, places value in direct action, and appreciates diversity.
     Instead of joining political parties or special-interest groups, young adults are more likely to serve as volunteers or to become mentors to children. For Christians putting their faith into action, this means emphasizing ministry that meets physical needs and evangelism that’s based on building relationships.
     According to the survey by Public Allies, a youth-leadership and community-involvement organization, more than two thirds of young adults said the most effective way to bring about change is by “practicing your ideals in everyday life” (68 percent). The same percentage said they had been involved in their community in some way in the past three years, most by volunteering in schools, hospitals, neighborhood centers or church agencies.
     Other ways to bring about change, the respondents said, are making friendships with people of other races, volunteering to “help others in a direct way,” and voting in elections. Fewer responded that religious activities were effective and fewer mentioned “volunteering for a political or social cause.” Research by Independent Sector, an organization that encourages volunteerism and philanthropy, suggests baby busters volunteer as often as the builder generation and almost as often as baby boomers.
     Why is history’s most globally aware generation so locally focused?
     “The world has become so accessible that it becomes overwhelming,” says Doug Pagitt, manager of the Young Leaders Network for Leadership Network, a Christian think-tank in Dallas that focuses on the future church. As a result of this global-village overload, the idea of social change on a global scale “has lost some of its attractiveness,” he says.
     But there are other deeper reasons as well.
     Young adults widely reject the notion of inevitable social progress, says Pagitt. There is a loss of faith that science, human effort and reason will continue to make life better for everyone — a concept leftover from the Enlightenment but rejected by post-modernism. Baby busters aren’t buying it. “They realize this baby ain’t getting any better,” Pagitt says. “They say, ‘I know I’m not going to change the world out there, but I can make a difference here.’”
     And young adults look for hands-on involvement because, more than their predecessors, they prefer to learn from experience, Pagitt says. While earlier generations most often learned concepts first, then put them into practice, baby busters want the experience first. Learning takes place during and after the experience, as it is interpreted and understood.
     In that setting, the role of the leader is not primarily to impart knowledge but to help interpret the experience. That explains the cult popularity of talk-show hosts like Oprah Winfrey, says Pagitt. “They become the poets that help other people interpret their experiences.”
     Rose Berger, intern coordinator for Sojourners in Washington, D.C., has seen a change in the young adults who come to serve in the evangelical group’s social-justice and anti-poverty ministries. The once-clear distinction between evangelism and social action is disappearing among recent interns, she says.
     “There is much more of an integration now from what in the past has been evangelism focused solely on spiritual salvation and social action which served others but didn’t have the strength of meeting spiritual needs,” Berger says. “Now when young people come to our program, it’s all one piece.”
     Jimmy Dorrell of Waco, Texas, has seen the shift too. Dorrell is director of Mission Waco, a Christian organization that provides tutoring, after-school programs, job training and other services to 1,000 of the city’s needy each week — staffed largely by students from nearby Baylor University. He says those students are learning to see Christian ministry in holistic terms.
     In traditional church culture, Dorrell says, neither conservatives nor liberals are doing social ministry and evangelism. “Traditional denominations are still stuck in old theology. Their younger members don’t live there anymore.”
     Mission Waco’s 150 volunteers do not hide their Christian faith, Dorrell says, “but we are relational in our witnessing.”
     While Christians have long been divided over the best way to demonstrate their faith — by word or deed — those in Generation X are less likely to get hung up on the issue, say their leaders. “If you’re talking about Jesus while you’re building a house, which are you doing?” argues Bart Campolo, who directs KingdomWorks, an inner-city volunteer mission program.
     GenXers are generally less interested in propositional witnessing or counting conversions. But they are very interested in the spiritual and physical welfare of their friends and neighbors.
     Half of the young adults surveyed by Public Allies said that “community, looking out for each other” is a more important value than “individual responsibility and self-reliance.”
     Still self-reliance was valued most highly by 38 percent, which convinces Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne that GenXers see the relationship between community and self-reliance as both/and rather than either/or.
     “After the social gyrations of the past 30 years, this may be a generation in search of balance,” Dionne wrote in a recent column. “You might call it maturity.”

— Andrew Black is a paralegal for the U.S. Department of Justice
and a freelance writer in Dallas. (andresnegro@hotmail.com)

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