the invisible 20s

Conversations with my best friend (hi Allie!) have often sparked the inspiration for my blog posts. Today was no different. Allie is only a year or so older than me but we could not be in more different seasons of life. When she was my age, she was in her final year of graduate school finishing up her masters as well as planning a wedding. I, on the other hand, am in between jobs again, single, and debating on going back and getting my masters (eventually).

All of that is to say when Allie moved to her current city after getting married and accepting a teaching position, there were certain pockets for her within the church to jumpstart her community in her new area (not to say finding a church in the first place wasn’t hard). Her being married gives her and her husband the opportunity to make friends with other couples which will hopefully lead to mutual friends of those couples making friends with Allie and her husband respectively. But like I said, the whole being married gave her a jumpstart I don’t have at this point in my life.

She knows well that’s not a statement I’m making out of jealousy, it would be just as unhealthy for her to use that as crutch and not make any friends outside of couples as it would be for me to use as an excuse for why I’m struggling with making friendships after college. But I didn’t jump straight into a career that gave me work friends and I’ve always been single and have been between churches and so it’s been a struggle starting over in a lot of places in my life which has brought me to the conclusion: post-grads are practically invisible to the church.

I’ve seen several articles regarding (especially single though tbh depending on other factors I don’t think that matters much) young adults/professionals and their place in the church. Most graduates are no longer in their hometown or even home state! And that means that if the friends they made in undergrad or during their masters go off and move back home or other places, they’re starting over again, like a new kid at a new school. Only the new school is life and that’s about an extra 7 billion people give or take a baby.

So what are their options?

• Stay a church they’ve potentially outgrown spiritually because they know at least a small core group of people (I’ve been there it’s not fun).
• Church hop with potentially no end in sight (and go through the existential fear that you’re just being too picky)
• Stop going to church completely and hope people still come into your life (they do but they’re not the people you need)
• Become a hermit and binge watch Bob Ross on Netflix

I can tell you (including the last one) that none of these are fun in the end. Unfortunately, there’s only an incredibly small percentage of post-grads that feel like they haven’t outgrown the church they’ve attended for 4+ years and get to stay in the same town because they’ve landed a stable job within the first six months of graduating. And that percentage of people that do that and are single is probably even smaller. I’m not a math person, I’ve never claimed to be but given how lonely the last year and a half of my life has been, I can tell you those stats are probably pretty accurate.

When I graduated high school, I stayed in the same town I grew up in, the only problem was that only one other girl was going to the college in our town. Everyone else left.

And that’s fine! I went to school in my town for complicated reasons but the fact of the matter was the even though I had spent so much of my life here and had planted so many roots, come the first day of freshman year, I felt like the new girl because I didn’t really have anyone to decompress the day with. I was living at home and commuting, the other girl in my Sunday school class had a completely different major and we weren’t that close of friends. I didn’t want to reach out and bother her so I was just… alone. I was a new girl in an area I could walk through blindfolded.

And I feel like that now. I feel almost displaced and I think that’s hugely impart due to a large gap within the church community that seems to skip straight from 22 year old college senior to late 20s/early 30s married person. There is this entire in between I’ve seen talked about and have seen other people in that season of life that live in other states share the same concern. They feel alone and invisible under the guise that there’s not enough of us to really be worth serving.

And to that I say if there’s enough people nationwide, to be writing articles and asking advice in Facebook groups about what can I do to make friends in this season of life, I definitely think that there are enough of us to be worth serving! And all I mean by serving is hey having a bible study that is for men and women of that age or having a Sunday school class of men and women of that age.

Obviously, it’s important to have people in your life to look up to as well as people who you can mentor but if you don’t have people walking alongside you, I honestly don’t think you’re going to have second opinion to really help you listen to the advice from the people ahead of you and you’re not going to be able to serve the person coming up behind you very well either. We were made to be in community (Acts 2: 46-47) but we’re all scattered now because I don’t think churches are seeing how badly need something like that. They mostly cater to the college demographic and if they see us, we’re the bible study leaders for the college demographic or we’re the babysitters for the young married couples’ children for their bible study.

I’m not trying to point a finger at any church in particular but in the last year and a half of my life it’s definitely something I’ve observed in my life and the lives of my friends through ministry around the country. I would love to get and go somewhere and help build something like this and make sure that this demographic gets some kind of community to build each other up so that we can baby sit the young married couples’ kids or lead that Bible study but we need something to fill our own cup up with first before we can be expected to be equipped to do such a thing.