Young Adults Are Asking Who They're Supposed to Be. Your Church Has the Answers.
Score Card
Who This Is For
Most useful for small group directors, young adult pastors, campus ministers, and lead pastors at churches with a significant population of 20s and 30s. Also relevant for seminary chaplains and campus ministry leaders. If you've lost young adults to a period of vocational uncertainty, this brief is addressing the gap your church has.
What To Do With This
-
This week: Identify three congregation members — ideally in different vocations — who have a compelling story of how faith shaped their work. Note their names. The first step is knowing who the witnesses are.
-
This month: Interview one of them — 20 minutes, conversational — about their vocational journey. Record it if they're comfortable. Even if this never becomes a formal library, the conversation itself is pastoral.
-
This quarter: Design a three-session young adult series: one session on the theology of calling, two sessions of story and conversation with congregation members in different vocations. Evaluate what resonates before building anything bigger.
The Startup Insight
The Muse built a career discovery platform around a simple insight: people can't imagine a professional path they haven't seen modeled. Instead of aptitude tests or job listings, The Muse showed people doing meaningful work — in-depth profiles, stories, day-in-the-life content — so that users could find themselves in someone else's path. The mechanism was narrative, not algorithmic. People explored not by filtering for fit, but by encountering stories until something resonated. Career platforms had been building better filters for decades; The Muse built a better mirror.
The Ministry Translation
Churches are responsible for vocational formation — helping people discern calling, understand vocation, and make major life decisions in community rather than in isolation. Most churches discharge this responsibility through a prayer and a personality test. What The Muse suggests is that the missing piece isn't assessment — it's witness. Young adults and career-changers in your congregation can't imagine a vocationally integrated Christian life if they've never seen one modeled up close. A curated calling story library — video or written profiles of congregation members in diverse vocations sharing how God led them, what it costs, what it gives — paired with a structured discernment process (conversation prompts, small group guides, mentorship matching) costs almost nothing and addresses one of the deepest pastoral needs for people in their 20s and 30s. The content already lives in your congregation. It just hasn't been told.
Further Reading
- The Muse (themuse.com) — The commercial platform that inspired this brief; still live and worth exploring for the model of how narrative works as a discovery mechanism.
- Every Good Endeavor by Timothy Keller — The theological anchor for this brief; the most accessible and rigorous treatment of vocation as a spiritual category.
- Mentoring for Mission by Gunner Olson — A practical framework for the mentorship-matching component of the discernment process.