Young Adulthood is a time when people are making their major life decisions. People are finding their life's work, their home, their spiritual calling, their marriage partner. In some ways, these commitments define young adulthood: once you have all these factors in place, you are much less likely to seek out a group for young adults; if you are 39 and still haven't found a partner or a steady job, you are likely to still feel yourself a young adult.
What are Young Adults thinking about? What are the life challenges we face?
Career choices.
Maybe you think that this is too boring to talk about in church, but for many UU young adults, the potential conflict between the desire to live out one's spiritual values and the need to be economically self-sustaining is a significant life struggle. Young adults need a supportive environment in which to talk about career in the context of ethics and spirit. They also need information about different alternative career options, and older role models who can talk about what the decision to be a "starving artist" or "corporate sellout" (or "lifelong activist" or "social service worker") feels like twenty or thirty years down the road.
Religious commitment.
At most congregations I visit, I look around the pews and see a sea of older faces. There are maybe three young adults there. But when the time comes for visitors to stand and be greeted, two of the three young adults stand up. Clearly, they are not going to stay. But they came. And then at coffee hour, when I ask the elders why there are no young adults in the congregation, the answer I most often get is that "young adults are not interested in church." I think of all those young adult visitors, and I wonder what is not getting through.
For lifelong UUs, especially for YRUU leaders or for the spiritually sensitive, young adulthood is the time when we consider becoming ministers. Not everyone takes that path, just as most young Catholics do not actually become priests or nuns, but the process of consideration is deeply meaningful. UU young adults may have just finished four or fourteen years of Unitarian Universalist religious education. They don't want it to suddenly end, or to go to waste.
UU Adult RE is, for the most part, not set up to meet the Young Adult religious hungers that I see. Partly because of YRUU and partly because of the larger culture, most young adults of this generation are not "recovering Christians." They are just as likely to be struggling between Zen and Wicca as between theism and atheism, and the Goddess is old news. They often express interest in religious discipline, admiring Catholic nuns or Othodox Jews or Buddhist monastics. This interest in discipline, by the way, is not because they have low self-esteem and want to gain the security of being mindless cult zombie, the way their elders fear. It's because they want a challenge to try their by-now-formidable spiritual and theological powers on.
UU young adults ask me: is UUism strong enough to challenge me? Deep enough to deepen me? Real enough for me to be proud of? Fellowship and comfort are good things; but I can get that at a cafe. I want to know about the religion. And I want to feel its power, not just believe in some principles on paper.
Sexuality.
Like career, marriage (or relationship) is something that if you haven't got it figured out by a certain age (let's say maybe 27), anxiety starts to set in. Forming lasting adult relationships is a young adult developmental task.
Like religion or career, for some young adults this task is relatively smooth, and for others it is a source of crisis. But for most, it is a topic that they need a chance to talk about, at church, in a spiritual setting.
I've got more to say about UU young adult sexuality in another section, so I'll be brief here, but I will say this: we need an OWL for young adults, especially for UU-raised young adults. You changed us with the sexuality education you gave, and young adulthood is a major moment in the human sexual lifespan. Adolescence was about safe experimentation; but young adulthood is about sink or swim. It is just not fair to dump us into the "Adult" curriculum with the general population 55-year-olds, or to claim that the adolescent curricula are adequate to our needs.
AYS taught us to use caution in our youthful experimentation. It did not teach us to have courage for risking an adult commitment. When you are thirteen, it makes sense to say "no" anytime you feel scared. When you are twenty-three, or thirty-three, a different kind of guidance is needed. This is another example of an area where the message needs to change from youth to young adulthood.
My liberal-Catholic stepsister was given a full semester of religious education in preparation for her marriage. UU young adults are different, but in spite of or maybe because of that difference, we too need guidance and support from our religious community.