Lately, you may have started hearing about “YAMN.” What does that mean, and where did that name come from? Well, we were writing a grant, needed something to call our idea, and stuck with the first acronym that came to mind.

In the summer of 2020, I was fresh off a first wave of pandemic grief and hoping to get to know my new diocese. Before moving to the Pioneer Valley, I had spent the past five years in Boston doing a substantial amount of young adult ministry through in parish internships, in several campus ministries, and had been a part of the Diocese of Massachusetts’s 20s and 30s Task Force that established its diocesan Young Adult Advisory Council. Newly arrived in Western Massachusetts, I wanted to find out what was going on, who was doing things, and how I could join in. I reached out to Megan McDermott at Grace Amherst, who connected me to Tanya Wallace and Jac Essing at Lawrence House in South Hadley, and we looped in Valerie Bailey Fischer at Williams College and Jenny Gregg at Cathedral of the Beloved in Pittsfield for those initial conversations in the late summer and early fall of 2020. From those conversations we discerned several needs:

1.     A need for some way for young adults across the diocese to connect to one another, facilitate collaboration, and share fellowship and opportunities.

2.     A need for some ongoing conversation and collaboration between ministers lay and ordained engaged in ministry with young adults aged 18-40.

3.     Paid staff support to convene and organize responses to the needs identified in 1 and 2 and to build capacity for greater work together.

Out of that initial discernment, we decided to apply for a Young Adult and Campus Ministry grant from the Episcopal Church’s Office of Faith Formation to pay an organizer to do this work. As we were working on the grant form, we had to decide: What was our name going to be? In lieu of anything better, we wrote “Young Adult Ministry Network” in title field, and in true Episcopal fashion we shortened it to its initials: YAMN.

We received partial funding for that initial grant, which was matched by Bishop Doug, which allowed me to work quarter-time on this ministry in 2021-22. A diocesan Ministry Development Initiative grant allowed us to fund a retreat in the fall at Barbara C. Harris Camp and Conference center. And in 2022, we received the full two-year TEC grant that continues our funding into early 2024. Once this term is complete, however, we’re ineligible for future church wide young adult grants for five years, so we’re actively discerning what is next for YAMN. In the meantime, we’re working hard to try different ways of supporting young adults and folks who minister with young adults across the Episcopal Diocese of Western Massachusetts.

This is both a simple and a challenging question. Young adults in YAMN, our diocesan network, are people aged 18-40. Sometimes, to differentiate from college and campus ministries, the term “young adult” is used interchangeably with the term “20s and 30s”. Occasionally the term “young professional” is used for these sorts of groups. And, sometimes, the term young adult is used to refer to older youth and teenagers, especially since terms like “young adult literature” refers to that age group. But what about young adults who don’t go to college? What about young parents? Some people in this age range dislike the term “young adult,” because they experience its usage as delegitimizing the full adulthood and maturity of people in that life stage.

We use 18-40 recognizing that the category is both incoherent in terms of how many different stages of life and ministry needs can fit into that age range, and also recognizing that it is a discrete set of places where ministry needs for parish and diocesan as well as church wide support and programming are often unmet. Episcopal campus ministries are extremely poorly funded, when they are funded at all, despite the need for affirming Christian community and support on campus. Parishes are often unequipped to support the needs of young adults in their communities. Because of demographic shifts in church attendance and leadership, young adults who join parishes often find barriers to fellowship, barriers to sharing their gifts of leadership, and barriers to fully participate in their baptismal vocation in the church. These are problems across the church, and they worsen as time goes on.

Young Adult Ministry looks different in different contexts, and with different groups of young adults. Young Adult Ministry in some cases is parish 20s-30s groups, small groups that gather regularly to support each other in their life of faith through meals, fellowships, and shared activities. In other cases, young adult ministry might look like affinity-based meetups: we’ve been experimenting this year with meetups in different places across the diocese to see who is drawn to these events and what sort of community we can build through them. Young Adult Ministry can look like enhancing traditional ministry offerings by providing childcare and scheduling events at times outside of “traditional” working hours – so that young families and workers are able to attend them. Young adult ministry looks like organizing young adults to be eligible, nominated, and elected to parish and diocesan positions so that they may take their place in the life and work of the church and provide their gifts of leadership. And in our diocesan context, young adult ministry looks like the work of the Lawrence House Episcopal Service Corps, which calls young adults into a shared community of service and prayer in South Hadley.

What might young adult ministry look like in your context?

Currently, the young adult ministry network works through two overlapping streams of ministry. The first stream is our online gathering for young adults to connect, share opportunities, and fellowship. This takes place on our Discord server, an app that young adults can connect to by requesting an invite link. There are channels on the server for prayer requests, upcoming events, job opportunities, and general chat, as well as voice channels that we’ve used for online prayer services and bible study. This stream seeks to be an accessible way for young adults across the diocese to connect and share information and fellowship.

The second stream is a monthly-ish gathering of people who are engaged in ministry with young adults. This is an hour, usually on a weekday afternoon, over Zoom, where we share news on what we’re doing, strategize on shared events, and dream about the future of this ministry. These meetings are where recent events, such as our board game afternoons and icon-museum meetup were planned. While we’re entering the final year of this stage of our ministry and looking to the future, we’re also looking forward to a year of activity – more meetups across Western Massachusetts, more praying together, our yearly retreat in October, and a presence at Diocesan convention. To get involved in this ministry or to learn more about YAMN or young adult ministry, you can email me at william.harron@gmail.com.