Book review The Faith of Generation Y

You may remember a book a few years ago called Making Sense of Generation Y. A follow on book from the same research team of Sylvia Collins-Mayo, Bob Mayo and Sally Nash, together with Christopher Cocksworth, called The Faith of Generation Y has now been published. This looks not only at the spirituality of young people from Generation Y but also at how they relate to church and faith. It’s an interesting read and gives some insight into how we should work with young people. One of the big implications is about how we label what we do with young people. Many of the young people with no experience of church who then experience a church sponsored youth event won’t make the connection to church. This means we may have to be clearer with young people about WHY we do what we do which is no bad thing. Another interesting element for me was that despite some suggestions that young people might have a pick and mix approach to religion (picking re-incarnation here, angels there etc) this isn’t at all supported by the research. The book has interesting insights into how young people think about big issues such as death and how their personal spiritual life is formed - it’s well worth a read and can be borrowed from our resource library.