Transcript
Speaker 1:
You’re listening to the Roundup Podcast, a podcast on reaching the college campus, developing leaders and sending out kingdom multipliers. This podcast is created by the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention and provided through Cooperative Program giving.
Mitch Tidwell:
Well howdy friends and welcome to the Roundup Podcast. I’m your host Mitch Tidwell. We have a great show today with Josh Packard, who is the executive director at Springtide Research Institute. I was listening to a webinar the other day, he was on there talking about his research on 13 to 25 year olds and it was very fascinating research, especially how young people viewing institutions, which is our churches and also the increased amount of loneliness. And then how do we as church leaders, how do we respond to those students? It’s a really fascinating interview with Josh. We sit down to talk about what are some of those trends that he’s seeing? And then how can we as ministers respond in light of that? Really, really good and I hope you will enjoy the show.
Mitch Tidwell:
Josh, how are you doing?
Josh Packard:
I’m doing great, really excited to be here.
Mitch Tidwell:
We’re glad you’re here. This episode, we’ll hit here at the beginning of May, but I know a few months ago I got to listen to a webinar with you and some folks from Exponential. And I thought, man, I really need to get Josh on the podcast to talk about trends, especially among generation Z and some of the college students. Thanks for coming on. Josh is with Springtide Research Institute, they gather data from 10,000 young people ages 13 to 25 and they’ve also done some qualitative research with a number of young people as well. It’s a really kind of robust look at kind of the status of young people today and their view of church. And so, hey Josh, I’d love for you to, I know I just shared a little bit, but kind of share a little bit of background about yourself and then how you kind of got to where you’re at today with Springtide Research Institute.
Josh Packard:
Yeah, sure. And I’m really excited. I know you have more than just a local presence, but being a proud alumni of Southlake Carroll High School. I’m excited to be back and talking to people in Texas. I went to Southlake, I grew up more or less in Southlake end of Metroplex and then went to Texas Lutheran University for undergraduate before deciding that I sort of liked higher ed and wanted to be a professor. And so I’ve been a sociology professor for about the last 10, 12 years or so. And it’s not one of the things I ever thought I would leave. I’ve loved working with young people and getting to do classroom instruction. And I wrote a book called Church Refugees about how people keep their faith, but leave the church and really got a chance to sort of see the impact that good research could make in the hands of people who were actually going to use it.
Josh Packard:
I love academic research. I think it’s really important, but it’s probably not what I’m most well suited for. I think it’s to do that research but then sort of figure out how to get that and translate it into ways that people can actually act on that data. That’s sort of led me to this place here, running Springtide Research Institute and at Springtide our whole focus is the connection between the inner and outer lives, the religious and daily lives of 13 to 25 year olds. And we saw a need for somebody to step in and do this kind of work because so much of the research that happens right now, so much our understanding that informs ministry efforts for young people is done through a particular lens, through a particular denominational lens, through a particular faith tradition lens and I think that that work can be informative, but we know unequivocally whether we like it or not, we know that the trend is that young people are moving away from institutions.
Josh Packard:
And so if we really want to understand them, we have to be asking sort of different set of questions and that’s where Springtide comes in and that’s our whole focus. You mentioned that we’d collected 10,000 surveys and a 150 some interviews for The State of Religion and Young People 2020 that we’re going to talk about today, but that work for us never stops. Now as we sit here talking, I think we’re well over 18,000 surveys and close to 200 interviews, as we start putting things together for State of Religion and Young People 2022 and the other studies and reports that have come out. We’ve got one coming out, in fact, we’re talking today it’s March 22nd, we’ve got this report coming out this week called The New Normal about eight ways to resource and think about how to engage with young people in a post pandemic world. We’re always putting stuff out, always working on the data, trying to hone those questions and get them just right.
Mitch Tidwell:
Wow. This is really good. When I saw you guys, I started doing some research online and I thought, oh my gosh, this is exactly what I’ve been looking for. That was a big part of wanting to get you on, especially when I started reading y’all’s report on the state of religion in young people. And you mentioned kind of relational authority. One of the things that I think I’ve noticed, just looking at ministry, just getting to see various churches, is to see how really the relational always kind of use these terms. I forget where I heard it from, but kind of positional equity verse relational equity and with young people, you have to lead with a really high relational. You have to build that relational capital to really begin to influence.
Mitch Tidwell:
And so was just super intrigued by the research that you guys had done and even some research I did as of recently, where I’ve heard that an increased skepticism from young people when it comes to institutions, which include the church. And I know that’s a big part of your research. Anyways, I just kind of want you to give us a broad stroke understanding of what do you see are some of the most significant trends among kind of young people today from this 13 to 25 age range?
Josh Packard:
Well, I think that there’s two primary findings that are really important for an audience yours especially to understand. And they’re not necessarily things that you would think might show up study about religious young people or young people’s religious lives, but they’re pretty critical and related. And on the one hand is something that gives us a peek into their sort of traditional religious markers like attendance and that kind of stuff, affiliation, do they check a box saying that they’re Christian Protestant, Christian Catholic, Muslim, Jewish, et cetera or not. And that’s really a story about trust. And it’s a story about institutional trust that’s been going on now for about 40, 45 years in this country. With each subsequent generation, we see a decline in institutional trust and that’s no different for, in fact, it’s just a continuation of that trend for young people.
Josh Packard:
When we asked young people, for example, to rank various social institutions on a scale of one to 10, from no trust to complete trust, the highest one is nonprofits, but that hardly matters because what really matters is the overall trend, and even the highest one, nonprofits gets a 5.2 on a 10 point scale. And it’s important. That’s a really crucial finding because if it were just the case that say, look young people’s religious affiliation is declining and their trust in religion and religious institutions is declining, but trust everywhere else was really high, then I think then we have a religious problem, so to speak, that churches needed to get together and do better.
Josh Packard:
But when you see, as a sociologist, when I see data like that, that suggests that trust is declining across multiple generations across all social institutions, well what that tells us is that the church doesn’t really have a church problem. Instead, it’s got a problem that’s going on in the world that it needs to respond to. And you can sit there all you want and say that they should trust us, that we are trustworthy and that may very well be true, but the reality is people don’t. And so I think it compels us to rethink, how are we doing things? And how can we overcome that? That’s insight number one.
Josh Packard:
The second thing that I think goes hand in hand with this, but is really sort of shocking is about the record levels of isolation and loneliness among young people. Social science has been using a scale put out by some researchers at UCLA in the late 1970s to track isolation and loneliness for 40 years now. And this is the first time that as we sit here today, this is the first time that the youngest generation surveyed has ever been at the top of that scale. It’s usually the oldest generation. And not only are they at the top of that scale, but their objective levels are higher than we’ve ever measured for many groups. Something like 30% of young people in our study told us that they have one or fewer trusted adult in their life they could turn to if they needed someone, if they needed to talk to somebody. One or fewer and that includes their parents. That’s a third of young people that have one or fewer adult in their life they can turn to, including their parents.
Josh Packard:
You start figuring, you start putting these puzzle pieces together and not every piece fits in the same puzzle. That’s what good research it’s supposed to do is figure out which ones go together. And I think that these are two that really go together. You start seeing people that distrust institutions, that are turning away from those traditional structures where you would sort of get a lot of those connections and you couple that with institutions, I think telling themselves a slightly incorrect story about why the decline is happening and what you’ve got is a bunch of well meaning adults who really want to connect with young people on the one hand, but not really knowing how to do it anymore and their old methods just aren’t quite as effective as they used to be. And young people by their token are telling us they really wish they had more trusted adults in their lives. And so at Springtime, we really want to stand in that gap and help people figure out how to bridge that.
Mitch Tidwell:
When you say the lack of trust or really kind of a positive view that young people have towards institutions, where does that come from? How is that?
Josh Packard:
Well look, so this is academics studying this question so you can imagine there are as many explanations as there are people thinking about it. I’m not going to say that it doesn’t matter at all because I think it does. It does probably or potentially matter, but the answer right now is that nobody’s quite sure. We can all point to specific things that happen in specific sectors. Watergate as one of the first and earliest major political scandals that was televised nonstop, that did not help in terms of trust in politics. But certainly that’s not the only thing. And televangelist scandals in the 1980s in the Catholic sector, these scandals that have been going on for the last couple more decades, those don’t help, but that’s not the only part of the story.
Josh Packard:
It’s all about us to say, I think there’s a lot of academics trying to sort that out and figure out where the decline in trust in institutions comes from, but the reality for people with boots on the ground trying to figure out how to engage with a young person is just to first wrap your head around that. That when you introduce yourself, especially that first impression, but even throughout a relationship, the more you lean into your institutional titles and affiliations and position, that means you’re going to have a less of an opening in the life of that person that you’re talking to, especially if they’re 13 to 25. That’s the critical thing to understand.
Mitch Tidwell:
Yeah. And you mentioned something, you said something that was a one liner, I wish I could have caught it. I was trying to write and I remembered about halfway through, but I forgot the rest, but you mentioned something about, there’s a problem that with young people, the way they view institutions, but rather than, it’s almost it’s a problem that the church needs to try to figure out how to fix. I forgot exactly how you worded it. You mentioned about how, oh go ahead.
Josh Packard:
Oh, I’m sorry. No, go ahead and finish. I didn’t mean to cut you off.
Mitch Tidwell:
Yeah, I was going to say that, but then you’re also saying, hey, the more we lean into institutional titles and names and things like that, the less probably we’ll be trusted. It sounds like everything just goes down to really kind of a deep, the more that we lean into being personal or relational is really probably kind of the way into the future, at least from what I’m understanding.
Josh Packard:
Yeah. And that was the focus of this, The State of Religion and Young People 2020, it was all about relational authority and this trying to help people, this is what our data are showing consistently is that the old model was like, the more you could be affiliated with an institution with a high reputation and a lot of standing that had been around for a long time, then that would sort of give you more authority or sort of more sway in the conversation. But young people are just telling us in so many different ways.
Josh Packard:
This isn’t one question on a survey, it’s a lot of different data points where they’re coming through again and again to say, “No, there’s not a place where I feel like I belong or accepted. There are people that make me feel that way. There’s not an institution that I ascribe to. There’s not an institution that I say ‘Yeah, that represents me, but there are people that I’ll affiliate with, that I will line up behind.'” And so we were able to take that and form this model of relational authority, because it’s not just sort of young people wanting adults to hang out with them. What they were wanting in terms of relationships was pretty specific.
Mitch Tidwell:
Well, how do you think that affects the church, especially coming up with youth in college? I don’t know, any ways that you think that practically affects the church or that you’ve seen it affect them?
Josh Packard:
Well, I think it’s, even if you’re sort of listening between the lines of what I was just saying, I think it calls for a pretty radical departure from the types of ministry that is not all of what we do, but is a lot of what we do. In that world where institutional trust is high and that world existed for a long time and we built, the work that youth ministers did as the field even emerged for the first time and developed certainly over the second part of the 20th century, it was pretty remarkable. From nothing built up these systems of let’s get as many young people connected to our institution in some way, so that we can then start to have conversations with them and do the work with them that we want to.
Josh Packard:
And because there was some, the larger the building you have ,the fancier title, the more degrees that you had, you were seen as an expert, you got to stand up on a podium and command some version of the room. And that went a long way back then with young people. And that was great. I don’t think it was wrong. I think it was the right thing for the right time, if that was your goal. But we live in a different time and it’s not the right thing anymore. Look, there are people listening to this right now and they’re doing those kinds of things and they’re still seeing some success, but increasingly it’s harder and harder to get those same results using those methods. And sometimes people are finding that they’re just not working at all and they know it.
Josh Packard:
If they’re doing this kind of work, with their boots on the ground, working with young people right now, they know, but they just don’t know what else to do. And when I go out and talk at conferences and stuff, I can see immediately who the people in the audience are who are doing youth ministry on the ground and who the leaders are because all the youth ministers in the audience are just nodding along at everything I’m saying. The presentation isn’t really for them, we’ve got data, but they’re like, “Yeah, I see this every day.” The relationships are the only thing that matters, but a lot of times their bosses are still holding them to these older models that worked once upon a time that they just don’t work anymore.
Mitch Tidwell:
Yeah. And I think I see that across, I know even in our state of Texas, I’ve seen among college ministries one of the things that’s been super effective is where a ministry is really more staff supported but student led and that students are really helping shape and form the ministry. And they’re also becoming the essentially the evangelist for the ministry and that you’re not centralizing the whole thing to a person or a minister, but you’re actually de-centralizing it where you have the students are actually the ones that are leading. And I’ve seen that become really an increasing way of effectively doing ministry and reaching more people. Because even I talked to, I was at a church the other day at consultation and there’s a couple just in the suburban church, actually, not far from where you grew up. And there was a couple that leads a ministry. And one of the leaders, who’s an adult says, “Hey, these students are just, they’re leaving, but they’re actually starting, they’re all joining a group that’s being led by another college student.”
Mitch Tidwell:
And I kind of thought to myself, kind of tapping into some of this is what they saw as the adult appointed kind of church leader and I think they just really wanted kind of more of a relational kind of expression of their Bible study in their group. And I’ve seen that increasingly happen. The more that students want to own and lead what they have and they probably just need that mentor and support along the way. I haven’t done the research, but I feel like from what I’ve seen, you’re really onto something in all this obviously.
Mitch Tidwell:
Well Josh, what do you think, is there anything in particular that you’re seeing specifically? I know you’ve worked with college students as a professor, but anything specifically that you see that would be important for our listeners?
Josh Packard:
Well, probably the most heartbreaking thing here is when we’re talking about that loneliness and isolation that, which I know is super counterintuitive because we think of young people, we think of them as like hyper connected, on devices all the time. And I think this is where our qualitative research is really able to help us. The interview was really able to help us unpack a lot of this because we would see these results from surveys where they would say like, “Oh, I’m really lonely. I’m really isolated. I don’t have that many meaningful interactions on a given day.” But I think probably most people hearing those, we were the same when we first saw those numbers, we were like, how could this possibly be the case? And so thankfully we had the strong interview component built in and we were able to dig into that a little bit and understand that while they are very networked, social media has only been around for maybe 10 years in a really robust way on mobile devices and that kind of stuff.
Josh Packard:
We really haven’t developed very good social norms about how to have deep, meaningful relationships online that are durable and mimic real life friendships. And certainly not cross-generational, that’s definitely not happening. Those are just sort of emerging. And so when we talked in interviews, young people would tell us over and over again, “Yeah, I have the social networks, but they’re not doing the same thing as real life friendships are.” And so when you break down the loneliness data by age, you asked specifically about those sort of college age students well, we asked them, “Do you agree with the statement, I feel completely alone. And we see a 15% jump when we go from 13 to 17 year olds who answer that question about 24% of them, 25% of them say that they feel completely alone. They agree with that statement. Well, it’s 40% of 18 to 25 year olds.
Mitch Tidwell:
Wow.
Josh Packard:
Who agree with that statement. And in some ways, I think that when you really start thinking about what the lives of a lot of those young people look like, you can begin to understand this. A lot of people, if not the majority or all are outside of their parents’ home, they’re not being sort of required to go to high school every day where they might run into somebody. A lot of those 18 to 25 year olds are on college campuses where I’ve seen this in my own work as a professor, increasingly you can just decide not to interact with anybody.
Josh Packard:
I’ll tell you a really quick anecdote about this research lab that I run at the university where I’m finishing up my last semester. We had all the campus, not all, all a bunch of the campus ministry groups came to us and said, “Hey, we’d like to do just a quick survey, the students at the school and their faith lives.” We said, “Okay.” We put the questions together for them. It’s what we do in that lab.
Josh Packard:
And one of the questions was, “How many meaningful interactions do you have on a daily basis?” And we defined that out, it’s more than just asking about how the weather was. And then, so I wrote out the first category as zero to five and then six to 10 and on and on. And my students who work in the lab with me, they said, “No, no, no. The first category is zero. The second category is one and the third category then can be two to five and then we can go up there.” And I said, “Y’all, that’s nuts. This is the residential campus. People are living in dorms. People, there’s not going to be any meaningful group of people that has zero or one interaction on a daily basis.”
Josh Packard:
And they were right. It was the top two categories were zero or less than three. That’s one or two. On campus, coming to class, going to dining halls and what they told me was that students would, which I didn’t see because in a professor you’re in the classroom, you don’t necessarily see this. You have students would live in a dorm room sometimes by themselves, they would go to class and not talk to anybody. They’d go to the dining hall, get their food to go and go back to their room. And that is just so different than, I don’t even think that was possible when I was in college. And it was a while ago, late 1990s, but still, I think that is just a dramatically different understanding of the world that a lot of us who are in leadership positions remember from when we were that age. It’s the world has changed pretty dramatically.
Mitch Tidwell:
Wow. Man that’s fascinating information. And I can only go speculate it, some of that. I know just what I’ve just researched online, just through various aspects, I feel like I’ve noticed among young people there have, I don’t know, Josh, do you think is there not an ability to connect with people on a deeper level, just not having the understanding how to do that? Any thoughts on that?
Josh Packard:
Well, as a sociologist, I can tell you, even though we didn’t collect this data, I can just tell you that’s what growing up is. That’s a big part of what we’ve always, adolescence has always been about figuring out how to interact with the world. And so that’s not new, that’s always been a part of it. I think what’s sort of new or why we feel that tension more right now is because now young people are doing that largely disconnected from the guides, the adults, the institutions that used to do that socialization work for them or with them. And so it feels way more acute. I don’t think it’s because this generation is somehow less capable than any other generation. It’s just, what do you do when you don’t have those traditional structures in place? And those structures aren’t sort of being really innovative to come out and meet you? I think there’s a danger that we’re losing it for sure.
Mitch Tidwell:
Well Josh, what do you think are, how should as a church, what’s the response from leaders in this? I know that one of the big part of your research was a relational authority. Can you kind of speak into that piece on how maybe what’s the best way for collegiate leaders and any other leaders that are listed in how to respond to something like this?
Josh Packard:
Sure. Yeah. Relational authority is made up of five elements. At Springtide we say all the time that we don’t want to be interesting, we want to be useful. We gear of our research towards what can actually be done about something. And the framework that young people laid out for us through a series of questions, the framework that emerged was about listening, transparency, integrity, care and expertise. It’s not that young people want you to be their friend. They told us that over and over again. The expertise part does matter, but the expertise part doesn’t matter unless you’re also doing the listening, transparency, integrity and care. It’s really about putting those five elements together. When we’re able to do that, I think positively, we see trust levels go up to 90% as opposed to a five out of 10. We see trust levels for individuals who exhibit those characteristics go sort of through the roof.
Josh Packard:
But look, I don’t think this is easy. There’s a few things that we say over and over again. Number one, I don’t think that youth ministers, campus ministers, young adult ministries, they can’t do what they’re currently doing and do this. There’s just, I’ve never heard of a person in ministry who’s not working hard enough or very rarely. You’re going to have to give up some stuff and so I think that’s part of it. Secondly, just as we got really innovative in the eighties and nineties, especially with program based ministry, I think we’re going to have to get that innovative about relationship based ministry. And thankfully, the church has a long history of being really innovative about the way that it delivers ministry.
Josh Packard:
And this is, I think it’s just the issue here is understanding that a change is needed. And once that happens, once people wrap their head around it, I’m pretty confident that we’re going to see an explosion of what used to pass for just the most the cutting edge version of youth ministry when I was a kid or maybe a little bit before that, the lock in on a Friday night. Well, what’s the relationship version of that? Somebody going to come up with something and you’re going to track it and you’re going to find ways to measure the impact. And that’s what’s really required.
Mitch Tidwell:
Josh, have you seen anyone do this really well?
Josh Packard:
Yeah, mostly though it’s places that I’ve heard of so far are places that are a little bit decoupled from the institution. A lot of para-church ministries, a lot of campus ministries are actually in, I think good positions to do this because with campus ministries sometimes, I know a lot of your audience here is a campus ministry but through a congregation, but still, I think you might not be as resourced as you’d like, but a lot of times you get a little bit more rope because you can be sort of off. Physically away from the building sometimes. And so we’ve, we’ve been hearing some really compelling versions of doing relationship based ministry from those folks. I’ll give you just on the tracking front, because I know that’s a key thing is how do we measure this? People are going to ask our numbers, but if you’re telling me I have to do relationship, I can’t just report back numbers.
Josh Packard:
We’ve got people that are tracking every interaction with every young person that they have and they’re being intentional about those interactions and conversations to move them towards a particular goal in terms of their relationship with God or baptism or whatever the outcome is that they want. They just got them all in a spreadsheet. And then they’re tracking every conversation every day, always trying to push it forward, getting good at understanding when to back off and when to lean in. And I think that’s just a remarkable way of approaching this. We’ve heard stories of people that have completely flipped their campus ministry model, where it used to be this, we’re going to throw this big party at the beginning of the year and invite everybody to it and that’s what we’re going to basically learn 75% of the names that we’re going to know for that year.
Josh Packard:
And instead, what they’ve done is they flipped this into, we’re going to have an end of the semester celebration and their goal is that everybody they invite to that end of the semester celebration, it should feel like coming home as opposed to coming to a party. Even though they wouldn’t have had a gathering before then, they want to know them so well and I’ve introduced them in one on ones and two on one relationships to other people that by the time they all get together, they want it to feel like a homecoming, not like walking into what can be terrifying for a lot of young people and ridden with anxiety, a giant party. And they’ve had lots of success with that model. Spending a lot more time up on the upfront, in the relationship side.
Josh Packard:
I think the stuffs out there. There’s a lot of people doing digital stuff in COVID. Playing video games with kids. Young adult ministers who never wanted to play Fortnite who got really good at Fortnite because that’s where young people are hanging out and you can talk, you can interact, you can learn about them. There’s innovative ways out there doing this.
Mitch Tidwell:
Yeah, and I think it’s been a struggle. One of the struggles with a lot of churches is that measurement piece of what really matters and for a long time, and obviously still today, those have been quantitative. And really a lot of this relational side is really the qualitative on the quality of relationships and how do people really feel in the ministry. And I know that’s kind of a hard thing for churches to put their finger on. And that’s always something that’s a little bit more difficult to sell to any kind of supervisor or boss you have, but it really does make a difference just being involved in collegiate ministry.
Mitch Tidwell:
Me personally, my philosophy of disciple making is to be as high invitation, high challenge, want to be very relational and then challenge, because I think that invitation kind of gives you that equity you need to challenge somebody, but you have to start with high invitation on inviting someone into your life and being, I think all those things that you mentioned of listening, of transparent, of having integrity and care and expertise in what you’re doing. And I see how that really does make a difference. I think about even my own college minister that how much he needs to probably multiply himself. He’s such a good minister, relational minister. If we could have more of those, we could probably reach more people. That’s really good Josh, do you have something to say?
Josh Packard:
Oh no, I was just going to concur. I think that part of it is that we need more of those, but also part of it is that we need better systems. The quantitative stuff does matter. And I think we can figure out how to track relationships in the same way that we used to measure attendance. First of all, the first thing we need to do though, you’re right, is to get rid of this idea that attendance mean commitment because it doesn’t. It might’ve once, but we have pretty definitive evidence in our research to show that attendance does not mean commitment. We need to get rid of that idea, but we can with a little bit of work and understanding, we can start to measure and quantify and track relationship building, even transformational relationship building. We don’t have to turn these all into commodities and be transactional about this, but we can be deliberate about what we’re doing.
Mitch Tidwell:
That’s good. Well Josh, what do you think we see down the road 10 to 15 years from this generation? I guess maybe, I don’t know. Could you paint a picture of if things don’t change, what do you think is that the picture 10 to 15 years down the road here?
Josh Packard:
Well, if things don’t change, I think the future is pretty clear, it’s we don’t see any reason, we don’t see any data on the horizon. I think at one point there was sort of a narrative out there about millennials that, okay, I would hear some religious leaders say, “We tried, it didn’t work. It looks like we might lose this generation and we’re going to get to work on the next one. And we’re going to get them back.” Not that anybody was, even the people who said it, they weren’t happy about it. They were just trying to come to terms with what they were seeing in the trends. I don’t think that’s true. We don’t see anything to indicate that there’s a floor on this. Increasingly in fact, what we’re seeing is the people who left organized religion, your older millennials and younger gen X, now they’re raising kids and they’re also not taking them to church as you can expect.
Josh Packard:
I don’t see any particular reason why this couldn’t, this trend will continue for the next 10 or 15 years or could continue. There’s not a natural break on it in other words. That being said, 90% of the country still believes in God, a high level of people still pray on a regular basis. There’s really high levels of belief in this country. And so I don’t actually, even though that could happen over the next 15 years, given that there are so many people, even young people who are really open to and interested in religious conversations and that we have a very strong tendency in the Christian Church, in America towards responding to challenges with innovation.
Josh Packard:
I actually tend to think that it’s more likely that the church is going to go through a pretty big period of innovation. I don’t mean innovation on core values. I mean innovation on modes of delivery. How we do the work that we do, not what work we do. And that’s where if I had to put money down, I’d put money down on that happening. But it has to happen. I don’t think it’s just going to happen because, people will have to do that work.
Mitch Tidwell:
Yeah. I really liked what you said about, because I think there is a lot of churches, it’s the idea that, well, if they’re going to leaving college, once they started having a family, having kids, they’ll probably make their way back. But that’s not something we can bank on in the future. And so I think probably some of these next generation ministries, as far as got to kind of figure that out because yeah, we just can’t can’t bank on it. Well, that’s really good. Well Josh, if people want to kind of get a hold of you or if they want to see what you do, learn more about Springtide, what’s the best way to reach you or to see about your ministry or your institution?
Josh Packard:
Yeah. I am personally, you can find me on Twitter @drjoshpackard, D-R Josh Packard, and you can find all Springtide’s work at springtideresearch.org. We have some stuff that we’ve been able to get some very generous donations for a free, like The State of Religion and Young People, it’s in print I think it’s $10, but in digital it’s free. And then we’ve got some other reports out there about longing. Coming up the end of May we’ll have a study called Work Life, helping young people find meaning at work and choose work that is meaningful, fulfills their religious and spiritual values. We’ve constantly got stuff coming out. The best way to stay informed is to sign up for our newsletter, comes out twice a month, full of insights and research even before it comes out in the actual written reports.
Mitch Tidwell:
That’s awesome. And it’s also, it’s super affordable, it’s free and then you can buy the paperback for 10 bucks. You can’t beat that. That’s good stuff.
Josh Packard:
That’s right.
Mitch Tidwell:
Well Josh, well thanks for being on. And this has all been really good. I’d love to even bring you on again at some point, maybe even talk about this even a little bit deeper, but thanks so much for being gracious with your time and sharing your insights with our audience.
Josh Packard:
Yeah. You bet. Thank you.
Mitch Tidwell:
All right. Thanks Josh.
Mitch Tidwell:
Well, friends, thank you for listening to the Roundup Podcast today. It has been a joy to get to record with Josh and just really fascinating. There’s so much there. I wish we could keep going. And we may do that sometime. But thanks for joining us today. Don’t forget, follow us on social media @sbtccollegiate, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. And we have a Facebook group called Roundup Network. You want to jump in there, we have hundreds of college, church based collegiate leaders all across Texas and even the nation in there to kind of idea share, collaborate, all those things. Feel free to like, rate and review and subscribe to our podcast. We’d love to make sure you get those alerts when we have new podcasts. Well thanks for joining us today and we will see you next time.
