by Kiara Jorgenson
A year-and-a half into our research together, something shifted. Addie Flesch and Paavo Rundman, both St. Olaf College students and lifelong Lutherans, bring a depth of theological commitment to climate justice that surpasses that of many adults I know. For two-and-a-half years, they joined me in assessing the staying power of the ELCA’s 1993 Social Statement on Creation Care from a young-adult perspective, digging through archives and climate reports, visiting congregations and leading their peers in discussion. Our work will soon result in a book with Fortress Press, and we’re hopeful it will foster intergenerational conversation and action on environmental problems and possibilities.
But a year-and-a-half into our research together, something shifted. I remember that Monday afternoon meeting well. The day before Addie and Paavo had presented their research at a nearby Lutheran church, where they also offered a pragmatic take on Christian hope in light of climate change.[1] To their disappointment, the insights they shared were met with suspicion. They weren’t taken seriously, nor was the claim they were making—that hope must be troubled in ways. To my surprise, what they brought to our debrief meeting wasn’t anger, but instead a deep weariness. They felt that no matter where they turned—classrooms, social media, youth gatherings, or, in this case, conversations with well-intentioned elders—the refrain was always the same. Things are dire. Catastrophic even. Statistics get recited, and urgency underscored. And then predictably the dialogue quickly dries up or loops back to the same grim claims.
What my students were longing for was not more ominous facts, but real companionship in learning how to shoulder the long, hard work ahead. Addie and Paavo had been welcomed into spaces like that congregational forum, placed on panels, and consulted for task forces. But neither of them experienced these forms of inclusion as actual partnership. And even partnership, they were learning, rarely leads to accompaniment.
I began this collaboration with Addie and Paavo with the explicit aim of mentoring them toward a thicker, more robust sense of hope. But that Monday conversation and my months working alongside them since have given me a more vivid understanding of hope’s demands and a keener awareness of how the church might better meet the needs of young adults. What I share here is an effort to pass along what I take to be their holy insights.
When visiting congregations, Addie and Paavo regularly reminded their 50 yrs.+ audiences how “once-in-a-century” weather events became routine during their childhoods. The crises that the ELCA’s 1993 Social Statement on Creation Care named as concerns for “children and children’s children” are not abstract futures for these two.[2] Calamity is just the everyday weather of their everyday lives. What makes their vantage significant, therefore, isn’t simply that they are young or worried. It’s the both/and they carry. Addie and Paavo describe their generation as experiencing a unique emotional dissonance: overwhelming helplessness and a deep sense of responsibility simultaneously. This isn’t apathy, although plenty of adults they’ve interacted with have been quick to point out their generation’s absence at recent No-Kings rallies (with a tenor of accusation rather than curiosity, I might note). As Addie shared with me this past fall, it’s like being handed a task whose scale exceeds any available tool, and then being told to get to work. The result can be what we in environmental studies call “eco-anxiety,” a chronic, diffuse dread about ecological collapse that compounds every other uncertainty in a young person’s life.[3] Left unaddressed, eco-anxiety can petrify into paralysis. This may look like apathy from the outside, but is in fact the product of helplessness when something feels both total and unresolvable. The effects of eco-anxiety are now widely known, and they’re impacting young adults the most.
Pastors and congregational leaders would do well to understand the difference between these. A young adult who has gone quiet on creation care is not necessarily indifferent. They may simply be exhausted. They may have burned through one cycle of frenetic activism and found themselves empty at the other end. They may have been included in enough conversations about the problem to last a lifetime, without ever being invited into relationships that would help sustain them.
When Addie and Paavo described their exhaustion at that November adult forum on climate change, they weren’t denying the seriousness of our ecological problems. They knew their facts. They had felt the heat—literally, in Paavo’s case, during the 2024 ELCA Youth and Young Adult Gathering in New Orleans, where he suffered heat exhaustion on the second-warmest day ever recorded there. What they were rejecting was something subtler; namely, the assumption that citing the problem, repeatedly and with increasing urgency, constitutes faithful engagement with it. It does not. And the church, of all institutions, should know better.
I can’t think of any expression of Christian theology, past or present, that suggests naming suffering makes it bearable. Don’t get me wrong, calling a thing what it is is crucial. For example, our liturgies of confession and forgiveness do this good work by inviting us to tell the truth about the impact of our sin. But as confession is followed by the proclamation of forgiveness in our faith tradition, so recognition of suffering must be followed by a reminder of God’s immanent presence amid it. What Addie and Paavo were bumping up against, in congregation after congregation, was a church so fixated on diagnosis, and perhaps therefore anxious in its despair, that it could not still long enough for grief to do its work.
The consequences of rushing this process are not trivial. When the only available response to eco-anxiety is more information about how bad things are, followed by an urgent call to individual action, the cycle is textbook. Motivation. Effort. Burnout. Cynicism. Addie and Paavo are familiar with this cycle, and the data suggest most young adults in their communities are too. Social media activism, lifestyle change campaigns, petition signing—none of these are wrong.
However, on their own, they don’t provide what any of us need to sustain a lifetime of hoping against hope. What this “climate generation” needs and the church is uniquely equipped to offer is something different. It’s a community that can hold grief without being destroyed by it, and that can speak of hope without pretending the grief away. For a generation navigating eco-anxiety, these theological resources are ingredients for a thriving life amid chaos. The question is whether our church will offer them as such, and whether our communities of faith will step into the special role we must play in this new planetary era.
So, what does hope require in practice? What are hope’s companions? Here’s what I’ve learned from Addie and Paavo.
Make space for grief before reaching for action.
Many young adults lack spaces where grief can be recognized without attempts to solve or manage it. In their writing and speaking, Addie and Paavo have asked our church to return to its rich traditions of pathos and invite young adults to dwell in their grief and reckon with their pain. In practice, this could look like a sermon series that weaves lament into proclamation. It could mean starting a congregational conversation with hard questions instead of an action-points checklist. It most certainly requires that those in pastoral leadership avoid gift-wrapping the hard stuff with an unfounded optimism. The grief can be catalytic and generative.
Offer binocular vision
Addie and Paavo draw on the work of ecotheologian Panu Pihkala to describe what they call “binocular vision,” or the ability to see loss and possibility simultaneously, without letting one obscure the other. This is harder than it sounds. The temptation, in the face of bad news, is to resolve the tension in one direction or the other. But neither serves young adults well, nor does either reflect the full witness of Christian faith. Our scriptures are replete with stories of people who mourned what was lost while earnestly looking for God in what comes next. Preachers and teachers who hold this binocular tension and exhort communities to faithfully inhabit ambiguity and uncertainty offer young adults a way forward. This is especially so when pursued through intimate relationships of accompaniment.
Situate the present crisis in a longer, larger story.
In their writing, one of the most astute moves Addie and Paavo make is resisting treating our current ecological problems as unprecedented. They point out communities who have endured the ends of worlds before. Theirs are the stories of displaced peoples, destroyed habitats and extinguished ways of life. And in all of these examples, the witness of Christian faith is a God who accompanies the oppressed and is present in beginnings and ends. This perspective doesn’t downplay our very real environmental challenges, but it does make hope more imaginable. We can see ourselves in the stories of others. So, when congregations help young adults connect their own grief to that of the biblical Israelites in exile, for example, or to neighboring Indigenous communities who lost their lands and remain dispossessed, resurrection takes on new meaning.[4] In my experience, young adults are utterly captive to these narratives. When biblical study is grounded in truth-telling, particularly regarding Christianity’s problematic tango with settler-colonialism, it can be a wellspring for action and spiritual endurance.
Build intergenerational relationships of accompaniment.
This is perhaps the most pointed challenge Addie and Paavo offer me. Young adults, they’ve said, are often tokenized in church discussions and committees. They may be present but rarely have genuine agency, and are almost never mentored into their roles. Paavo in particular has helped me see how older generations’ guilt and related sense of urgency frequently drive them to focus on short-term solutions. In his home denomination, this typically looks like passing resolutions and launching initiatives, whereas what he and his peers most value is the long-lasting, less visible work of accompaniment. Mentorship through presence.
Addie and Paavo haven’t asked for a seat at the table. As a part of the climate generation, they’ve simply inherited these seats. Rather than a bigger platform, what they desire is elders who, by example, demonstrate how to sustain a lifetime of faithful work without burning out or giving up. This kind of mentorship is not a program or a quarterly agenda item, although it can certainly grow out of intentional programming and warrants regular inclusion in the meeting minutes of church councils. There is great value in having a mentor who can say, “I may not have all the answers, but I will not leave you to face this alone.” Congregations that take this form of accompaniment seriously will find, as I did, that the learning runs in both directions.
Build belonging by attending to the local.
Eco-anxiety feeds on a sense of boundlessness. When our ecological challenges are framed as entirely dispersive and responsibility global in scope, it’s easy for any of us to hamster-wheel in the realm of theory. It’s very possible to care deeply and do little to nothing. One of the most practical gifts a congregation can give young adults, therefore, is vision for what is within grasp. This isn’t to say that local action is enough to solve our wicked problems, but it helps young people understand the tremendous benefits of showing up. And for a generation that reports feeling increasingly socially isolated, this is a win-win.
For the church, this requires helping people identify what they can do as individuals, as a congregation, and as part of a wider community. It looks like connecting them with local organizations already at work. It means finding a middle ground between the false comfort of “all will work out” and the overwhelming “the whole system must change.” Both leave people adrift. And GenZ and GenAlpha won’t buy either anyway. When a congregation works to discern what it can and cannot do and discovers pathways together, young adults are given what they say they need most—a place to start and a community to call upon.[5]
A Word to Pastors and Congregational Leaders
In its own way, the collaboration Addie, Paavo, and I shared was a living example of this. They were never just students passing through my classroom. They became partners who reshaped my understanding of hope, church and what it means to work faithfully across generations. This experience has left me with some thoughts for pastors and congregational leaders, and I’ll conclude by sharing those.
First, know that your congregation is already filled with young adults carrying this burden. They may not call it eco-anxiety. They may never mention it to you. But the grief is present, in their quiet retreat from creation-care conversations, in the fatigue that follows each wave of activism, or in the sense that most adults focus on problems over people. You don’t need a new program to meet young adults where they are, but you may need a different kind of pastoral attentiveness. Scratch, and just below the surface you’ll encounter pain. How will you move beyond inclusion toward accompaniment and really listen?
The second is harder. It requires honesty about what the church has often failed to provide. Many of our churches have responded to our environmental decline the way anxious institutions tend to respond to hard things: by forming committees, deliberating, issuing statements and passing resolutions. These moves matter; but what I’m hearing from young people like Addie and Paavo is also a need for an ecclesial commitment to connect this present struggle to a larger story and to provide models for the road ahead.
At its best, the church offers a compelling way to make meaning in these tumultuous times. Not by outcomes, but by faithfulness. Not by what is achieved in one lifetime or generation, but by what is planted for the next. What I’m taking from my years of collaboration with Addie and Paavo is a growing trust that hope can come to us and sustain us through the grief of loss and the anxiety of overwhelm when we forge meaningful relationships of accompaniment that allow us to see things as they are while yet imagining what can be.
Kiara Jorgenson is the Martin E. Marty Chair in Religion and the Academy, Associate Professor of Religion and Environmental Studies, and Department Chair of Environmental Studies at St. Olaf College, Northfield, MN.
[1] Addie Flesch and Paavo Rundman, “Seeds of Change: How Young Adults in the ELCA are Cultivating Hope Amidst Eco-Anxiety,” Word & World 45, no. 2 (Spring 2025): 233–245.
[2] Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, “Caring for Creation: Vision, Hope, and Justice” (social statement adopted by the ELCA Churchwide Assembly, 1993), https://www.elca.org/faith/faith-and-society/social-statements/caring-for-creation .
[3] Panu Pihkala, “Eco-Anxiety, Tragedy, and Hope: Psychological and Spiritual Dimensions of Climate Change,” Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 53, no. 2 (2018): 545–569.
[4] Steve Charleston, We Survived the End of the World: Lessons from Native America on Apocalypse and Hope. Minneapolis: Broadleaf Books, 2023.
[5] Britt Wray, Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis. Toronto: Knopf Publishing, 2022.
