PODCAST | Empowering Gen Z Through Discipleship (feat. Tami Peterson)

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Transcript:

Christa Neidig:
Welcome to the Vanderbloemen Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Christa Neidig, Manager of Marketing and Business Development here at Vanderbloemen. In today's podcast, I get to talk with Tami Peterson. She's the founder and the CEO of Life Architects, a career consulting group that partners with students, parents, schools, and faith-based organizations to design pathways to meaningful work and lifelong vocational fulfillment. In this conversation, Tami discusses the importance of discipleship for Generation Z. She shares practical tips on how to empower and help the younger generation through the challenges that they face on a daily basis. We hope you enjoy this conversation.
Hey everyone. Welcome back to the podcast today. I'm so excited because I have Tami Peterson with Life Architects. Hi Tami.

Tami Peterson:
Hi Christa. How are you?

Christa Neidig:
I'm so good. I'm excited to do this podcast because Tami is also in Texas, which means we're on the same time zone. So scheduling was nice and easy.

Tami Peterson:
Yeah, it's always exciting to be in the same time zone because it's not early in the morning or something.

Christa Neidig:
And I feel like we can bond over Texas things, which is fun.

Tami Peterson:
That's right. That's exactly right.

Christa Neidig:
Well, Tami, for those who haven't heard of you yet, why don't you go ahead and tell them a little bit about what it is you do and your background? And then I want them to hear all about the amazing work you do at Life Architects.

Tami Peterson:
Thank you. I started in the last century, it seems like a long time ago, in Christian education and education in the church. I worked as a teacher and I worked as a guidance counselor. And I ended up being the director of guidance at a classical Christian school in the Dallas Fort Worth area. One of the things that I discovered was in all the spaces that I worked in, I didn't have enough time to talk about the idea that I now talk about all the time, which is vocational discipleship.
So having led in the Christian school space and also in the church space, I really wanted to launch out on my own in 2012 and create a company which is called Life Architects, and it's a coaching and consulting company. I like to say I'm a thought partner with people. So a lot of the conversations I have on a daily basis are just around what you're thinking about. How do you work with the next generation? What do you need? What are the things that would make your work with them more effective, more efficient? I like to say we think about people work as kind of inefficient work because people work is growth and that takes a lot of nurturing. But the paperwork and things that we do with them that help set up the work we do with young people can be very efficient. We can do some things that we get information pretty quickly so we can sit and listen and talk and be with them in space.

Christa Neidig:
That's so great. And you said you've been doing this since 2012, so you've seen a lot of things and throughout that, you kind of had this whole thing we like to call Covid in the middle of that.

Tami Peterson:
Absolutely.

Christa Neidig:
It changed the work that you do.

Tami Peterson:
Yes. It's interesting, there's a lot of things about Covid that changed for the better. I'm maybe the minority, but part of what happened in Covid is we just became aware that we are human and just-in-time delivery of everything is not a human trait. So I think many of our jobs were just-in-time delivery. You think about how we think about the Amazon drivers, they have to go fast and get it done and not take breaks. I mean, it's just inhuman really some of the ways we think about work. So I think Covid really helped us understand that. We live in a world where being a human is an important thing and acknowledging our humanness, which means taking a break and rest and Sabbath and all the things that we think about as Christians when we think about rest. It becomes an important part of the workplace.
Now, just because we became aware of it doesn't mean that we changed the workplace overnight. And we see that with the pushback with the next generations. The millennials and Gen Zers out there are just like, "We are human. You need to treat us like humans, please." So I think we're getting some good information for them since Covid with understanding what real human needs are in the workplace, how we work together intergenerationally, but also just what does it mean to be a human and do work? Which are two different things.

Christa Neidig:
That's so great. And you work really closely with a lot of high school students, college students, and young adults. What are just some of the things that you're seeing right now? Earlier before we started recording, you and I were talking about how education seemed pretty stagnant for a while, and then Covid happened, and then education just changed so much.

Tami Peterson:
I think it is what I was just talking about. The workers in education became aware that they were spending lots of time after school in the evening, grading papers, writing things, doing things, and were neglecting some important areas of their life. I do think it's on the worker side, but then it's also on the student side. Gen Z is marked by two important dates. The first birthdate in their generation is in 1996, which is when the internet became ubiquitous and the end date of their generation is 2012, which is when the smartphone became ubiquitous. So if you think about their generation as bracketed on either end by technology, you have a really good picture of what is happening with them. Technology has disrupted what we would call the natural or normal or traditional, you can use all those words, way of thinking about childhood. And you being a millennial, you had a childhood with no technology or very little. And then as you got older, it kind of came into play. I think Facebook was 2008, so that was part of your childhood, I'm sure.

Christa Neidig:
I feel like I tethered the line. I like to say a geriatric gen Zer because I'm right on the cusp. So close, but I kind of feel like I feel both of them. And someone told me one time they're like, "Christa, you're really a grandmother just trapped in a Gen Z body." I really don't belong in any of these. But I do get that. I feel like I can relate to growing up when I was younger and you didn't have that and we had, I remember dial up internet. The noise ingrained in my brain.

Tami Peterson:
Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

Christa Neidig:
Wifi and all the other things. So interesting.

Tami Peterson:
Yeah, and it was interesting watching it because students back in that day couldn't wait to get home. I remember we might have had a game in the school that the kids could play when they went to computer lab, which is so funny to even talk about now. It's like, "Oh yeah. We had computer labs." What a strange thing.

Christa Neidig:
Oh yeah.

Tami Peterson:
Yeah. And they would go and play... Oh, there's all sorts of... Oregon Trail of course is the classic. Many kids played dying of dysentery and things. Kind of funny. And then all the Mario games and everything came out in that generation's childhood. But now Gen Z has every piece of information they could ever want that actually has ever been around that we know of at their fingertips.

Christa Neidig:
Insane.

Tami Peterson:
So trying to figure out what does it mean to disciple a child when they can have access to anything they want? And I think it's a daunting task for parents.

Christa Neidig:
Sounds tough. It sounds really tough.

Tami Peterson:
Yeah. And put on top of that, that they're struggling themselves with what does having a smartphone in their pocket mean as a parent? And the balance of thinking about what they need, thinking about what their children need and not very many communal spaces. They spend their day at work, the students spend their day at school, and yet they're connected, oftentimes texting back and forth throughout the day. So they don't really have news to tell people when they get home. Everything is in real time. So even if they eat a meal together when they get home, there's not much more to say. We've created sort of an untenable society for humans to live in because we kind of know everything, but we don't really know what we really want to know.

Christa Neidig:
Yeah. It's funny you say that. We went on a trip last week and I did a little Facebook post and Instagram. I put pictures up and one of my husband's good buddies called him. And Andrew was so excited to tell him about the trip and they were like, "Oh yeah, I saw all the pictures. Oh, I saw y'all did this. Oh, I saw y'all did that." And he was like, "Well, you already know what I did. I guess I can't tell you about it now."

Tami Peterson:
Yeah. And it's amazing to me because I have friends all over the world just from graduate school and everything. We very rarely have new things to say about what's happening in our life because so much of it is on the internet. I actually put a discipline in place recently because I studied gluttony over Lent, which is a great thing to think about.

Christa Neidig:
That's a good time to study though.

Tami Peterson:
It is. But I just put in place, I don't get on social media, but Saturday morning I look at it. On Saturday morning for business, but also for my friends. So that has helped me stay focused during the week. These kind of practices are really important for young people to start thinking about how can we put boundaries around things that are really intruding into real life? But it's a hard sell. Boy, it's a hard sell because it's so exciting to have everything out there. Yet when we talk to young people and we've seen trending like this, Barna does some great studies on the trends of what we're seeing, but we're seeing a lot of depression.
When you actually talk to students, they're like, "Yeah, I just compare my life to what I'm seeing on Instagram or what I'm seeing on Facebook, and I don't have that kind of life." And if people really knew who I was, they wouldn't like me. So even if they're putting things out there that look happy, some of them are just kind of keeping that darkness at bay. It's because they're not really communicating in person and being embodied together. And everybody's concerned that if they do something wrong, it's going to be splashed on social media and it's going to ruin their chances for everything.

Christa Neidig:
Yeah. There's an underlying fear that I think comes with that of what people think, what would happen.

Tami Peterson:
Yeah. Especially with the difficulty with college admissions. That's the other thing is the warnings come out of, "You need to be careful on your social media because colleges will rescind their acceptance to you." So they're just feeling very monitored. I mean, people in my generation, we've had conversations where it's like, "I'm so glad we didn't have social media back then because we'd be in trouble or embarrassed." All sorts of words come out. We weren't doing anything, we were just immature. But if those things came out in video form, it's amazing how difficult it would've been as a middle schooler especially. Some of the moments that I can remember in my own memory that I just made a mistake or said something stupid or tripped and fell, dropped something, got stuff all over me.

Christa Neidig:
Yep.

Tami Peterson:
Yeah, it's a difficult thing.

Christa Neidig:
Something else we talked about before starting the recording was another change from your generations on down to younger generations was kind of how we used to have more gathering. We used to be physically together more, and now we're so connected virtually and what we're missing with that. Would you mind just explaining more about that?

Tami Peterson:
Yes. One of the trending that's interesting is, and sociologists have been tracking this in America for a while, is we really don't have many rites of passage anymore. Certain groups have rites of passage, quinceanera or bar mitzvah and bat mitzvahs, but as a society as a whole, it's sort of like graduation is it. So we're connected to our school. But what that does is there are very few opportunities for intergenerational conversations and even with college students and high school students just being in a space that's sort of communal with their peers where it's not an educational event or a church service. And if you think about weddings, it's an interesting thing. It was for a long time that a wedding would be the gathering of all the people who loved this couple. So all the older people, all the people that were their age, and all the younger people. But now we have destination weddings and limited guest lists because they've become so expensive.
And it becomes this moment where a young couple just starting out is feeding a whole group of people who don't need food, first of all. We're just going to start with that. And they don't really do anything except celebrate this moment in time. A wedding where we have intergenerational conversation is a blessing and sort of a strangeness. I mean, I've been to many weddings where it's like this group of people is so strange, but it's so wonderful to have people talking about the life that they've seen you grow up. And of course they love sharing moments of embarrassment from when you were five or whatever. And that's all good. It's all good fun. But we don't have many of those moments.
Even if you think about the average church in America that doesn't have Sunday school for adults. The adults come for a church and the students go to Sunday school and then they leave. There's no coffee time in between. There's no kids running around while you're trying to have a conversation with someone else. Or if there is, it's just for a few minutes. You're not spending an hour together on Sunday morning as a community where everybody kind of knows each other. I'm not longing for days gone by. I'm just thinking that we don't have spaces like that at all. Where is that? Very rarely do we have a gathering where we are enjoying each other's company intergenerationally.
I feel that a lot of times, particularly with college students. College students, they're taken out of their community, which is minimal at best, and put into a community where everybody is their age and it's so exciting. Everybody's their age. They do things with them. It's so much fun and they get hyped up about sports and they have all the school spirit and just everything. They love it. They talk about it very fondly. Then they leave that, and of course we have the hashtag adulting, which really is just doing things that you're required to do to live.

Christa Neidig:
living.

Tami Peterson:
Yes. To live as a human, your own laundry, feeding yourself. I have conversations with young people who are like, "Ugh, meal prep. I can't imagine. I have to spend three hours meal prepping." I'm like, "You know you can just cook on the day you're going to eat."

Christa Neidig:
[inaudible 00:16:12] do that.

Tami Peterson:
Yeah. Make a sandwich or something. It's not a big deal, but it is one of those very interesting things that creating community for young people... And that's where I work in the church and young adult area. Creating community for that age group is very complicated because you can't really treat them high school kids and, "Hey, we're going to have this night where you guys come and we're going to entertain you with goofy games and all that." It's like, no, these are adults. So now how do we do that?

Christa Neidig:
And adults also, I feel like as someone in the young adult is within this age group, you have a really diverse mix of different stages of life within the small age group.

Tami Peterson:
Yes.

Christa Neidig:
Some people are married and they live a married lifestyle. Some people are single and single lifestyle. Some people are already having their first kids, some people are traveling a bunch for a living. It's just kind of a big mix. Some people are still in med school and they still kind of study all the time. So it is, how do you cater to that?

Tami Peterson:
Yeah. I love that word cater. It's very interesting because if you think about intergenerational groupings over an event like a wedding, we're not thinking about all those different people and how we can cater to them. We're thinking about the bride and groom, and I do think that some of that is exactly the way we should think about church. We're not thinking about catering. We're thinking about being the bride of Christ and what does that mean and what kinds of things should we be doing together that are uplifting and encouraging and community building? And we're not very good at it yet. I mean, I think Covid really broke a whole bunch of stuff that was working kind of. And then after Covid, everyone got used to not sacrificing their own comfort to do something with other people. So it's an interesting thought process around this.

Christa Neidig:
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Now that I'm thinking about it, you got me thinking about my own church and what we're doing. But one of my favorite things that we do and honestly most of the people at my church, if you were to ask them what's their favorite thing the church does, is during the summer, on Thursday nights, the entire church is invited to the church building and there's dinner and everybody just eats dinner together. People sit on the floor, they sit on the parking lot, there's a little park, so kids run around and play and do their thing. I get to talk to people much older than me, much younger than me. I get to love on some people's kids while also having a nice conversation with someone who's been married a little bit longer than we have and things like that. And it's just right there. So it's kind of what you're saying, the wedding conversations where it's not focused on all these other things. We're just gathering and then we worship together and that's the focus.

Tami Peterson:
Yeah, that's wonderful. That's such a great idea and so community building. I will tell you the other way to do this is very convoluted because then you have a young person like you saying, "Oh, I'm really struggling with this or that, and now I have to look for someone who can give me advice. Who could I call to give me advice?" Instead of just sitting down next to someone that you've never met before, maybe a friend that you know pretty well, and they say, "How are you?" And you just look at them and go, "I don't know. I'm kind of struggling with this thing." And you hadn't planned that conversation. It just was there because you were what I call friends in convenience, a church should be friends in convenience. We're together a lot and we're friends. Now there's a lot more to church than that, but at the very least, we should be convenient friends where we sit down next to each other and say, "Hey, how are you?"

Christa Neidig:
That's funny. I subbed in one of our preschool classes, and it was with a mom I'd never worked before, but she walked in. You could just tell. And I was like, "Hey, how's your morning going?" And she was like, "It's just been a morning." And it was just funny to hear the common struggles of, "Well, getting this one dressed and out the door and getting breakfast for everyone. And then the road was closed because there's a marathon." And it was just funny because we both were able to just sit there, and like you said, friends of convenience. We just happened to be there and we had 20 minutes before the kids came, and it was such a fruitful conversation. But if the church doesn't make space for that, it's hard to do that.

Tami Peterson:
Yeah. It really is. And as someone who is open to a conversation with pretty much anybody I sit next to, I'm just that kind of person, I have been so blessed by young people who are just doing amazing things. And so they share their story with me and I'm like, "Oh, this is wonderful. How did you end up where you are? Tell me more about that. How do you feel God is leading you in this area?" I kind of think of it as discipleship going both directions. I'm kept young by the young people I hang out with, and they get a little wisdom sometimes for me. But most of all, we're just being the bride of Christ together and learning to love God by loving each other.

Christa Neidig:
That's beautiful. You mentioned earlier how you said, I won't mention any names, but you said you've talked to several churches about young adult ministry and the common problems that they're all seeing within this age group and then how they're kind of approaching it differently and how interesting that is. What are some of those different ways and different approaches?

Tami Peterson:
It kind of depends on what they have going already as to how they're approaching it. Some of them are doing exactly what we have talked about in the sense that they're meeting more, which is good. They're meeting more even intergenerationally. They're adding a Sunday evening service maybe once a month that they're just inviting everybody to. So some of that is what they're doing, but then they're also doing some special programming and they're thinking about how to move the young people through the stages of becoming part of the body of Christ. So they show up to an event, which might be similar to your dinner on Thursdays, might be a summer... Summer's a great time to do stuff like this. A summer playing volleyball with friends. Something like they just say, "Hey." They might have food. They might not have food, but we're just going to offer this space for people as part of our young adult ministry to play volleyball together.
Then the next thing they might have is maybe an eight or 10 week study over something in the fall or a home group for a short period of time, which I really like because I think young people feel the burden of a whole year of something. It's just a lot of-

Christa Neidig:
[inaudible 00:23:22] right now.

Tami Peterson:
Well, and they have a lot on their plate. Because they are traveling, we talked a little bit earlier about people traveling Monday to Friday. I don't know how they do it, but creating community when they're traveling. So some of it, we just have to think about who's there and who's already coming to the church. So if we have quite a few people that are traveling Monday to Friday, then programming during the week is probably not a good idea. So kind of thinking, "Okay, well what else could we do on Sunday or maybe a Saturday night once a month or something to gather people casually and doing something together that might be fun, a game night or something like that?" And of course, they're adults, so the church doesn't have to come up with it. They can come up with it.
At our church, we host a study in our home. We are not leading it. We don't teach at all. We have young adult guides who are teachers, and they're talking about disciplines of the Holy Spirit. So what are the disciplines that you want to talk about? And they're putting programming together. We have young adult writers that are writing in it and really utilizing the giftings of the next generation as well. Another church that I'm working with has a fellows program. So it's a group of young people that commit to walk together through the year, and they read a lot, which I love. It's a lot of books, but it caters to a certain type of person. You said earlier that you're kind of an old soul, and that's the kind of person that I think moves all the way through everything to a place where they're really thinking seriously about who am I in Christ? Where do I belong and what work is he calling me to do?
We all kind of get to that place at a different spot in our life. Some people, they're there at 17, "Tell me what to do, God. I'm all in." Others are working through it all for a very long time and don't get to that place until later in life. So making opportunities for people to discover new things about themselves and about God.

Christa Neidig:
I think that's wonderful. Tami, I'm looking at the clock and we have just gone through our time so quickly. Our conversation's been so fun. I didn't want it to stop. But thank you so much just for shedding a little bit of insight into this generation and what we can learn about them, how we can learn to reach out to this next generation and continue, I think, building the kingdom through Gen Z and through millennials. Where can listeners learn more about what it is that you do?

Tami Peterson:
Well, we're on the web, of course, as everyone is on the internet. And we are at lifearchitectscoaching.com, and that's architects with an S, so plural. Lifearchitectscoaching.com. And we have just information. There's some blog posts and some other things on there. We work with high school students. We're basically students 15 to young adults through 35. So spanning both generations, just helping them in vocational discipleship, thinking about their lives, who they are and what they should do that grows out of who they are.

Christa Neidig:
That's great. Thank you again so much, Tami.

Tami Peterson:
You're welcome. Great to be with you.

Christa Neidig:
Thanks for listening to the Vanderbloemen Leadership Podcast. At Vanderbloemen, we help Christian organizations build their best teams through hiring, succession, compensation, and diversity consulting services. Visit our website Vanderbloemen.com to learn more and subscribe to our Vanderbloemen Leadership Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts to keep up with our newest episodes. Thanks for listening.