The Princeton Project on Youth, Globalization and the Church completed its second phase with the research team's annual meeting, September 6-8, 2000. While the first year of the project focused on literature reviews focusing on youth, globalization, and the church in our respective areas, the second year focused on interviews with youth themselves in order to ascertain adolescents' awareness of globalization, the processes contributing to globalization, and their perceptions about the impact of these processes on their behaviors, beliefs, and values. After pilot interviews and survey data were collected, approximately 20-25 final interviews were conducted with secondary school students in each of the following regions: Argentina*, England, Germany, Ghana, India, Japan, Paraguay*, Russia, South Africa, and the United States. The interviews were intended to assist the research team in sharpening our research questions, and to align our research approach more closely with the lived experience of adolescents. These interviews are not intended to constitute a statistically viable sample, and our learnings are more appropriately understood as observations, not as "conclusions."

At the conclusion of this project in 2002, a book will be published to disseminate the project's findings. At the same time, we realize that these observations may be helpful to others engaged in youth ministry before the project is completed. Because this project is still "in progress," the interview data and the interpretation of that data will not be made available for public distribution. Therefore we have briefly summarized some of the more obvious themes emerging from these interviews for the sake of on-line availability.

A number of common themes emerged. At the same time, the interviews suggested some gaps in our understandings, and also pointed for the first time toward some implications for youth ministry.

Common themes from the interviews:

• The most widespread sources of global awareness among the adolescents interviewed were the popular music industry and a working knowledge of English.
• In most regions, adolescents experienced significant tension between being "open" to otherness, which for most constituted a moral norm, and maintaining their own convictions.
• Youth did not seem to perceive exposure to "otherness" as relativizing their own convictions.
• Adolescents in most regions distinguished between spirituality and religion most often viewing spirituality as a positive, inward, personalized experience of God and religion as a negative, institutional, external practice. In some regions young people interviewed equated spirituality with spiritism.
• As expected, stage in development made a difference in interviewees' perceptions of globalization and its processes. Older adolescents (ages 17-18) were quite aware and reflective about these processes, whereas younger adolescents (ages 14-16) were generally unreflective about these processes, although they could identify them.
• Young people in all regions valued their particularity. Some, but not all, perceived globalization as a threat to their local identities; most youth saw little problem with being simultaneously influenced by global culture and maintaining particularity.

Gaps Revealed by the Interview Data:

• The most obvious gap was the sense, among most interviewees, of a vast disconnect between young people's experience of church and their experience of culture.
• While youth affirmed relationships with parents, gaps between youth and parents (and often youth leaders and pastors) tended to center on adult lack of understanding of culture.
• Youth in and within different regions perceived globalization differently. Positive vs. negative perceptions of globalization did not break down neatly according to socioeconomic variables or region.
• Given the literature reviews (Princeton Project on Youth, Globalization and the Church, Phase I - 1999), it was somewhat surprising that evidence of apocalyptic thinking in young people did not show up.
• Given the literature reviews (PPYGC, I - 1999), it was somewhat surprising that youth did not react either positively or negatively to young people of different religions.

Possible Implications for Ministry with Young People:

• Young people seem to value experience/immediacy, participation, and image.
• Young people seem to seek conviction, communion, and connectedness.
• Young people seem to respond to wholistic approaches to faith formation that stress knowing, experiencing, and living.
• The church may be able to learn something about openness and tolerance from young people.
• The church seems to need to deal with economics, politics, and culture as global realities.
• Young people seem to need cooperative forms of public life that do not require them to surrender their individuality or local communities.
• The church seems to need to address the tension youth feel between globalization and localization.
• The church would seem to benefit by listening to youth and youth leaders' critiques of the ideology of globalization, and in developing a theology of globalization.
• Young people look to the church to mediate meaning from the culture around them.
• The church seems to need to involve both developmental and eschatological models of growth and maturity.
• The church seems to need to show young people how to talk about their convictions that include connectedness, openness, tolerance.

Phase II of the project also included piloting four case studies of paradigmatic youth ministries in the U.S. (a small, Hispanic, Pentecostal inner city church in Philadelphia; a large suburban Presbyterian Church [USA] in Seattle; a small, "small town" federated mainline church in Colchester, CT; and a range of Asian and Asian-American youth ministries clustered in ethnic churches in Chicago]. The purpose of these case studies was both a better understanding ministry and youth involved in those ministries, and to take a first "dry run" at a methodological approach. Phase III of the project, to be completed in 2000-2001, involves profiling paradigmatic youth ministries in each region, both in congregations and outside congregations, that address globalization directly. The project will substantially alter the method used by the pilot studies in order to strengthen its relationship to practical theological method.