Connecting the Generations: Close the gap between younger and older people in your church. (526 hits)
The hippie movement was at its height in 1971, and Stuart Briscoe had just become pastor of Elmbrook Church in Brookfield, Wisconsin. Stuart persuaded a group of 100 counter-culture youth to attend worship one Sunday, and one of the church's leaders was not pleased. "I want to make one thing perfectly clear," the leader said. "These young people you brought into our church have to be kept separate. We have worked hard to keep our children away from these kinds of people."
When a "full and frank exchange of positions" concluded (Stuart's more experienced, diplomatic description), the leader offered a solution Stuart could agree to. "I'm tired of hearing about the generation gap—let's build a generation bridge." Soon afterward Elmbrook started a new Sunday morning class. It ran for three months, and participants were hand-picked from diverse age groups.
The class wasn't given a teacher (or a referee); the studies were led by the participants themselves, with an older person and a younger person sharing the task each week. Their curriculum, the Book of James. In time, friendships and mentoring relationships were built that last to this day. The class shared its experience with the church, and a waiting list was created for the next Generation Bridge class.
This paradigm integrates whole households—mothers, fathers, widows, singles, and children of all ages—into the same activities. An intergenerational ministry (also called inter-gen, multi-gen, or age-integrated) brings diverse ages together in the same place, with the same materials, for the same purpose. The goal: to build cross-generational relationships that strengthen faith formation in the community and at home.
Advocates of this ministry model tout the home as the primary center for faith formation. Often their top priority is training parents to impress the faith upon their own children. But successful intergenerational ministries incorporate more than just mom, dad, and the kids.
"The single most important thing in intergenerational ministry is to include the non-nuclear family units," says Eric Wallace, director of teaching services at Harvester Presbyterian Church in Springfield, Virginia, and author of Uniting Church and Home. "We call them 'households'—the widows, singles, single-parent families, etc. If you don't include them, you're just creating a 'family' fragment with separate needs and separate relationships from the rest of the body. The goal is to build unity and faith in every home, no matter who lives there."
Meeting the Objections
Intergenerational ministries begin in one of two ways: either the church is founded with core inter-gen values, or the idea is introduced slowly. In the latter case, inter-gen proponents often face stiff opposition. The cultural norm, common in schools and most church environments, is to separate people, and especially children, by age. Cultural norms aren't amended easily.
