Bob's Blog

Do you ever think about the future of the Church, especially here in America? I do. I always think about it. Lately, I've been thinking and talking with others about what we see happening in our churches. We seem to be churches that are segregating ourselves, and I'm not talking about from the world but from each other. We divide our Sunday morning teaching times by age. We have classes for elementary, youth, college, and adults. We even separate our adults. Usually, the older adult classes were the young adult classes a few years back. We just move the class along through the years. It's sort of a "continuous graduation," the same people moving with you from one decade to the next.

The problem I see is that we are slowly losing something very vital for us, and that is the multi-generational church. Now, you can have many ages represented in your church, but that doesn't mean your church is multi-generational. To know if your church is multi-generational is to answer these questions. Are the people in your church interwoven with each other? Do young adults feel that they belong? Do older Christians take an interest in those younger than them? Do the kids have contact with adults other than an hour on Sunday morning? In other words, is it a Body that looks like a body or are its parts scattered around the floor?

I feel we lose something when generations stop interacting with each other. I'm not sure if God intended it to be that way. I see so many examples of generational mentoring going on in Scripture (Paul with Timothy & Titus, Silas & Mark, Titus exhorting the church in Crete, etc...). I love the thought of Paul taking under his wings younger men like Timothy and Titus, showing them the ropes of their faith. Isolated age-stage ministry can result in seeing churches divide. We saw this in the 80's where Boomers wanted a church that connected with their generation, so they developed their own with their style of music, sound, lighting, and worship that met their needs. The ironic part about it is that now their kids are in their twenties and are leaving mom and dad's Boomer churches because these Millennials find them irrelevant to their generation. They want real, relevant, and vintage style churches, and so the cycle continues.

I'm not saying that there is no need for the Church to be culturally relevant or that some churches were meant for a time, but we lose depth of maturity when our church is mostly populated by twentysomethings. We miss the energy and legacy of the church if it is lead only by older adults. But most important is this: we miss the opportunity to experience the diversity that God has created from one generation to the next. We lose the lesson of sacrificing our "needs" for the joy of serving others outside our world. I need those older and younger around me to make me the person Christ desires me to be. I need other insights from different vantage points in life to do that. I need a multi-generational church, and I think you do as well.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 1, 2007 at 7:15 AM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.