A Gospel for All Ages

Teaching and Preaching with the Whole Church

David M. Csinos, David M. Csinos

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781506473949
• eBook ISBN: 9781506473956
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

A Gospel for All Ages lives at the intersection of two conversations--preaching and intergenerational ministry. By integrating these two topics, an entirely new conversation emerges, one that draws from both, that interrogates both, and that births something new in the process, creating fresh possibilities for a sleepy church.

The fields of preaching and intergenerational ministry rarely cross paths because they are championed by two different sorts of ministerial leaders. On the one hand, preaching and homiletics has largely been a field for teaching pastors, senior ministers, and other pastoral practitioners who are tasked with the important work of proclaiming the gospel to congregations of adults every week. On the other hand, the cheerleaders of intergenerational ministry have tended to be ministry leaders who find their primary vocation within the formation of adolescents and children. Increasing numbers of Christian educators and leaders who work in children's and youth ministry are lifting high the banner of intergenerational ministry.

Wherever your tent is planted in one camp or the other, this book is for you. If God has called you to the work of preaching, you find within these pages wise words and best practices for improving and expanding your homiletical practice in light of the eight-year-olds and eighty-year-olds who share a pew on Sunday mornings. If your vocation is Christian education or intergenerational ministry, these chapters will spur you toward that final frontier of all-age worship as you consider how your vocation can include the preaching of the gospel to young and old alike.

Six creative ministry professionals join author David M. Csinos in providing intergenerational best-practice resources. Each chapter includes discussion questions and exercises for future practice.

Part 1

Understanding Intergenerational Preaching

Chapter 1

Intergenerating Our Faith

There’s tremendous variety among those of us who call ourselves Christians. From theological doctrine to liturgical practice, it’s not difficult to divide ourselves into one camp or another. There are uniting aspects also, one of which may be the common practice of watching the younger people in our congregations file out of the sanctuary to a program that’s made and marketed just for them! While the children and youth head to children’s church, youth group, or Sunday school, the adults in the room stay and continue with the worship service.

However, in the past decade or two, I’ve seen early glimmers of a gradual shift in congregational practices from those that segregate the generations from one another to those that bring together people of all ages. Thanks to the courage of creative leaders and the knowledge gained from contemporary research into intergenerational ministry, an increasing number of local churches are taking steps to keep the whole gathered community together. Through special events, social time, and weekly programs, a growing number of local congregations and parishes are experiencing the blessings that pour out among a community consisting of all ages—a community that is intergenerational.

Holly Catterton Allen and Christine Lawton Ross, in their comprehensive text Intergenerational Christian Formation, define intergenerational ministry as that which happens “when a congregation intentionally combines the generations together in mutual serving, sharing, or learning within the core activities of the church in order to live out being the body of Christ to each other and the greater community.”1 While these are not easy feats, intergenerational approaches to ministry are on the rise. But just what does it mean to combine generations together with this sort of intentionality? What does intergenerational ministry look like? How does it happen? And if it seems to take so much effort, why even bother in the first place?

Becoming the Disembody of Christ

While the growth of intergenerational faith communities is hardly limited to the twenty-first century, its recent resurgence evidences a shift in how we imagine the life of the church. The quest to become a church of all ages is a historic response to a contemporary situation, an old solution to a new problem. Before discussing what exactly it means to be an intergenerational church, it’s important to understand why so many churches (at least in the West) are age segregated. During the 1900s (especially in the last few decades of the century), the church increasingly decided that the best way to spiritually nourish and form its members into faith-filled disciples of Jesus was to separate them into groups based on their age and stage of life. But why is this? And how did it happen? While there are many contributing factors, four are especially noteworthy.

Before plunging headfirst into the reasons for the rise in dividing up Christians by age, it’s important to state that the segregation of the generations is not a church-specific problem. Many of the trends that led to the ongoing separation of people by age and the issues that have ensued as a result have been played out in the wider societal theaters in which the church participates. In many instances, in fact, we in the church were responding to shifts in the broader dominant cultures that swirl all around us. So there’s no need to pile on the guilt or cower with remorse for the mistakes we made in the move toward age segregation. As society progressed and changed, so did the church. And the gradual separation of ages represented tremendous shifts that the church made with the good intention of helping everyone become better formed in the Christian faith. But as we all know, roads paved with good intentions can lead to some treacherous places.

With that sidebar out of the way, we begin our discussion with the first factor that contributed to the rise in age segregation: people are living longer lives. Thanks to advances in medicine, nutrition, and workplace safety and a host of other ways that people’s lives improved during the twentieth century, human beings have been living longer than they ever had before. Around the beginning of the twentieth century, the average life expectancy for people in the United States, Canada, Australia, and much of Western Europe hovered at around fifty years. By the 1950s, that number had increased to sixty-seven or sixty-eight years in many parts of the world. Things kept moving along, and by 1990, people could expect to reach their late seventies, with the Japanese leading the pack with a life expectancy of eighty-one. And current statistics indicate that the life expectancies of people in Canada, Australia, Chile, South Korea, and Western Europe have closed the gap with Japan at an average life span of more than eighty years.2

This means the number (and age) of seniors in congregations has grown substantially over the past century, so much so that they have sometimes been the largest single age group in churches. Additionally, the generational diversity and age differences between the oldest and youngest congregants in a parish became vaster than they had been in previous eras. In the words of Howard Vanderwell, “Longevity has created a new day in the worshipping congregation.”3 And as the gap between the youngest and oldest parishioners in our pews widened and the diversity of ages increased, we responded by breaking the congregation into smaller groups based on age so that members of each generation could learn alongside one another. Assuming that age was the most important characteristic of our parishioners and that people of the same age are all alike (both of which are not true), we organized our parishes so that children learned alongside other children, adolescents—a relatively new phenomenon at the beginning of the last century—hung out with other adolescents, young adults had Bible studies with other young adults, middle-aged adults worshipped with other middle-aged adults, and seniors shared Thursday-afternoon tea with other seniors.

A second contributing factor to generational separation had to do with the rise of late or global capitalism. As the consumer-capitalist economy shifted in the latter part of the twentieth century, the rate of consumption took off, and the pockets of companies producing and selling things for us to consume became heavy with our hard-earned money. In order to ensure that the public would continue purchasing products on a mass scale, marketers and business owners made several strategic moves, one of which was to stratify society into new, narrow, age-based segments. Joyce Mercer, on whose work my argument here rests, states that the whole concept of the “toddler” was invented by marketers in order to create and sell products that were geared only to children of that age group.4

So not only did the twentieth century see the creation of the adolescent; it also gave birth to the toddler, and if we expand our gaze to include the early twenty-first century, we can add the tween and the emerging adult to this list too! And it all worked beautifully, at least for those who stood to benefit from our ever-expanding purchasing power. With people—especially children—now perceived as belonging to very specific and short-lived age groups, companies could create new markets that hadn’t previously existed. When toys were marketed as appropriate for toddlers or seven- to nine-year-olds or tweens, once children grew out of these ages, they left behind their “outgrown” playthings alongside their outgrown clothes. This, of course, required them to have new products that were appropriate for the new-but-brief stage of life to which they now belonged.

As the twentieth century saw advances in health care and changes in economics, it also witnessed a surge in research into human development, which is a third factor that helped proliferate generational segregation. Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget developed a theory of cognitive development among children. In the United States, Erik Erikson offered his assessment of how human beings pass through stages of psychosocial development through a series of identity crises. Lawrence Kohlberg developed a theory of moral development. And within theological circles, scholars like James Fowler and John Westerhoff constructed theories for understanding spiritual development. We could speak of all sorts of other theories and nuances that were put forward in the later decades of the 1900s, such as those of Robert Kegan, Carol Gilligan, and James Loder, that shed further light on how we grow and change as we walk through life.5

One of the results of this eruption in theoretical understanding was that we could better understand what made a three-year-old person different from a thirteen-year-old person and how the contours of faith among teenagers differed from those who were middle aged. And even though human beings of all ages and stages certainly share much in common, our differences were now underlined, circled, and marked in yellow highlighter.

All of these factors swirled together in the late twentieth-century church to give rise to a fourth: the programmatic professionalization of ministry. For much of the history of the church, the generations mostly worshipped and served alongside one another. But things began to change during the second half of the twentieth century. As baby boomers came of age and began having their own children, they developed different ways of living. The spendthrift nature of their parents who lived through the Great Depression and World War II was no longer necessary because the economy was doing well. There were more things to buy than ever before and more money with which to buy them. But time was becoming an ever-diminishing resource. So with more cash and less free time, parents turned to professionals to pinch-hit and teach their children things that their parents might have taught them when they were growing up—like how to play the piano, kick a ball between goalposts, and memorize the multiplication table.

This economic outlook made its way into churches with a boom in the hiring of youth ministers, children’s pastors, and other paid leaders to help people become formed in the Christian faith. These staff members created menus of programs for their communities, with particular offerings for specific demographics. When coupled with the realities of longer life spans, economic age-stratification, and growing awareness of human development, the programmatic professionalization of ministry led to separating people by virtue of age—and age alone—in order to participate in Christian practices (faith formation, worship, social activities) that were tailored and offered just for them.

My discussion of these major shifts in Western society relies on generalizations that do not paint an accurate picture of all contexts. Yet it serves to show how, broadly speaking, the church entered the new millennium as the disembody of Christ. While there are certainly benefits to age-based ministry, many local congregations underscore the positive elements and overlook the deeply problematic aspects involved in dividing the generations, so much so that such separation may be seen as downright necessary for the church’s shared life of discipleship. Age segregation has become part of our ecclesial muscle memory. I’ve met leaders in Catholic parishes, mainline Protestant congregations, and evangelical Protestant churches around the world who hold to this idea so tightly that they are bewildered about what to do now that they have only a handful of children in each of their Sunday school classes (if they’re lucky enough to have that many). To quote the unofficial motto of the church, “That’s the way we’ve always done it” (I still can’t find the verse where Jesus says this—it must be in one of the appendices of the Bible).

Change is happening. Our present circumstances are calling us to do things differently. And for some churches, this means abandoning practices that divide us on the basis of our years on earth and bringing the whole church together again.

Prefixes Matter

Conversations about bringing generations together in faith communities have been going on for some time. Leaders in congregations of various sizes, locations, and denominations are exploring questions like What sort of engagement among people of different ages do we imagine? What types of encounters are we hoping for? and What kind of relationships do we wish to foster?

These kinds of questions aren’t unique to discussions about generational diversity. In fact, they speak to some of the core issues involved in building relationships across many lines of difference, such as gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, race, and ethnicity. With a deep awareness of this, Australian intergenerational ministry advocate Chris Barnett has developed a framework for understanding varying levels of relationships and engagement among generations by borrowing from the United Church of Canada’s efforts to more fully engage in practices of cultural diversity.6 And it all has to do with prefixes.

Congregations may identify as multigenerational—environments in which people of many ages might worship, serve, and socialize in the same space as one another but where relationships across age groups may not really exist. Barnett holds that “there is tolerance living alongside superficial and polite interaction.”7 Take, for example, the growing trend of “including” children in adult-oriented worship services by having activities available to keep them occupied, such as coloring pages, activity bags, and the well-known children’s message. One pastor once told me that their church installed an art table at the back of the sanctuary so that children could color, draw, paint, and sculpt during the service. These sorts of activities might make it easier for children to remain present during services that are really meant for adults, but any interaction among young people and adults remains rather limited in a multigenerational setting.

If the church with the art table opened it to people of any age, then they would have demonstrated a cross-generational environment, where “there is some sharing, listening, and learning, but little individual or collective transformation.”8 In cross-generational churches, children, teenagers, and adults interact with one another and get to know one another. They might work together on service projects. There may be mentoring programs that pair a senior and an adolescent together as the teenager prepares for confirmation or baptism. During a social time after a service, a middle-aged adult might come up to an emerging adult who is visiting on a break from university and ask how school is going at the same time that a child runs up and gives this emerging adult a big hug. Relationships exist between the generations, but the church has yet to take any significant in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword by HyeRan Kim-Cragg
• Introduction: Assembling the InterGen Avengers
• Part 1. Understanding Intergenerational Preaching
• Part 2. Practicing Intergenerational Preaching
• Part 3. The New Normal
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Contributors