InterGenerate

Transforming Churches through Intergenerational Ministry

Holly Catterton Allen

• Publisher: Abilene Christian University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781684269846
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Ministère chrétien

Leaders in Christian communities are all asking the same question: How can we bring the generations back together? InterGenerate addresses important questions of why we should bring the generations back together, but even more significantly, how we can bring generations back together. In this edited collection, ministers, church leaders, and Christian educators will find valuable, new generational theory perspectives, fresh biblical and theological insights, and practical outcomes backed by current research. InterGenerate offers important guidance on topics including
•intergenerational spiritual disciplines,
•transitioning from multigenerational to intergenerational,
•new research that focuses directly on intergenerational ministry and offers practical outcomes to implement, and
•benefits of intergenerational ministry for the most marginalized generations.An exciting and distinctive aspect of InterGenerate is the vast diversity of voice —men and women ranging in age from millennials to baby boomers, representing multiple countries and over a dozen denominations—all seeking ways to become more intentionally intergenerational in their outlook and practice.

Part One

BECOMING MORE INTENTIONALLY INTERGENERATIONAL

Chapter One

Why Now?

Jason Brian Santos

Twenty-five years ago, I took my first full-time gig as a youth worker. I was a bright-eyed nineteen-year-old who desperately wanted to help lead other young people into a relationship with Jesus Christ. I was studying youth ministry in a small Assemblies of God liberal arts college when the opportunity surfaced to take the reins of my own ministry—an offer I couldn’t refuse. I remember gathering with that motley crew of teenagers in the dank church basement that was filled with tattered furniture and a colorful banner hanging from the wall with my newly designed name—Cutting Edge Youth Ministry. Little did I realize then, the name I chose for the ministry was ironically prophetic for many of the efforts we’ve made in children’s and youth ministry over the past few decades.

Truth be told, my fledgling ministry didn’t end up being on the cutting edge of anything. It did have the effect of being cutting edge, albeit, not in the innovative, dynamic sense of the phrase, but in a divisive and, in many ways, damaging way. I remember telling parents that they should steer clear of the work I was doing with their children and harshly vetting adults who wanted to be a part. I, like many youth workers over the years, had bought into the idea that youth needed to be pulled away from the larger body to do their spiritual seeking. I believed that parents and other adults would only muddy that process with their attempts at offering pat answers for what it meant to be a Christian. As far as I was concerned, young people needed a welcoming environment filled with people their own age in order to wrestle with their faith and ask hard questions without embarrassment. Who better to mentor those teenagers than a cool, almost-twenty-year-old who was convinced he knew what it meant to follow Christ?

In the years that followed, I persisted in this philosophy of ministry, forming children and youth in the faith in various basements across the nation and globe. Over that time, my thinking began to shift. As I watched high school graduates exit my youth programs and spread their wings into the wide blue yonder, I began to notice an unsettling trend—many of them weren’t returning to the church. This pattern, unfortunately, wasn’t an anomaly confined to my particular ministry; it was increasingly being noted throughout the nation and across denominational lines.

In ecclesial and academic circles, we made valiant attempts to offer correctives for this growing trend. We created new paradigms of youth ministry, each with the promise of fixing the failures of the past (e.g., purpose-driven, contemplative, mission-oriented, etc.). While these efforts proved helpful for a time, in retrospect, most ended up being Band-Aids that only temporarily covered up the deeper, more systemic issues befuddling our efforts to form our children and youth in the faith. Nonetheless, we plodded on, trapped in a cycle of creating new, innovative ways of reaching young people.

Then, in the late 1990s, practitioners and scholars began noting a subtle trend in the spirituality of young adults, particularly among Generation Xers, who seemed to be abandoning the faith communities of their upbringing in favor of ecclesial traditions characterized by more formal liturgy and historical Christian practices.¹ Others simply left the church all together. Though there was noted concern with this shift, it didn’t cause widespread panic until the Xers’ younger siblings followed suit. The millennial generation, equally discontent with the vast offerings of North American spirituality, made a much stronger statement in the most powerful way imaginable. They just left. Often characterized by the phrase “spiritual, but not religious,” large numbers of millennials simply stopped affiliating with institutional religion, giving rise to a new category of American spirituality known as the “Nones.”²

This hemorrhaging of young people from the life of the church has profound effects. The most obvious is that the perceived future of the church is threatened. Common sense tells us that if this trend continues, ultimately, there won’t be any bodies left to fill our pews. Like all institutions, active membership is a significant indicator of vitality and longevity. Without a new generation to carry on our religious traditions, the societal impact of the institutional church may disappear. Consequently, for the first time in history, youth and young adult spirituality became a significant area of research, most fully realized through the National Study of Youth and Religion—the largest, most comprehensive longitudinal study of religion and young people.³ Along the way, scholars began to argue for a new stage of life they call “emerging adulthood”⁴; these scholars argue that we are seeing, in essence, a shift in how we understand “adulthood.” Traditionally defined markers—like the completion of education, marriage, a house, and children—are checked off later in life, if at all. Theoretically (and historically), once these markers are met, these adults return to the church. Though we’ve witnessed this return anecdotally among some Generation Xers, there is little evidence to demonstrate that time and maturity will eventually work in our favor.

A Generational Divide

I’d like to suggest, however, that there is more at play in this cultural shift than a growing generational distrust with religious institutions or the extension of a generation’s transition into adulthood. Rather, I’d argue that what we’re seeing are the effects of an increasingly individualistic, peer-oriented society that celebrates personal experience and self-fulfillment over a communal ethos and ethic. Naturally, this shift has a significant impact on the way the church relates to the culture. As we navigate this turn, I believe it is critical that we examine our ecclesial contexts through the lens of generational theory,⁵ a topic that will be addressed more fully in Chapter Four, Lynn Barger Elliott’s chapter.

For the purposes of this introduction, however, consider these brief descriptions. The silent generation, born between 1925 and 1942, were the survivors who came of age in an era shaped by the Great Depression and the Second World War. Helping to rebuild the country on the heels of the GI generation, they worked to strengthen societal institutions through civil participation. Largely characterized by a cultural morality, they conflated Christianity with good citizenship.

The baby boomers, born between 1943 and 1960, came of age during massive changes in our culture—the civil rights movement, women’s liberation, and the sexual revolution—partly prompted by the boom in psychological research which championed the values of personhood. Ultimately, this existential awakening yielded a generation that embraced therapeutic individualism unabashedly. Unlike the generations that succeeded them, boomers attempted to reform the church rather than abandon it altogether, giving rise to non-denominationalism and consumer-driven Christianity. Arguably, peer-oriented spiritual formation found its beginnings during this era.

Generation X, born between 1961 and 1981, was the smallest generation of the past century. Returning to a parentless home after school earned Xers the moniker “latchkey kids.” Highly distrusting of institutions, particularly religious ones, they are often characterized as having a deistic view of God, echoing the abandonment of their childhood. Growing up in a culture of “church hopping and shopping,” they wrestled with the virtues of a market-driven, “build-it-and-they-will-come” spirituality.

Finally, the millennials, born between 1982 and 2004 (comprising the largest generation thus far), are the ones who have communicated their discontentment with institutional religion via their absence. As the first technological natives, they are the most individualistic with a vast capacity to shape their ever-changing identities and social relationships. Undoubtedly, they make up the most diverse generation. Millennials are often unfairly stereotyped as self-absorbed, despite their being known for their collaboration and social activism. They are also among the most studied generation—especially in the area of spirituality.

In 2005, the National Study of Youth and Religion offered evidence that not only are we doing a poor job of handing down faith to our children, but that the faith we’re handing down is lacking. Teenagers were found to be largely inarticulate about their faith, lacking a religious or theological vocabulary from which to draw. While the young people interviewed didn’t have negative views about spirituality in general, their perception of Christianity painted a grim portrait. The researchers asserted that we’ve handed down a faith the authors labeled Moral Therapeutic Deism (MTD). In short, MTD is the belief that religion is there to teach us what is right and wrong (morality), that it functions to help us feel good about life and ourselves (therapeutic), and that while God is real, this divine being is not really concerned with our everyday lives (deistic).

Generationally speaking, MTD is a far cry from the civic Christianity of the silent generation that understood the church as a pastoral institution that offered spiritual comfort and moral formation. After the Second World War, religious communities experienced a surge in attendance and the pastoral model lost its efficacy, giving rise to a multi-staff, programmatic emphasis. Associate pastors and ministry directors were hired to accommodate the influx. Moreover, this trajectory, undergirded by the explosion of developmental psychology, inspired boomer leaders to develop “age and stage” ministries as a means to address the needs of specific age groups.⁶

During this period, it made perfect sense to pull our children and youth away from the corporate worshiping body in order to focus on the particular needs of each stage of faith development. Consequently, youth ministry burgeoned into a whole new category of ministry with endless opportunities for study, innovation, and, ultimately, professionalization. While children’s ministry didn’t quite mushroom to the level that youth ministry did in terms of research and publications, it too experienced tremendous expansion and became a powerful marketing tool to draw the larger family unit into the folds of the church. In the end, these peer-oriented efforts moved the spiritual formation of our youth and children from the multi-generational body to the fringes of our communities.

Van Gogh Mickey

What was the result of this shift? A Van Gogh Mickey Mouse. Imagine with me for a moment the face of Mickey Mouse, but with only one ear. In this image, Mickey’s face represents the larger body of the chur...