Celebrating the generations together as a family
James Bradford
By James Bradford
The final two evening services of General Council are designed to bring together young people and adults in a multigenerational worship celebration. Because of the many cultural niches and emerging microtrends in our society, blending the generations is getting harder to do — even in church life. Yet tonight we get to be family.
There is something healthy about worshiping together across generational lines. We look past style and focus on substance. It calls all of us to be selflessly flexible in order to center on what is truly transcendent. The issue is not whether it’s Bill Gaither or Hillsong United, a traditional preacher or a contemporary communicator, my peer group or a lot of very different kinds of people around me. It’s about Jesus and maturity and authenticity in the presence of God.
The same can be true of the local church. Admittedly, not every church will be multigenerational. The student church I helped to plant at the University of Minnesota was mainly full of 20-somethings. A church plant reaching a retirement community would not be multigenerational either. Neither would churches with outreaches to specifically targeted demographic groupings. A church’s mission will ideally determine its makeup.
Yet I would also argue that churches with broader community outreaches can be both multigenerational and missional at the same time. It is not unusual to hear that historic, multigenerational churches may become an endangered species in our culture. The relevance-related obstacles facing those kinds of churches are, indeed, huge – but not insurmountable.
The church I recently left to assume my current role is Central Assembly in Springfield, Missouri. Central is a remarkably life-giving, outreaching community of believers. At over 100 years old, it is also strikingly multigenerational. There are hundreds of children and youth in addition to hundreds of college students. There are also nearly as many hundreds of senior adults, not to mention everyone else in between like me. In some cases there are four and five generations of the same family worshiping together in the church.
I came to deeply love this congregation and to believe in both its viability and its future. The church was growing with a steady stream of both younger and older adults taking on church membership. The inevitable challenges, however, forced me as a pastor to think a lot about staying outreach-focused without losing our multigenerational identity or falling into the trap of trying to be everything to everyone. Here are a few of my reflections.
As in any relationship, people need to be valued and validated. This is true of marriages, friendships and, not surprisingly, church families. To do this I needed to think “both/and” rather than “either/or.” It can’t be “the old people are holding us back” or “the young people are going to push us over the edge.” Healthy multigenerational congregations find ways to avoid labeling parts of the congregation as threats and other parts as darlings. Instead they value and validate everyone.
During my second month as the new pastor at Central Assembly I did a five-week Sunday morning message series on the importance of singles, married couples, children, youth and senior adults, focusing on one group per Sunday. It gave me the opportunity to personally validate the diverse groups within the congregation. This actually linked us to our discipleship. Looking past ourselves and valuing others who are unlike us does not always come naturally, but it does cultivate in us mature Kingdom-mindedness.
I also found it important to occasionally revisit with the congregation the ‘uniqueness’ of our multigenerational makeup. Unless we as leaders talk about and guide this issue, congregations can drift into frustrating conflict over generational differences. I tried to talk honestly about the problems of dividing up the budget in a lot of directions or the dilemma of seeming too contemporary for some and too traditional for others. Yet I also tried to overtly celebrate our multigenerationalness as a strength that calls the best out of us and enriches our church life with the vitality of the young and the wisdom of the old.
Musically, the waters can get pretty rough across generational lines if the only goal is to make everybody happy. Our understanding of worship needs to be regularly reframed in a multigenerational church. The issue is not pleasing ourselves but pleasing God. We do not come to the place of worship with our eyes primarily on ourselves. That makes us picky and critical. Instead, we come hungry to meet God and eager to help people outside of Christ experience the authentic presence of a God who relentlessly loves them.
At Central we sang older hymns in a way that did not sound old-fashioned and newer worship songs with lyrics that had meaningful, Christ-centered content. We tried to keep the volume ‘somewhere in between’ but still energetic. Our music pastor, Tom Matrone, brought a humble excellence and an authentic anointing to worship-leading which also helped transcend the generational lines. Personally I prefer contemporary praise music, but I have learned to worship in more than one ‘musical language.’ I also tried to keep my preaching very Word-centered, listenable and practical in order to relate to as many people as possible.
Finally, whereas our Sunday services were very multigenerational, we did try to give permission for groups to meet ‘generationally’ during the week. People legitimately need opportunities to meet with their peer groups. Once that need is met, however, the challenge to become a prayer partner or mentor to someone of a different generation truly means something. I have especially found young adults to want both peer group interaction and older confidants and mentors in their lives.
A lot can be done to intentionally program ways to blend the generations if the creativity to do so is encouraged and both young and old feel ownership. I especially loved seeing various age groups at Central serving on ministry teams together, united by mission and not age. All of this can happen if the permission is given to be generationally “both/and.”
So tonight we will worship as a family across generational lines and united in Christ. May the Lord be honored, the presence of God given place to and the work of his Spirit forged in our hearts, together.