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Three Models for Intergenerational Faith Formation

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Each month, we post a series of blogs around a common topic. This month, Sarang Kang and Lynn Turnage are curating a blog series on faith formation. We’ll hear from various people who are involved in faith formation personally, professionally, and perseveringly. How has your faith been formed? How has your faith formed you? We invite you to join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter!

This post was originally shared on the Building Faith blog.

by Matthew Kozlowski

Intergenerational Conference
Back in October 2014, I attended the Lifelong Faith Associates symposium on intergenerational faith formation. About 100 practitioners from a variety of churches and denominations gathered to discuss intergenerational models of teaching and sharing the Christian faith. The following article summarizes much of what I learned at this outstanding conference. The three models described below are not the only ways to do intergenerational ministry, and this is by no means an exhaustive or authoritative list.

The Sunday School Question
One issue that I want to get out of the way: intergenerational formation is not about closing or “killing” Sunday school. Many people doing intergenerational work have taught or coordinated Sunday school, and they understand its benefits. That being said, these leaders are willing to ask whether a classroom model (grouped by age or grade) is the best format for every church.

Intergenerational Model 1: Large Gatherings
Some churches that have transitioned out of the age-group classroom model host large intergenerational gatherings instead. All ages are invited to these monthly events, and organizers embrace the excitement and challenge of planning the large gatherings. I met representatives from several large Roman Catholic parishes that are fully committed to this model, and no longer offer traditional classes for children (sometimes called CCD). Instead, all families and children are invited to the monthly events.

The churches publicize the entire schedule in advance, expect wide participation, and even ask for registration and a small payment to cover food and materials. Intergenerational gatherings are often around two hours, and may include food, icebreakers, worship, music, and study. Some churches do include break-out sessions in which adults and children split up, briefly, for age-specific study.

Intergenerational Model 2: Small Groups

Many Christians are familiar with small groups, but intergenerational small groups are different in that adults, teenagers, and young children all meet, pray, and study together.

But how does the content work? Surely a 4-year-old cannot comprehend Bible study at the same level as a 44-year-old. This is true. But in an intergenerational small group, children are encouraged to participate as they are able, and to listen and be present. Additionally, the format is usually simple: sharing, scripture reading or devotions, and praying for one another.

The benefits, say proponents, far outweigh the drawbacks. Imagine a younger child praying for a teenager, while other members of the group lay hands on them. In intergenerational small groups, this is normal practice.

Intergenerational Model 3: Enhance Existing Programs

The intergenerational model that may translate well to many congregations is the “weave model” –  not an official term, but a phrase I made up for descriptive purposes. This model looks at all the events and formation opportunities that a church currently offers, and asks – in a very practical way – how can this become intergenerational? For example, do adults already make palm crosses before Palm Sunday? Invite all ages and create an intergenerational event. Does the youth group already deliver items to nursing homes? Invite older adults to help, and young children to tag along and participate.

Extreme Practical Planning
When considering any of the above models, there is a caution to keep in mind: intergenerational programming takes careful planning. For a leader, this means thinking up everything that could go wrong, and then stacking the odds in your favor. For example, a favorite Building Faith post explains how to ensure that multiple generations sit with one another at tables. As a leader, you can have all the best questions and activities in the world, but for the program to work you must create mixed groups.

Theoretical Grounding

The theory underpinning intergenerational formation proposes that people learn faith through the community of faith. Notice that this is not a one-directional movement of adults to children. ALL participants in the life of the church learn through the insight, experience, support, and prayers of the other members of the community.

An 80-year-old can learn quite a bit by reading the parable of the laborers in the vineyard with an 8-year-old. Teenagers often have powerful lessons to teach about service and mission. And of course, as it has always been, trusted adults teach and model Christian faith to children in worship, study, and charity.

As Maria Harris writes in Fashion me a People, “The doers of education are the community as community… [We] are realizing that the church does not have an educational program; it is an educational program” (page 47).

Focus on Relationships
A good framework for any church considering intergenerational formation is a focus on relationships. That is to say, churches can create a plethora of opportunities for all ages to connect with one another in meaningful, faith-based, conversations and experiences. Yes, the events and the content must be well planned and well done, but the programming is not the end-goal. The goal is mutual learning, growing closer to Christ, and deepening faith. In intergenerational formation, people of all ages make this journey together.

Matthew Kozlowski manages, edits, and writes for Building Faith. He lives in Alexandria, Virginia with his wife Danielle and two young daughters. Throughout his career he has been a teacher, camp counselor, school chaplain, camp chaplain, Sunday school teacher, parish priest, and Alpha course coordinator.

This article was first published in the Spring 2015 edition of Episcopal Teacher, a free magazine published by the Center for the Ministry of Teaching.

A Brief Reflection on Intergenerational Ministry

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Each month, we post a series of blogs around a common topic. This month, Ellen Crawford True is curating reflections on intergenerational ministry. What does it look like for the church to do and be church together? What does it feel like to understand ourselves as vital parts of the body? What can it mean to seek to be faithful as children of God together, no matter what comes next? We invite you to join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter!

This post was originally shared on James’ blog, “Praxis.”

by James Kim

There are articles, blogs, books you can read about intergenerational ministry. I don’t pretend to be an expert. I don’t have much to add to the fine materials one can find out there.

This entry is a plea to anyone who may be considering doing “intergenerational ministry” from a guy who’s doing his best to lead a ministry that reflects the inter-generational nature of Christ’s ministry.

First, please don’t try to be who you’re not. That get’s weird. What do I mean?

That’s what I mean. That’s weird. Don’t do that.

Don’t try to “get relevant.” Just be authentically you. Should a young person come to your church, they are wanting folks to be real. And when they see that there aren’t many young people around, the last thing they are wanting is for the older folk to be “young.” Should the young people stick around, it will be because they see and sense a genuine love for Christ in you. They will be drawn by your way of loving and being loved by Christ.

So be you. Be a wiser, older, uncle/aunt or grandparent figure. You are not their “pals” and young people aren’t expecting that from you.

The reality is that most of our Presbyterian churches are older. That’s okay. It’s who we are. There’s no shame in that. And the good news of Jesus is that God will use who we are to reach people.

Lastly, please don’t do intergenerational ministry as a church growth strategy. No one wants to be someone else’s project. If you’re going to do intergenerational ministry, this is not about the future of your local church. This is kingdom investment in the people God sends your way. Young people who don’t know Jesus and who don’t share your local church history, don’t give a rip about the future viability of your local church. That’s one of the last reasons why they would be a part of a church community.

When young people show up it’s because they are hoping against hope that this God thing is for real and that they can experience in the church something bigger than them, bigger than this generation, bigger than this world. They want to connect with a God who is eternal and a community who can “usher” them into God’s presence.

Doing intergenerational ministry will be difficult, time-consuming, have a low investment-to-return ratio, and be costly.

So why should anyone do intergenerational ministry?

Because Christ’s kingdom is multi-generational in nature. Our local church should reflect that.

james kimJames Kim is the senior pastor at the Little Church on the Prairie in Lakewood, WA. 

Fellowship and Worship as Messy Church

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Each month, we post a series of blogs around a common topic. This month, Ellen Crawford True is curating reflections on intergenerational ministry. What does it look like for the church to do and be church together? What does it feel like to understand ourselves as vital parts of the body? What can it mean to seek to be faithful as children of God together, no matter what comes next? We invite you to join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter!

by Suzie Gerrard Fletcher

Five years ago, I moved to a rural charge with three United congregations in the Church of Scotland.  The Sunday School as was had ceased to function during the vacancy, and soon after I arrived, it was decided we would try and do something completely different: Messy Church. An interested group of folk gathered for a training course and three months later held our first Messy Church. It is a great opportunity for people of all ages to worship together, and to create a sense of belonging. Broadly based around fellowship, it is both a fun and creative way to introduce people to Jesus through hospitality, friendship, stories and worship. And, to share together in a meal, which for many families and churches, is a rare occasion in this day and age.

Messy Church is its original form is a fresh expression of church that began in a Anglican church in Portsmouth as a way of being church for people who don’t do traditional church, for whatever reason. It is a church of all ages… and lots of churches have picked up on the idea and been able to adapt it for their own situations, both in the UK and overseas. It has grown and estimates are that well over 500,000 people belong to Messy Church, and that number is growing all the time. A typical session includes an introduction, crafts, a celebration (worship) and a hot meal.

In our situation, we have a craft leader and worship leader (myself), and should have had a catering team. We generally meet on the same Sunday from 4-6pm in the afternoon every month (some do it on a weekday or Saturday). There’s a brief introduction to the theme as folk are gathering and then everyone is let loose to go and explore eight different activities which help to tell the story in different ways. The emphasis is on crafts, being sure there is something for all ages and genders, and the adults come alongside and take part whilst lending a hand to younger children. We have a person at each table (ages ranging from teenagers to the elderly) to help explain how their activities relate to the story.

After about an hour, we call everyone to the front of the hall, as our hall is separate to the Church itself, and have a time of singing songs, telling the Bible story in a creative way, a participatory prayer and Messy Grace (blessing done in a circle), before we line up to share in a meal which we serve around one large circle of tables because our numbers allow for that.  The materials used are very helpful in organising each session.  

About half of those who come have/had some loose connection to church, whilst the other half have not. For most of these families, Messy Church is church and apart from special services, they do attend on Sunday morning, and after education of the elders aren’t expected to.  This sort of fellowship is new and different more many in the UK, and it is wonderful to see God at work in generations of people who might otherwise have never known much of the faith.

Messy Church is enabled, resourced and supported by BRF (Bible Reading Fellowship), a registered charity, as one of its core ministries.

suzie fletcherSuzie Garrard Fletcher is a parish minister in the Church of Scotland, where she serves a united charge of three small rural congregations. She graduated from Presbyterian College in 1996 and has a dual degree (M Div and MA in Christian Education) from Union Theological Seminary and Presbyterian School of Christian Education, as was, and went to Scotland for a year, but she and her husband loved it so much she applied for admission to the Church of Scotland and has been working in Scotland since her ordination in 2001. They have three small children, with another on the way, and enjoy family life in a small village on the North Sea, with the convenience of the beautiful historic and cultural city of Edinburgh, just forty miles away.

An Intergenerational Experience of the Church

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by Ellen Crawford True

If I close my eyes I can see the hallway of my home church. The linoleum tiles are slick under my 3-year-old feet as I run to hug my best friend by the choir room. In the blink of an eye, I see the loving exasperation on my confirmation class teacher’s face. I’m too busy chatting with her son to listen to her celebrating the legacy of John Calvin whose serious face stares at me from the slide on the screen behind her. Blink again and I hear basketballs dribbling on the gym floor on a chilly Thursday night in January while my patient coach urges us to run a little faster and play a little smarter. (They can’t cut you from a church team, even if you have a non-existent vertical leap and are five feet tall on a good day.) I can feel the air swirling around me as four other classmates and I dance in the sanctuary while the choir sings a Christmas cantata. Another blink, and I am walking down that aisle to say my marriage vows moments after the church ladies–armed with safety pins and stain remover–have finished fussing over me and making sure everything is just so. Two years later I am kneeling in that same aisle to feel hands pressed on my head and shoulders while prayers are lifted at my ordination. It is the same place where we celebrate the resurrection at my mother’s memorial service, the same place where the church welcomes my daughter at her baptism.

Jess Fisher-2In each of these moments I see the faces and hear the voices of men, women, and children who have been church. At its best, my experience of faith has always been an intergenerational one, long before such a notion was trending. There were coaches, parents, Sunday school teachers, nursery workers. There were preschoolers and junior highs, circle leaders and the men’s bible study that gathered every so often on Friday mornings in my family’s living room. That was church for me. In many ways, it still is.

In recent years there has been an intentional move to recover this intergenerational emphasis in the church. Some of this movement has grown out of necessity: it doesn’t make sense to have Sunday school divided into too many different age groups when there are only a few children, one youth, and a handful of young adults present on Sunday mornings, so we look to be and do church all mixed together. But the more powerful motivation has been to regain something that gets lost in the larger world. Just as we are too often segmented and separated by gender, class, race, orientation, and ability, we are divvied up by age. As is the case with every division, something crucial and sacred is lost along the way, at least for me. My faith is deepened when I get time to color with three-year-olds. My heart is lifted when I laugh and pray with seventy-year-olds. I am challenged and encouraged when I hang out with and worship alongside people who don’t know the same eighties movie references I do, people who couldn’t name a single Prince song until just a few weeks ago. Something sacred happens when we do church together. I see holiness when I watch those three-year-olds and those seventy-year-olds color, laugh, pray, and tell stories together. In those moments, I catch a glimpse of the kingdom of God.

In the coming weeks, we will hear from a variety of voices from across the church as they reflect on intergenerational ministry. Like every other buzzword in church circles, it’s not about a one-size-fits-all program. It’s not a silver bullet that will solve all of our problems or alleviate all of our anxiety. But in their reflections, we will hear hope. The posts will be written by pastors, seminary students, educators, and church members about what it looks like for the church to do and be church together, what it feels like to understand ourselves as vital parts of the body, what it can mean to seek to be faithful as children of God together, no matter what comes next.

EllenCrawfordTrueA native of Nashville, TN, Ellen Crawford True graduated from Davidson College and Union Presbyterian Seminary. She has served churches in North Carolina and Pennsylvania. She’s a fan of grits, biscuits, running, dancing, and Steph Curry. She lives in Camp Hill, PA with her husband Dave, their daughter Abby, and their dog Homer. She serves as Pastor and Head of Staff of Christ Presbyterian Church, also in Camp Hill.

2016 National Gathering Ignite: Danita Nelson

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Danita Nelson of New Covenant Fellowship of Austin shares about their intentional, multi-national, multi-racial, intergenerational community.

Children’s Church is the Church

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By Rodger Nishioka

one-eared-mickeyIn their book, The Godbearing Life, which has now become a youth ministry standard, Kenda Creasy Dean who teaches at Princeton Theological Seminary and Ron Foster, pastor of a United Methodist congregation, identify one of the most problematic models traditional youth ministry as the “one-eared Mickey Mouse.”  In their description, the congregation and its ministry form the head of Mickey Mouse while youth ministry forms one ear that, like the Mickey Mouse image, is barely attached to the head.  The problem, they say, is that young people grow up with an understanding that youth ministry is only tangentially connected to the life of the whole church if it is connected at all.  They view youth ministry as something that is separate.  This view ends up reinforcing the natural egocentrism of adolescence and while that may suffice for a while, when young people grow up, they find themselves bereft of any understanding of church and the whole church’s ministry and their part in it.  That is when they drift away.  Tragically, we set them up for this by locating their ministry as something apart from the rest of the church.  This analogy is potent as we consider the place of children in the church.

In too many congregations, our children are “dismissed” to go to “children’s church” or something like it either a few minutes into the congregation’s worship or in place of being present in the congregation’s worship at all.  As far as I can tell, this is a 20th century phenomenon.  In reviewing session minutes from Presbyterian congregations in the archives here at Columbia Theological Seminary, this action of sending children out of worship began in the 1950s at the height of the post-war baby boom.  Prior to this, no such thing existed.  Children were in the whole of worship with their families.  But in the years following the second world war with the tremendous influx of newborns, congregations began looking for immediate and cost effective ways to gain more space in the sanctuary to accommodate all these young families and their children and some inventive pastor or church educator thought about sending the children out to make more space for adults and thus, the phenomenon of “dismissing” children from worship was born.  If a generation runs approximately 20 years, then we are into our third generation of this experience and it has become normative for us all.  Indeed, when I have preached in congregations where there is now plenty of room for all ages to worship together, church after church still sends children out of worship because “that’s what we have always done.”  The truth is, that is NOT what we have always done and even more, we are now reaping what we have sown.

We have sown three generations of children leaving or never worshipping with us, and it is no wonder that so many find worship boring and incomprehensible when they come of age and are expected to join us.  Further, when I suggest that children remain with us during the whole of worship, some of the loudest objections come from some young parents who want worship to be a time for them when they do not have to worry about their child’s behavior.  My own sense is that this reflects the current belief among developmental theorists that adolescence is extending well into young adulthood and what else is a true sign of adolescence but the primary focus on one’s own needs over others.  And after all, these parents of young children experienced the pattern of a separate “adult worship” and “children’s worship” when they were young so is not that what church is supposed to be like?

Here is the greatest problem I find in separating our children from us in the worship of God.  In Matthew’s gospel, he relays the story also found in Mark and Luke about Jesus encountering little children.  Parents are bringing their children to Jesus because they want their daughters and sons to meet him, but the disciples turn them away.  Jesus tells the disciples to , “Let the little children come to me, and do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of heaven belongs.”  (Matt. 19:14).  Readers of Matthew know that the gospel writer often uses the words “kingdom of heaven”  euphemistically for “God.”  Given the quote from Jesus, he seems to be telling us all that God belongs to children.  This is unique, truly.  I can find no other place in the gospels where God is said to belong to anyone.  It seems that there is something about children that they alone are named as the ones who possess God.  For me, then, the question of children and the church is first and foremost a theological one.  If we are called as the body of Christ to worship God and to glorify God and to enjoy God (as the Westminster divines tell us in the catechism), then does it not make sense that those to whom God is said to belong, our children, should at least be present among us?   In fact, should not our children be leading us in this endeavor for which we were created?

There is no “children’s church” separate from the “church.”  Children’s church IS the church.  Amen.

Rodger Nishioka is the Benton Family Chair in Christian Education at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, GA.

Let the Children Come

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hands old and youngToday we aren’t posting new material, but pointing everyone back to the fabulous Theresa Cho and her blog Still Waters. Theresa and the saints at St. John’s Presbyterian Church create masterful, meaningful worship experiences for God’s children of all ages. Check out these two posts in particular (and while you’re on Theresa’s blog, check out the wonderful prayer stations!)

Theresa shares some of the challenge of being a parent and in worship leader or participant and offers some tips on welcoming children (and their parents) in worship from their experience in making worship intergenerational at St. John’s.

Let the Children Come – Intergenerational Worship

Intergenerational worship based on different learning styles sounds great! But how do you get from here to there? You make change along the way. Theresa shares the step-by-step experiment they led to increase variety and flexibility within worship. Hint: She also highlights Storypath, the new online resources from Union Presbyterian Seminary to connect children’s literature with the lectionary and biblical/theological themes.

A Disciplined Experiment on Changing Worship

Theresa Cho is the Co-Pastor of St. John’s Presbyterian Church in San Francisco, CA and blogs at Still Waters.