Great is the Lord and most worthy of praise; his greatness no one can fathom. One generation commends your works to another; they tell of your mighty acts. They speak of the glorious splendor of your majesty—and I will meditate on your wonderful works. They tell of the power of your awesome works—and I will proclaim your great deeds. They celebrate your abundant goodness and joyfully sing of your righteousness. (Psalm 145:3-7, NIV)
In those verses, the psalmist talks about how it is each generation’s duty to pass along the stories of God to the next one. God doesn’t drop a Bible out of heaven and say, “OK, you guys need to read it and learn.” He looks for the older generation to educate, instruct, and help bring along the rising one … to share out of their journey and relay from their experience who He is, what He’s done, and how they can live a life that’s not only meaningful but pleasing to Him.
As Christians, we believe in the vertical revelation of God. Jesus left His home in heaven to take up residence on this planet. The Holy Spirit descended from above to become an indwelling presence in our lives. The writers of the Bible tapped into the supernatural insight of God’s Spirit to where what they wrote is truthful and authoritative. But we also believe God reveals Himself to us horizontally and makes Himself known person to person, individual to individual, and generation to generation. While God is faithful to draw near and reveal Himself to every person, there’s also a sense in which those in the new generation learn from the truths passed along by the previous one. If there’s no passing along from one generation to the next, then the up-and-coming generation grows up deprived of some of the things they need to have in place in order to know God and realize His best for their lives.
Obviously, the family is designed by God to be the primary place where this happens.
Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates. (Deuteronomy 6:4-9, NIV)
These verses clearly articulate the responsibility of the older generation to pass along to the younger godly values and truths for living—or, to use the words of Psalm 145, to proclaim the awesome works of the Lord and tell of His power. Whenever I dedicate children, I challenge the parents to embrace the responsibility of being the primary agent for the transfer of truth about God into the life of their child. The church plays a very important, but supplementary, role—to augment, reinforce, and fill in the gaps. Doing that doesn’t merely involve passing along facts about God so the child can have some accurate information. It’s deeper than that! The calling is to shape their heart—to model and display godly living so as to develop within those in the next generation hearts that are radically surrendered to Him, committed to His cause, and willing to pay whatever price is necessary to follow Him wherever He wants them to go.
Facilitating this generational transfer is a tough task. And given the cultural shifts going on in our world, it’s getting tougher all the time. The continued fracturing and breakdown of the family is creating lots of households where it isn’t happening at all, or it’s only being addressed in a token fashion. Many families are dealing with incredible issues of brokenness to where they aren’t in a position to address this calling as wholeheartedly as they should. A lot of young people on the threshold of adulthood have a concept of God their family did little to instill. And, understandably, they’re confused. They’re messed up. When some of them say they don’t believe in God or question His existence, I want to say, “Tell me about this God you have questions about—what’s He like—because chances are I don’t believe in a God like that either.” For most of us, it was someone from the preceding generation that initially got us pointed in the right direction when it came to understanding who God is and what He’s like.
Additionally, when the Bible talks about this generational transfer of truth, it isn’t talking about a “let me teach you” type of thing as much as it is a “let me show you” arrangement. Learning in Bible times didn’t look the way it often looks today. In Bible times, you didn’t gather kids together and place them in classrooms so adults could dispense information to them. Learning was much more informal and unstructured. It was the product of role modeling and observation. You learned by being placed in a setting where you could examine and observe the actions of the previous generation. You learned by watching people’s day-in, day-out behavior … by observing how they conducted themselves … by examining the way they lived their lives.
This generational transfer—this supplemental but critical role—is a real challenge for the church in North America because, in many churches, the generations rarely come together. Individuals from different generations are seldom in the same place at the same time. The church is largely an assortment of ministries and programs designed to appeal to a particular niche. The programs we develop and ministries we offer are basically the product of an attempt to answer the question, “How can we reach this segment of folks, or people who fit this profile, with the message of the gospel?” Think about it: In Youth Ministry, we’re targeting the 13-18 year old niche. In Children’s Ministry, we’re trying to reach the birth-12 year old niche). Men’s and Women’s Ministries … Singles Ministry … Senior Adult Ministries … Sunday School classes that typically form around people who are at a similar station in life—all of these are attempts to meet the needs of people who match a certain profile or fit a certain niche.
And there’s nothing wrong with that. We need it! I am where I am today in large part because I grew up in a church that cared enough about me to develop programming tailored to meet my spiritual needs at different stages along the way. I am where I am because a church dared to ask, “How can we make the gospel come alive for people in that age group?” and they devised some plans to make it happen, followed through, did it, and it worked. I understand the need to target our message and contextualize the gospel so we can address and meet the needs of people where they are. But I also recognize it wasn’t just the material or subject matter that influenced me. It was the adults … the volunteers … the participants who gave of their time and energy to make those ministries happen. Looking back, I don’t remember specific Sunday School or children’s church lessons. I don’t remember specific teen devotionals or Bible studies. But I remember specific adults—specific volunteers that gave of their time to invest in me. That was a key part of developing the spiritual building blocks in my life.
We can’t lose sight of this calling to do what Psalm 145 says and participate in the generational transfer of truth. And when I think about how the North American church is currently configured in many places, there’s only one setting where people routinely come together across generational lines—where they come together as a family in such a way that intergenerational interaction can happen. And that, of course, is worship—the Sunday morning service. In most churches (except for the largest ones), the worship service is unapologetically intergenerational.
But that’s a real challenge because, with different generations present, you have different generational preferences. What connects with one generation alienates the other. What one generation finds meaningful turns the other one off. What engages one generation irritates the other. What one generation sees as fresh and creative the other sees as stale and tedious. What one generation sees as touching and moving the other sees as humdrum and boring. When you get people from different generations in the same room—each with their own distinct likes and dislikes—you end up with a setting where it’s absolutely impossible to please everyone.
The way some churches have responded—particularly larger ones—is by niche-marketing worship. In an effort to appeal to everyone’s preferences, they’ve provided variety—a contemporary service, a traditional service, a blended service, and a liturgical service. But I fear, in the process, we’ve also created some unintended negative consequences. We’ve produced a generation of people who’ve come to believe church is primarily about them and their preferences. An activity that’s supposed to be about directing our praise to God has become something focused on the satisfied sensation we hope to receive. Something that is to be focused on Him has morphed into something fixed on us. In the process of trying to deal with the challenges of generational preferences, we’ve created a horde of spiritual consumers who have lost sight of what church is supposed to be about. The church doesn’t exist for us. It should benefit us. It should be of service to us. It should contribute to our spiritual growth and development. It should change us for the better and help us become more like Jesus. But it doesn’t exist for us. It exists for the sake of the mission Jesus entrusted to us—to go into all the world and make disciples of all people. The church is the only entity that exists primarily for the benefit of those who don’t belong to it! That’s what makes it unique and different from every other enterprise on the planet.
In our attempt to try and please everyone and satisfy their preferences, we’ve created churches that have largely lost the ability to facilitate this generational transfer … that have surrendered their capacity to provide the supplemental modeling and reinforcement that comes from the older generation commending to the up-and-coming generation the works of the Lord.
So—how do we address this situation? Let me use an illustration. Imagine, if you will, a holiday gathering where the entire family comes together. At Thanksgiving or Christmas, you’ve often got three, sometimes four, generations present. When you think about it, that’s very similar to what happens in churches on Sunday mornings. On the average Lord’s Day, you’ve got people gathered together for worship who vary in age from twelve to 92. If a generation is approximately twenty to 25 years, you’ve got three or four generations present … three or four different groups who have their ideas about what church should be, how it should feel, and how it should be carried out.
Returning to the big family, holiday gathering—at those gatherings, whose interests predominate? Who determines the culture at the dinner table? In the family I grew up in, it was the younger generation. Now—please understand what I’m saying. That doesn’t mean the meal was designed specifically for them. It just means an intentional effort was made to have foods they like … to talk about things they wanted to talk about and have topics of conversation they could enter into. A genuine effort was made to make sure they had a good time and enjoyed themselves. Because if they don’t—if those family get-togethers were times when they came away feeling like they weren’t wanted or valued—then at some point, when they got older, there was a good chance they’d think, “You know, I’ve got better things to do” and decide not to show up for those big family gatherings.
I wonder if that explains why so many young people have left the “Big C” Church these days—because those of us in the older generation haven’t really let the younger generation know their presence is wanted at the table. And now, we come to a time where we’re beginning to think about handing things off to the next generation and we realize there’s very few people to hand it off to because most of them have left and are gone.
When I was in my doctoral program at Asbury Seminary about fifteen years ago, there were nine of us in my cohort that were going through the program together. Six of the nine pastored in the United Methodist church. One of them told me a statistic that is absolutely frightening. At that time in the United Methodist Church, only 6% of its members were under the age of 35. Six percent! And I’m guessing two things: (1) what the United Methodist Church is dealing with is something a number of churches and denominations are dealing with, and (2) nothing has happened in the 15 years or so since he said that to me that has dramatically turned things around. Bottom line—it’s happening. The younger generation is leaving the church in droves. In terms of how we think about “doing church”, we need to think of ourselves less as a church and more as a mission outpost, for the United States is just as big a mission field as any place on the planet. And the church looks, feels, and functions differently on a mission field than it does in a churched culture.
One more thing about those big family gatherings—those occasions are lots of work and the responsibility is typically shared. They’re usually noisy, chaotic, and messy. When you invite the kids to the table, it can get loud and a bit raucous. But in the process, something wonderful happens. There’s a lot about raising kids I don’t know. But I know this—it’s a healthy sign when the family eats together. It’s an indication something good is going on when everyone can gather around the table, put their differences aside, come together and enjoy each other’s company. There’s something about that dynamic that builds great kids—kids who someday, when they look back on it, really value what you’ve built into them. The same principle applies to the church: There’s something wonderful that goes on when all the generations can come to the table and feel welcomed, valued, and appreciated.
Something vitally important is going on in those big family gatherings … those intergenerational settings. Learning is taking place. Jimmy won’t learn to respect grandma if he never has to be any place where she is. He won’t learn how to become a responsible adult if he never has to spend any time with her and her generation. And by the same token grandma, if she’s not there, she’ll miss out, too. Not only will she miss out on the joy of participating in the formation of Jimmy’s life, but she’ll also miss out on the blessing that comes from letting the enthusiasm of his youthfulness feed her soul.
What would it be like if the church in North America could somehow harness the wisdom, resources, and experience of age and combine it with the enthusiasm, energy, and innovation of youth? What kind of impact could it have on her community, and people’s lives, if she could merge these two sets of ingredients that, on the face of it, so often appear to be at odds with each other? I don’t know that I know the answer to that. But I know it can’t happen unless, within each generation, there’s a sense of humility and respect for the other. It won’t happen unless we can learn to function as a healthy family and accept and embrace each other in spite of our generational differences. That means the older generation needs to not look down on the younger generation and criticize them for the way God seems to speak to them, calling it mindless, shallow, and superficial. And the younger generation needs to not view the older generation as fuddy-duddies who are stuck in the past and out of touch with reality. It means we all need to respect each other’s preferences and God’s ability to make Himself known to us through those preferences. But, more than that, it means we need to each take it upon ourselves to be role models, willingly set our preferences aside, and enter enthusiastically into worship regardless of whether it’s our preferred style or not. Because, at the end of the day, it’s more important that the entire family—the different generations—come together and gather around the table at the same time than it is that our individual or generational preferences be met.