Podcast Episode 147

How can bringing different generations together in worship, learning, and community promote faith formation? Holly Allen discusses the benefits of a more intergenerational approach to ministry and strategies for helping young and old journey together in faith.

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How can bringing different generations together in worship, learning, and community promote faith formation? Holly Allen discusses the benefits of a more intergenerational approach to ministry and strategies for helping young and old journey together in faith.

Ann Michel: I’m Ann Michel. I’m a senior consultant with the Lewis Center for Church Leadership of Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C. I’m also one of the editors of our Leading Ideas e-newsletter. I’m pleased today to be the host for this episode of Leading Ideas Talks. My guest is Holly Allen, who teaches at Lipscomb University in Nashville in the areas of spiritual development and children’s and family ministry. She’s one of the authors of the book Intergenerational Christian Formation: Bringing the Whole Church Together in Ministry, Community, and Worship. The first edition of this book came out a little over a decade ago, and there’s a new edition, a second edition, that was published just last year. In reading this book, it is just so clear to me that you and your co-authors, Christine Lawton and Cory Seibel, bring just tremendous expertise and passion to this subject. So, I’m excited for the opportunity to talk with you today, Holly. Welcome to Leading Ideas Talks.

Holly Allen: Thank you for having me. It’s a delight to be here.

Ann Michel: So, your book makes a very strong case for bringing the generations together in worship and fellowship and learning and service. Yet in so many of our churches, this really isn’t the current practice. To set the stage for the conversation, I wondered if you could explain why the paradigm of age-specific ministries is so prevalent in North American churches.

Holly Allen: As your question intimates, it hasn’t always been so. Probably for 50 years or 55 years, probably in the 70s, we began dividing the generations. First, perhaps in youth ministry, then later in children’s ministry, and then we began to separate more and more. Probably the senior ministry came in next for the older people. Now we have singles ministries and we have emerging adult ministries or college ministries, those kinds of things. That has been the primary paradigm most churches have worked out of for a half century at least. The parents now in the pews, that’s all they’ve ever known. So, it’s a little bit hard to shift on them. So that’s been one of the hard things.

But how did we get here? Or why did we start separating? There were several reasons. I’m going to just go with three. Church growth strategists in the 70s and 80s were talking about “people like to be with people like themselves.” This really came out of India and the caste systems there. For missionaries there, it worked better for people to stay in with their own group. But it broadened fairly quickly. So, a lot of church growth people said, “Let’s do what they’re doing, what they’re advocating,” and that was one of the influences. Then the general cultural influence says, “Let’s put all the four-year-olds together. Let’s put all the 20-year-olds together. There was a move toward age segregation in society in general. When we were writing the first book, we went to a baseball game in California and I thought, “Oh, all the generations are here. This is so amazing.” But then I thought, “Oh, it shouldn’t be that amazing. That’s a sad commentary.” But we really are fairly age segregated across most of society. Churches are one of the few places that have been very intergenerational until the last few decades.

I would say what influenced me most when I was serving in the 1970s and 80s — I was the one who brought in children’s church at our church in the 80s—and I have repented of that. But I bought into the full developmental way of thinking about things, especially cognitive development. This was Piaget’s world, but it’s not his fault. We picked up on it and said, “Oh, this is a great theory. Why don’t we do this?” And as Ted Ward said, “Our theology for doing ministry has been developmental psychology.” Anyone can look at that and see there’s probably something wrong here.

We picked up on the idea that each segment needs to have only what they need cognitively, how they think. Little bitty children are intuitive thinkers, and you’ve got your concrete thinkers, and later you have your abstract thinkers. So, we shouldn’t do anything abstract for kids under, say 12, 13, 14. I bought that. I thought, “Oh my goodness! We shouldn’t have our children in the regular Sunday worship. We should be teaching them at their own level.” I was a teacher. I came from the world of educational psychology. It all made sense to me. But I didn’t run it past enough grids, nor did the people who were teaching me. So, I was probably in my 40s in the 1990s when I said, “Oh wait. Maybe cognitive development is not exactly the same as spiritual development.” I slowly began to unpack what I meant by that or what I thought about that. That teaching facts about the Bible is not the same as helping children and all of us come to know God. What does that mean? What does that look like? Of course it wasn’t just cognitive. We said teenagers really need different things than adults do. They’re grappling with hard thing—psychological, emotional, social needs, such as differentiation. Our 40 to 50-year-olds are not really into trying to separate from their parents. So, there are differences. And I acknowledge that. But they shouldn’t run the entire ministry system as they have. So, I think we just went too far down the developmental line.

The last factor I want to bring up is something that I’ve only been reading about just recently, and I should have figured this out sooner. But the marketing world has been in the business now at least for 30 or 40 years of saying “Your generation is unique. You have these needs. We have something special for you and just for you because you’re not like anybody else. You have unique needs.” I didn’t run my thinking past that—this is not in the book, I’ve just been reading about it recently. But we bought that individually. We said, “Oh yes, we’re unique. We need something for us.” But also, as churches, we’re [saying]“Our g