Intergenerationality

The sixteen dollar word in the title is probably the characteristic of the “ideal church” that I find most challenging to manufacture. Due to the multi-generational composition of our current congregation @ 1A, I’ve been studying up, a bit, on the subject, hoping to get some insight that will make both my worship leadership and my administration in this modernization of our operations more effective.

I understand that the wisdom (and let’s be honest… the checkbooks) of the more chronologically advanced individuals in the church is necessary. I also understand that the youth of the young is vital, if only logically, to sustain the existence of the church. But how on earth are we supposed to appeal to all ages, especially if we are trying to do so simultaneously?

The materials that I have read, thus far, all seem to promote an atmosphere of variety. Two sample suggested solutions were:

• Use many different types of music or even different bands.
• Make sure that every service team has members that represent every age group in the church.

And while I am aware that this method has proven effective in some churches, I have to admit that I don’t fully understand its success or understand how to make it work in our situation.

People have opinions… People like and dislike things in life… People have different passions, different callings, different gifts, and different levels of spiritual maturity… – The compulsion to develop a ministry that includes all of these individuals is perfectly understandable, of course. The apostle Paul said in 1 Corinthians 9:22 that he became all things to all people (NKJV), tried to find common ground with everyone (NLT), or became just about every kind of servant you can think of (Message) in his efforts to bring whoever he could to belief in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. But I have to admit that I question the effectiveness of this approach as an organizational strategy in the modern church.

If, in college, I had decided to major in, not one or two related fields, but five to ten unrelated disciplines, I’d have had much more difficulty in my pursuit of greatness and academic success. The difference is like determining what your interests, values, and skills are and then selecting the best option for you versus simply going into college without evaluating yourself at all and declaring majors in history, accounting, Russian, computer programming, interior design, dietetics, chemical engineering, dance, meteorology, and psychology. Only the very best of students could accomplish anything at all in taking on such a task and only the most dedicated scholars would even be slightly interested in being a part of such a broad program of studies.

My point is that, with the advent of globalization (and indeed, since the era of imperialism), adding multi-culturalism to the mix, and the widening of the gap between the experiences of different generations, it simply seems inefficient to use a fragmented multi-style of ministry in the hope of reaching everyone. It’s like Paul had the standard field and rules in a game of baseball… but by now, when we are covering the field, someone has come along and added several dozen more bases and changed the rules so that a batter can run in any direction and to any base he chooses. The punchline? — We just can’t cover all of the bases…

… At least not the way that we’ve been trying to do it. I am in no way suggesting that people should stop trying to relate to and reach everyone possible, the way Paul did. People should… But I’m feeling, more and more, that churches that desire to thrive in their God-ordained vision just can’t… at least not the way they’ve been trying to.

I believe that your church can be intergenerational… if you only have and only want mature believers. I have seen churches where devout, impassioned young adults truly worship and grow alongside older generations in a traditional setting/style and I have seen churches where visionary, spiritually mature senior adults worship and grow alongside younger generations in a contemporary setting/style. But if you only have these mature believers who are able to worship God regardless of the circumstances and conditions of the music, speaking style, infrastructure, or decor, are you really following Paul’s example anyway?

Recently, I posted concerning consumerism in the church. At that time, I was addressing the need for excellence in the operations of the church due to the expectations of the mal-churched and the un-churched. But to achieve that excellence, you must know who you are and who you aren’t. You must evaluate your God-given passion and calling to find out where you fit and who you’re supposed to be reaching. Who needs you most? Who do you feel that God is affecting, through your ministry, on the greatest level?

As much as so many church workers hate it, the institutional church is a business. It absolutely must also be a welcoming community of faith and a school of biblical knowledge, but a church that desires to reach anyone who is not already in attendance is a church that must employ at least a small measure of business sense.

Who is your target market? –<>– Hint: If you answered “everyone”, you are in that analogical ten major program and I wish you all the best… You have your work cut out for you. –<>– If, however, you are aware that your God-designed personality, calling, and experience creates an area of passion that has a specific style, purpose, target group, etc…, then I believe that you are well on your way to determining what kind of church you are meant to lead.

This can be difficult to wrap your mind around. Am I saying that our goal should not be to reach everyone? Yes and no… I believe strongly that the love of God is intended to save anyone who believes in atonement through Jesus Christ and wholeheartedly desires to follow his example for living. I believe that it is the charge of the Church at large, according to the word of Christ Himself, to take the Message to the entire world and make disciples of all different types of people. But I believe that the individual… and even the individual church/congregation can certainly have a narrower target than “all the world”.

I’m not speaking against missions work now, either… We should do anything we can to assist other bodies of believers just as we should do anything we can to build up and enrich the ministries of fellow individual believers, as I demonstrated in the recent post, 1A: Day One. My statement is simply this:

• The leadership in a church should be in agreement about what the purpose of that organization is and how they plan to effect it. If there is no agreement, leadership may have to be changed. If you are standing alone, stop holding up progress and go find where God wants to use and develop you. — Straight talk…
• The collective effect of all Christ-followers, all over the world, following their personal calling and all churches reaching the market that they feel equipped and impassioned to minister to is, theoretically, the perfect, harmonious fulfillment of the Great Commission and the individual spiritual and institutional health of the Church at large.

We will attract and impact more people when we design our worship experiences to combine parts of their social culture with the leading of the Holy Spirit and the same Gospel that has been around since Christ Himself. The importance and time-sensitivity of our Message is too great to simply keep going and hope they begin to feel guilty enough, get curious enough, or become broken and lonely enough to turn to the church.

We have to customize our methods to fit our market. If that means reading from the King James Bible, decorating with lots of flowers and banners, wearing suits and ties to church, and singing traditional hymns with a pipe organ, so be it… And if that means reading from some other translation, decorating in a retro-modern style, allowing food and drinks in our sanctuaries, wearing jeans and flip-flops to church, and playing rock-n-roll praise music, that’s fine too. Neither way is wrong… It really does depend on who you feel called to reach.

But the experience that I have and the research that I’ve done seems to suggest that you can’t expect to attract unbelievers from all generations with either method. Neither do I believe that the variety that so many articles swear by is truly the answer. In a church that does two traditional hymns and two rocked out, contemporary worship songs per service, has a senior pastor who spits sermons with little substantive content and full of religious jargon and cliches, uses a small group model wherein the groups are fun, age-based, and led by a member of that age group, decorates with artificial flower arrangements, and projects the song lyrics on a large projector screen with colorful, abstract backgrounds, I am going to be incompletely satisfied.

I’d love the contemporary music, the small groups, and technology and style of lyric projection… but I’m going to be dissatisfied with the hymns, the sermons, and the decor. The beautiful thing is that I could still worship through those (perceived) imperfections because I am spiritually mature enough to ignore it and adore God. An un-churched person with my same tastes may not be so gracious.

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Let me tell you a story of two senior adults in a transitioning church… One woman: an excellent giver, clerk of the church, and social hub among the “silver surfers” in that body… One man: a spiritual pillar in the church, groundskeeper, and board member. Both were long-time members and both had long looked for the day when that church would fill up with young families, skeptical college students, and all sorts of people who needed the love and forgiveness of God in their lives.

But after thirty-five years of ups and downs and with only minimal changes in between, the church was dying. Membership and attendance held steady at around ten or fifteen people… Everyone saw the signs and no one knew what to do about it. The pastor left… The denomination determined that either the church would have to change drastically and experience a resurgence under new, authoritative leadership or the doors would be closed and the congregation merged with another one, nearby.

A young, modern pastor was offered the task of effecting this resurgence, by the denomination. He accepted, moved his family to the new city, shared his vision for the church with the membership, and began developing relationships with the people. The decor changed as the banners and flowers were replaced with candles and colored can lights. The music changed as the piano was replaced with a keyboard and the hymns replaced with modern worship music under a new, young worship leader and college-aged band. The messages changed as the pastor began to teach in everyday language with an NLT Bible, sometimes sitting on a stool, rather than shouting his sermons from behind the grand pulpit… which had now been replaced by a much smaller, more mobile lectern. Suits and ties and silver hair were embraced by jeans and flip-flops and hair gel.

Through it all, a sense of community was maintained. Through it all, a remembrance of the vision… the destiny of that church was maintained. — And through it all, our two senior adults exhibited two very different responses.

The man recognized all of this change as the God-given path to reach the dream that the congregation had held for so long… The woman wondered why the pews were sold and replaced with chairs. The man wasn’t crazy about the rock-n-roll worship songs but knew that it was sincere and Spirit-led and that the people that he wanted to find Christ in this church would love it and worshiped God anyway… The woman sat with a scowl and folded arms through every service and tried to force the pastor to bring the hymns back. The man saw the congregation growing and becoming younger and thanked God for answering his prayers as he tried to share his realization with the less satisfied older members of the church… But the woman wouldn’t hear of it. She couldn’t believe that they were spending money to make the church look like a disco or that the pastor never “preached” anymore or that they had changed the name on the sign… and she lobbied her view to whoever would listen, expressing her dissatisfaction and complaining that new pastor had stolen and ruined their church.

And though the young pastor tried everything he knew to satisfy the needs of the older generation, including planning and offering a special service with only hymns and a guest speaker who preached in a traditional style, the woman eventually left the church… The man stayed and experienced the glorious providence of God to raise a dying church from obsolescence to a place of effectiveness and salvation and Christian community once again. The woman found a church that provided her with hymns and had pews and a preacher that stomped and spit, the way she liked, every week… The man continued to be a great leader in the young congregation and poured love, good will, wisdom, and hard labor into the church and its people until his dying day… And the impact that he had on many of those young leaders and parishioners is still evident in their lives today.

That man proved that a church can be multi-generational and that intergenerational worship is possible, no matter the style… That woman demonstrated that some people simply lack the spiritual maturity to see that God isn’t planning to do things their way, this time, and that people really do, often times, simply want what they want and nothing else. The man showed God’s will for us… to be passionate God-lovers who desire to worship him and share his love and grace in whatever setting we find ourselves in. The woman showed us that we do still need churches that are fully committed to a single style of worship. Some people just can’t handle things not being the way that they like them.

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I can understand not wanting anyone to leave your church. I agree that you should make every effort to bring whoever is willing along on your journey toward the vision that God has given you for your church… But we can’t afford to wait too long to reach that dream. There are many dreams to come after we arrive there and much more work and change to go through. The people that your heart is breaking for right now, perhaps people that you’ve never even met, need you to exercise your faith and make the move.

Use different services for different styles if you simply must reach everyone… But know your calling and know your purpose as a church. When the tough decisions have to be made, make them in the knowledge that God gave you a passion and interest in certain people and areas because he wants you to thrive there. Evaluating your options and executing a strategy will eventually become necessary. Don’t be afraid.

We do need the wisdom of the venerable and the energy of the young… But we only need wisdom from the elders if they are spiritually mature and open to the possibility that God’s plan to reach the vision may differ from their own. And we only need the zeal of the youth if their zeal is rooted in a non-circumstantial passion for God and a desire to see him glorified no matter what the worship style is. I believe that that is where intergenerational worship exists… where true worshippers existed in the first place. Beyond that, decide who you’re meant to reach and do all you can to become their perfect church.

Matthew 11:15

The title verse reads like this: “He who has ears to hear, let him hear!”.

I have ears… but I can’t hear. I went to the doctor today unable to hear out of my right ear… just a congestion / blockage issue that I’ve experienced several times… And I’m still not quite sure why it was a two-hour visit or how I managed to leave the doctor’s office unable to hear out of my left ear, instead! — But without standing on a soap box in an indictment of incompetent medical services, I do notice a parallel between this situation and the process of culture alteration in a church or business.

In any organization, there are always going to be things that need improvement. There will be methods, policies, and systems that become ineffective, whether due to incomplete foundations from the outset, or because of some shift in skills, resources, or values within the organization or your target market. Change is uncomfortable and it’s easy to fall into avoidance of it, but it is necessary in some situations.

Like my blocked right ear, some things in your operation may already be at the point of dysfunction. Maybe you have several programs or assets that are “banging, flopping, and dragging” as my new Pastor and boss, David Stephens, once put it. If so, you have a responsibility as the director of the organization to, first, assess the need and evaluate the possible solutions, and second, to administer the treatment quickly. The health of your company depends on both the constant observation and evaluation of your operations as well as the swift and confident execution of actions that address the problems that you find.

Most people can accept that notion… When something is broken, you should fix it. Furthermore, I believe that many could agree that the longer you leave a deficiency unresolved, the worse its impact. But what about that left ear?

When everything seems fine in your organization and when nothing crazy is going on, should you avoid change? When things are all pretty good and you have only minor complaints, can and should you bring yourself to upset that equilibrium? — Only if you want to be great.

My friend and mentor, Pastor Ben Liles of GenesisChurch.TV, likes to quote author Jim Collins in saying, “Good is the enemy of great”. Let’s face it… Good feels pretty good. When things are going smoothly and you’re getting by without incident, there isn’t much natural motivation to take action and risk conflict or trouble. But when the personal, God-given passion that I mentioned in yesterday’s post enters the equation, good is never good enough.

Some would say that the doctor just couldn’t leave well enough alone in the case of my left ear. I came in hearing pretty well. I hadn’t had much trouble with it, at least not anything that I couldn’t work out on my own time… But by meddling where there was no immediate problem, a much bigger issue was created.

Maybe they’re right… Maybe the doctor did at least expedite the presentation of hearing trouble in the left ear. But the vision and the intention was to improve my condition and to give me an even greater level of auditory capacity than I came in with. Great intention… Great vision… and even a great plan. The method that was used to attempt to repair a minor, potential problem was the same treatment that worked perfectly on the more problematic right ear. So what happened?

I’m not saying that you’re never going to fail. There will be times when you choose to move when inaction just feels right and you’ll end up creating more conflict and malady than you began with. However, for those who understand that such risk is necessary to truly pursue greatness and fulfillment, there is only earnest prayer and study prior to making the move. Not trying is not an option when you realize that your effectiveness impacts countless lives.

And the knowledge that however badly you manage to mess things up in your well-meaning hunt for your best offering and effort, God is capable and faithful to transform that failure into something useful, provides the support and confidence to dream big and pursue greatness – not for yourself, but for the glory of God and for the salvation of all who will have it by the mercy and grace of Jesus.

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[I wonder if the doctor had all of that in mind? ]

1A: Day One

So, today is my first official day in the office at First Assembly. And while some of my time, thus far, has been spent situating my things, other tasks have included setting up a second computer in my temporary office, dismounting a computer keyboard drawer, and framing a slightly comical glamor-shot-like picture of Jesus… on a white horse… in a crown and… is that a cape?! — …riding atop a gloriously lit patch of cumulus clouds. Oh and… yes, he is White with flowing brown hair, too. And no, it wasn’t a joke.

Let me stop right here to give my two cents… I know that some of you would find such an image to be very inspirational and would take offense if anyone dared make fun of this Revelation illustration while others of you would suppress your gag reflex at such a cheesy depiction of our Lord, reaching for the nearest trashcan or box of matches to destroy the eyesore. Is it a difference in taste?

Doubtful… I dare say that some of those who would defend the portrait wouldn’t actually like it, but would feel that, just because it is Jesus, it should be exempt from quality judgement. This fundamental difference in how people look at products and services in the Christian sector, I think, does much to define the difference between churches who are operating in the creative Spirit of God to repackage the Truth in a way that attracts a target audience… and churches who are either still doing it the same way it was done fifty or a hundred years ago or who are using the shotgun method of ministry…- try a little bit of everything and surely something will hit.

What if there really are poor-quality goods and services? What if the evaluative selection that we demand in everyday consumerism is the same consumerism that the un-churched come into our doors with? Maybe it’s time that we begin to realize that there really is such a thing as boring music, impotent preaching, and cheesy art. The rest of the world realized this long ago… And perhaps that’s why the Church, as a whole, has lost touch with the people.

God became flesh in order to die in our place… But while He was flesh, He used the time that He had to model innovation, compassion, leadership, training, delegation, spirituality, and faith. The disciples and the leaders of the early church modeled these as well. Yet, somehow, Christendom has managed to twist that model into traditionalism and entrenched my-way-ism.

The fact is, we are called to be fresh and alive in the creative power of our God… not copy-cats of our grandparents’ religion. In their time, they understood this challenge and became the innovators that they needed to be. Their way was exactly what the world needed… at that time. Now it’s our turn to step up and take the Message of Christ to those who need it most in a way that they can and will accept it.

We are each created by God with a personality and style and passion that is all our own. And why would that be instilled in us except to forge a mission and a vision in our souls to be love in action — not the way someone else does it or the way we’re commanded to by the other members of our respective communities of faith — but in a way that reflects that unique personal flavor that only we can offer. When you operate in your very own style, that passion makes you do everything with greater quality and effectiveness.

Stop settling for less than your calling. Someone out there is depending on your God-inspired creativity to finally make it all click for them. Someone out there is laughing at the outdated church and its glamor-shot Jesus and needs you to find a way to make the Gospel real to them… Find your direction, set your goal, and be intentional about getting there.

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… And be sensitive. At the end of the day, you have to realize that your style is not going to appeal to some people. You must allow those who find things that you think hideous, amazing, to thrive in who God made them to be. Help each other to accomplish your respective goals however you can.

That’s why I spent fifteen minutes framing the picture of glamor-shot Jesus… He isn’t on my bulletin board anymore (so I won’t break out in hives!)… but I did a fellow minister the courtesy of preserving and enhancing something that she considers spectacular. The picture hangs beautifully… across the room and out of my line of sight!