Having spent the past eight years noodling in topics such as intentional community, spiritual formation and pilgrimage, it’s not surprising that when I think about wholeness I can’t help draw upon the image of a caravan of people walking along a winding path that trails off as far as the eye can see. I imagine we’re walking alongside our families, friends and others who happen to be traveling with us at that time. In time, people come and people go: Children are born, become teenagers, then adults. At some point, everyone on our journey dies. One could say this image is just another metaphor for life, but I like to think of it more specifically as a metaphor for the Christian journey that offers us a way to live our earthly existence as God’s children.
In that way, we’re all pilgrims journeying toward a common end—being existentially reunited with our Creator. On this pilgrimage, we’ve got young, old and everyone in between learning and laughing together, living our lives with a deeper, more profound sense of wholeness. Admittedly, I’m not writing this with any sense of having solved the riddle of a young person’s sense of wholeness. Rather, I’ve been wondering if we, as a three-score-strong cohort of youth workers, leaders and pastors overlooked something as we partitioned young people from the faith formation found in the broader intergenerational life of Christian community.
What I mean is this: At some point during the past half-century, the North American church (generally speaking) decided that focusing on the individual needs of various ages and stages of our communal life was better for all. Although I believe there were tremendous blessings that came from concentrating on the particular developmental needs of a specific demographic, I think we lost something far more precious in looking at the Christian journey through a peer-oriented view of faith formation.
I think it makes more sense when we imagine that same twisty caravan of God’s children winding off into the sunset, but instead of it being all ages intermingling along the path together, it’s filled with clusters of the different generations primarily walking alone. They stick to their own age groups and interests as they learn and grow in their discipleship. True, there are still multiple generations packed throughout that long line, but so many of them aren’t really traveling together in any intentional way. Suddenly, the image of the pilgrimage seems a bit too fragmented for me, and when push comes to shove, I think young people feel that fragmentation.
Accordingly, we’ve addressed the issue by digging more deeply into what the individual generations need for a period of their lives, with an earnest hope that they will find a sense of wholeness. That said, I wonder if that sense of wholeness—regardless of age—could be realized more fully in the interconnectivity found in intergenerational faith formation.
After two decades of focusing primarily on developing programs and ministries that meet the specific needs of young people, I decided to tinker with my own budding convictions that our common life should be characterized more by our time and interactions together than our time apart. The three examples I offer here only bore fruit after much conversation coupled with a little experimentation. I don’t use the word experimentation lightly—I was never sure what would happen. I had my hopes. Some were realized, while others were not. Nonetheless, in the past two years I’ve attempted to integrate intergenerational faith formation in three venues: retreats, Vacation Bible School and Sunday School.
Intergenerational Retreat
I’ve never really liked all-church retreats. They always seemed to be an awkward social experiment to me. We get a bunch of people who don’t normally spend any significant time together beyond a few hours a week in worship services, and we throw them in a musty, cramped retreat center in the middle of the woods and ask them to participate in activities they never would participate in at any other time. As a youth and children’s minister, it was always my job to create a separate retreat curriculum for the various ages under my watch. As a result, the only time everyone was really together was when we ate (and, even then, we naturally tended to segregate).
Hoping for a different result, we made it our goal that all ages would remain together for everything except free time. Under the theme of “Storytelling,” every retreat participant got a chance to map, draw, write and verbally share their faith stories. Naturally, this was easier for those who’ve journeyed longer in the faith, but even the youth and children found creative ways to express where they felt God’s presence along their journeys.
The results were more than I expected. In fact, I was brought to tears as one sixth grader shared how he knew God was with him during a difficult transition in his life. Then, I felt a bit giddy as I witnessed a second grader ask questions about the faith story of a well-seasoned saint. As the retreat came to a close, I knew we were on to something when a mother shared with me how she was amazed that her son not only recognized God’s presence in his life but that he was excited to share that moment with her. It wasn’t just a multigenerational retreat; the interconnectivity across generational lines helped our young people realize the longer continuum of our collective faith journey. Who would have thought something as simple as sharing one’s faith story could provide such a powerful link between generations?
Intergenerational VBS
Wanting to explore further, we decided to tackle the annual programmatic tradition we call VBS. I’m not sure what it’s like in your church, but in my denomination, VBS is often more akin to a Jesus-and-me-centered childcare for tired parents who need a three-hour window to shop for groceries without being badgered to go down the candy aisle. We buy prepackaged kits with flashy themes filled with plug-and-play music and videos and lots of plastic crap that only contributes to our ever-growing landfill problem. Our hope is that perhaps they’ll have such a fun time learning about Jesus in our building that their parents will join the church after seeing their little ones sing the theme song during the next Sunday morning worship service. I didn’t want to do that anymore; it made me feel icky.
So we experimented by hosting our first annual intergenerational VBS. We called it ONE: A New Kind of VBS. We chose a mission theme through which we explored four mission works we’ve supported through the years. We held it on consecutive evenings to offer more flexibility for busy work schedules. We provided themed dinners each night, and we encouraged the intermingling of ages at each table. We divided the different ages into three intergenerational groups, and then we rotated them around different parts of our church for various formative experiences. The elderly among our participants cheered on the children, youth and able-bodied adults in the cultural activities and games while the youngest tried their best to listen alongside their older team members as others shared about the mission work in each culture. Everyone sacrificed a little in the interest of learning and growing together. At the close of VBS, one teenager commented, “I wish church was like this every week.” What I learned that week wasn’t about what we did or didn’t do; it was more about simply being together.
Intergenerational Sunday School
With two fruitful intergenerational experiences under our belts, we decided to broaden our experimentation and see if a larger effort was sustainable. For the past few years, our Sunday School program had suffered under the effects of cultural abandonment issues. In other words, the thriving attendance of decades past was long gone, and we were struggling to draw more than a handful of kids each week to our classes. It also had become a drop-off zone, a place where parents could finish their Sunday morning coffee in peace. So, we made the argument that we should collapse all our Sunday School groups—birth through 12th grade and their parents—into one giant class. In retrospect, I’m not exactly sure how we got away with it, but we did, and the results forever have changed the way I understand faith formation.
First, we broke up our Sunday School year into modules of varying lengths—three to five weeks—similar to mini-seminars. With more than 70 participants ranging from age 2 to 90, we dove into topics such as the Eucharist, Baptism and Advent. We invited the whole class to act out various narratives in Scripture. We engaged members in creative projects, expressing their own understanding of faith and the sacraments. We had a hands-on experience around the different ways communion is celebrated—and we sampled lots of different breads. We collectively painted different canvases with Christian images that now adorn the halls of our church. It was a creative, often chaotic, symphony of intergenerational expression and learning.
Sometimes, I taught about the topics while people were cutting magazines to make collages or coloring Shrinky Dink film for Advent ornaments. Though I wondered if anything I was teaching really was sinking in, I eventually got to the point of realizing it didn’t matter. We weren’t just doing crafts—an activity that too often is employed to fill time. We were engaging one another in creative pedagogy that was forming us as a community. The explicit curriculum of how we celebrate our holy days wasn’t lost; it just took a backseat to the implicit curriculum that we—young and old—are a community of pilgrims on a journey toward our Creator.
In the end, I think wholeness comes through the realization that we were designed to be interconnected, intermingled and interwoven. I don’t want to stop meeting the particular needs of the young people with whom God has entrusted me, but I want to make sure they experience a sense of wholeness in the fullness of who we are as a community of faith.
