MAILING LIST 
Vital Worship
Feature Stories ... for inspiration, learning, and group discussion
 At what age do children begin worshiping with adults at your church? |
|
|
All Ages Needed for Intergenerational Worship
Though many churches offer multiple worship options, each pegged to an age or generation, Howard Vanderwell and Steve Burger make a case for intergenerational worship that has families worshiping together.
Children asking at Passover, “Why is this night different from all other nights?” All ages listening together as Joshua renews the covenant with God, Solomon blesses the temple, Nehemiah rebuilds the Jerusalem wall. Jesus hugging and blessing children. Pentecost just as Joel foretold—sons and daughters prophesying, old men dreaming dreams.
In the Bible, God’s people have always included all ages in worship.
Today’s churches, however, offer more options. Some churches still have everyone from newborn to people with dementia in the sanctuary together. Others peg the worship hour according to age, ranging from nursery or children’s worship for young children to separate services for youngsters, middle schoolers, older teens, and college students.
“There’s no one simple solution to a very complex set of circumstances,” says Howard Vanderwell, who’s editing a book about intergenerational worship.
He defines intergenerational worship as “worship in which people of every age are understood to be equally important. Each and all are the church of now.” Vanderwell suggests that even if your church has chosen a more age-divided approach to worship, you can use the intergenerational worship concept to identify problems and find worship ideas.
 |
All ages present
Intergenerational worship has all ages present—embodying the truth that the whole church is the body of Christ. “Unity is a gift of Christ. Unity is and it needs to be maintained,” Vanderwell says.
Naturally, though, people ask what to do with the young ones.
“Nobody ever talks or debates about whether adults should be in worship. But we do debate whether children should be heard or seen in worship. Yet God’s continuing self-revelation is not age-specific. Your children may experience a relationship with God long before they can articulate it,” says Steve Burger, director of children and family ministries in the Evangelical Covenant Church’s Christian formation department.
Worshiping with different generations—singing together, holding hands during prayer, sharing communion—helps children form an identity as people who want to celebrate and glorify God together.
Burger recalls a little girl, who asked, while being led downstairs to Sunday school, “Hey, Daddy, how come I can’t stay upstairs with you and God?” She still needed to learn that God is everywhere present. And Burger is all for separating ages for developmentally appropriate education. But he cautions against sending kids to church school while adults worship.
Why do churches split up people by age? First, the 18th century Enlightenment emphasis on reason and education shifted worship from participating in faith to learning about faith. It’s the difference between doxology (right praise) and dogmatics (right belief). So if worship is only about believing, and kids are less cognitively developed than adults, then churches want to make sure kids know what to believe before they join the adults.
Second, North American churches have absorbed the culture of consumer choice and target marketing. They advertise to reach families shopping for more church options.
Meanwhile, churches too small to staff children’s programs during worship should take heart, according to Faith Communities Today 2005. This survey of 884 randomly sampled U.S. congregations found that keeping children with adults can help churches grow—if they also involve children in worship through speaking, reading, and performing.
 All ages can learn from each other, as depicted in this mural on a neighboring building for St. Stephen Baptist Church, in Louisville, Kentucky. |
Countercultural character formation
Though age-groups have their own vocabularies, communication styles, and outlooks—each shaped by particular economic, social, political, and technological realities—Vanderwell cautions against stereotyping or keeping everyone separate.
Instead he suggests becoming more intentional about worshiping together. “Where else in our society do we have such a strategic location to examine and foster the relationships of generations?
“The phrase ‘all generations’ appears 91 times in the Bible. God does not form our character all at once or all by himself. Nor does he expect us to unilaterally form our own character. God acts on us through others. Interaction among generations is necessary for forming faith and character. Each age learns from another,” Vanderwell says.
Steve Burger agrees. “Who or what we choose to exclude from our worship gatherings says as much about our community of faith as who or what we choose to include. And, really, does excluding anyone make sense when you realize we’re spending an eternity together?”
Taka Ashida recalls becoming pastor at a Reformed Church of Japan congregation that valued calm and quiet. He discovered that a father with three young sons always stayed in the entrance hall because he’d been told the boys were “so noisy.”
Ashida invited the family into the sanctuary. “They needed us; we needed them. The father was so happy to hear that from me. The boys were not always quiet. Some members accepted them. Some complained. But intergenerational worship is a foretaste of the ultimate worship service in heaven. Even a little noise should not stand in the way,” he says.
Worship forms character that lasts, according to George Aupperlee, who leads worship in dementia units at Holland Home in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
“Touch, direct eye contact, and the use of individual names help contribute to warm, personal, interactive worship … As Jane verbalizes every word of familiar hymns, the Lord’s Prayer, and treasured Bible passages, it is evident that grace still flows through well-worn channels to the depths of her soul and keeps faith alive,” he says.
 |
Everyone participates, everyone learns
Intergenerational worship takes humility as well as intention. Older generations can’t lord it over the rest with a “this is how we’ve always done it” attitude. Neither should worship leaders focus on one or two age-groups and ignore others.
Robert Nordling, now co-director of Christian formation and orchestra conductor at Calvin College, recalls a tense moment in a former church of mostly college students, plus “90 faithful older members.”
A seniors music group leader asked for copies of the new songs being sung in church. To nitpick? Not at all.
The woman explained, “Every Tuesday we eat lunch together, have a speaker, and then sing for a little while. We find some of the newer music a bit challenging. I thought if we practiced a bit together on Tuesdays, we might be able to participate better on Sundays. Some of those songs seem pretty difficult…to us anyway.”
Nordling says, “In all my years of music ministry, I had seldom witnessed such selfless maturity! This music would never be the favorite of these good people, but somehow that didn’t seem to matter. Their desire to sing as active participants in worship alongside those younger worshipers allowed them to lay aside their own music preferences in deference to others.”
The story continues... Every Member a Minister
Text by Joan Huyser-Honig
Photography by Steve Huyser-Honig
 In part because they lack personnel to divide ages during worship, smaller congregations naturally enjoy being intergenerational. |
Book Howard Vanderwell or Steve Burger to do a seminar on intergenerational worship.
Feel free to copy or adapt the congregational services survey that helped Kristy Ruthven recruit worship participants at Princeton Christian Reformed Church in Kentwood, Michigan. Administrative coordinator Yvonne Elliott put the results into Power Church Plus, a congregational database, and printed out reports for various committees. But you could input into Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice.
Read and discuss The Multigenerational Congregation: Meeting the Leadership Challenge by Gilbert R. Rendle and Bridging Divided Worlds: Generational Cultures in Congregations by Jackson W. Carroll and Wade Clark Roof. This article discusses issues from both books and suggests that congregations last longest when they consciously appeal to all generations, neither staying stuck in inherited traditions nor creating generation-specific congregations.
Plan to read and discuss a forthcoming book on intergenerational worship from the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship. Read reflections on intergenerational worship gathered in preparation for this book.
These books may give you insight into outlooks and concerns of people younger or older than you are.
- Children Matter: Celebrating Their Place in the Church, Family and Community by multiple authors
- Thinking Through the Children’s Sermon by William H. Armstrong
- Way to Live: Christian Practices for Teens edited by Dorothy Bass and Don Richter
- Growing Up Christian by Karl Graustein
- Embracing Midlife: Congregations as Support Systems by Lynne Baab
- Settling In: My First Year in a Retirement Community by Richard L. Morgan
Watch the DVD New Beginnings: The Gifts of Aging and use the leader’s guide to focus a discussion.
Check out these Calvin Institute of Worship resources related to worship with children, youth, older adults and intergenerational settings, including this survey on understanding the generations. Plan a worship service series on “The Chapters of Life.”
The Evangelical Covenant Church has excellent resources on Christian Formation in various stages of life.
Attend one of several children’s worship conferences or go to Aging in the 21st Century & Beyond: SCJ Senior Adult Ministries Leadership Training, September 4-5, 2007, Fayetteville, Arkansas.
Browse related stories about accessibility in worship architecture, children’s choirs, including children in worship, and reaching Christians who have dementia.
Feel free to print and distribute these stories at your staff, council, worship, or education committee meeting. These questions will get members talking about intergenerational worship:
- What have you learned from worshiping with people much older or younger than you? Are these opportunities available now in your congregation?
- Does your church focus more on some generations than others? If you send a bus to pick up neighborhood kids, do you also send transportation to nursing homes?
- When kids worship separately for years, how do they form the habit of worshiping with adults? Which worship habits does your church do best with…and at what age do worshipers start practicing them?
What is the best way you’ve found to make worship more intergenerational? Please write to us so we can identify trends and share your great ideas. Whether you do these or any other things, we’d love to learn what works for you:
- Did you create a survey or checklist to help worship planners more intentionally address different ages in liturgical words, prayers, and sermons?
- If you found a good way to get more ages involved in leading some aspect of worship, will you share it with us? What worked best to help train these new leaders, whether in leading prayer, music, Scripture, drama, or something else?
- If you recently moved from age-divided worship to (at least occasional) intergenerational worship, what worked best to prepare the generations to be together? Did you try multigenerational choirs, service projects, one-on-one pairings, or something else?
CICW web story reprint policy:
You have permission to reprint this article (or other stories in this collection) in its entirety, in print or online. Before the title of the article, please reprint the following permission statement. If you are reprinting online, please link to the website listed.
This article was first published by the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship, http://www.calvin.edu/worship/stories/.