Suddenly my self-consciousness was gone. We prayed for the church and the people that were sick or requesting prayer in the bulletin. We prayed for unity and for love, for reconciliation and the healing of old wounds. We prayed for goodness and grace, beauty and hope to rest here and in us.
Then the pastor was calling us all back to the surface. We blinked and I realised we were stilll here in the itchy pews. We grasped hands and nodded, like friends.
We went to that church with its traditional service and hymns, it’s pews sparsely populated with women wearing pantyhose for nearly a year but we never made a friend, never cracked the code of entry to tight social groups. And so we found ourselves in a different church filled with people our own age and songs we knew and flip-flops and suddenly it was easier to make a friend.
But I miss them. I miss the old people.
I am left wondering: why do we self-separate?
Maybe it’s just the natural outgrowth of our age separation all life long. We’re not an intergenerational church because nothing in our life has been intergenerational – we go to school with twenty other kids our age, we go to church and are kept in the classrooms away from the main service to eat goldfish crackers in peace, we sit in the warehouse with a trying-too-hard-to-be-cool youth pastor for another few years and then we emerge, blinking at the sun of society, and we draw to ourselves again, like to like, unable to fathom an intergenerational church life, unable to make it work, unable to translate with love the myriad of gaps yawning between us.
This church in particular had deep anger between the generations. The old people were angry with the young ones for wanting change (oh, church music…how many churches have you thus felled?) and the young ones were leaving because of “stubborn” old people that thought they owned the joint and the pastor because they paid for the carpet in 1983 and so the church was dying and oh, so tired. No one spoke the same language and eventually we got tired of trying so hard to start new there. So, like most of the other young families, we took our tinies and left for a group of people that were more like us.
On that Sunday though, I remember that when we are leaving, Waldorf said to me, “Well, that was nice to pray with you young people.”
Then he said wistfully, “I think that the young people kind of need us and we need the young people, don’t you? Because this was nice.”
It was nice. It was more than nice, I wanted to say. It was Kingdom of God, wide table set for us both and grace for just a moment and I loved it, this glimpse of what it looks like – what it is supposed to look like – even if was just for a moment. And it was a gift.
But all I said was thank you and have a nice rest of your Sunday, sir.
What has been your experience with older generations within a church context? What can we do to look more like a family in our churches?
