What makes the church so special in nurturing faith?
Fred P. Edie and Mark A. Lamport think it has something to do with the great potential for many generations being in one interacting community with intentionality. And, this needs to be cultivated. Not many places are left in our Western approach to society where many generations will gather in a group with intentionality. It is the the intermingling of the generations that we find in church that can foster beautiful growth in faith.
In chapter 14 of Nurturing Faith: A Practical Theology for Educating Christians, Edie and Lamport walk through the benefits of intentional intergenerational activity within the church on faith formation. They highlight the importance of formal and informal intergenerational formation moments as pivotal aspects of the church’s educational curriculum, including recurring rituals, frequent formal conversations, frequent “spontaneous” conversations, and the intergenerational sharing of life, work, and church service. Children and adults should be recognized as being in a sort of feedback loop when they participate in meaningful community of faith moments as well—the elders learn from the whimsy and questions of the children while the children learn from the timely wisdom of their seniors. Faith formation in an intentionally intergenerational context is reciprocal. In short, our churches need to be intentional in highlighting the interactivity and interdependence of its many generations.1
Intergenerational Interaction at Woods Harbour Wesleyan Church
Edie and Lamport urge that churches need intergenerational processes of faith formation, and I couldn’t agree more. Children see things differently than adults. They have such whimsy and imagination. They ask beautifully naive questions, they can point out inconsistencies with brutal honesty. They can also miss the forest for the trees and need help comprehending complex topics. Our eldest in our churches draw upon a fountain of experience, they have been there in many respects. They can provide preventative wisdom to the younger generations. They can also be prone to get stuck in ‘the way things always have been,’ and can use the honest reflection of the younger generations to test for poor traditions. So, how are we doing as a church to cultivate intergenerational faith formation?
At Woods Harbour Wesleyan, we have a Sunday morning service where all generations are together in the service up to a certain point. Children up through grade 5 stay with the adults for the opening 15 minutes of the service before going to Sunday school for the rest of the service. They get to experience congregational reading of Scripture, singing, and prayer in a multi-generational setting. When we have communion, they are usually present for that as well. But there isn’t a large amount of consistent intentional interactivity. The younger generations are often recognized but only sometimes given an opportunity to be a part of a core component of the worship gathering.
We can improve in this area by more regularly asking the younger generation, alongside parents and other core adults in their lives, to participate meaningfully and intentionally in core elements of the worship service.
This is a strategy that Edie and Lamport suggest for in their work for communal and intergenerational faith formation: make everything related to worship from planning, to worshipping, to reflecting/evaluating upon it purposefully generationally inclusive. A first-step towards this can come about by utilizing resources designed for kids within the Sunday morning worship time when we are all together. But I think there’s a cultural value that needs to be instilled to see this become a consistent aspect of our church life: the adult portion of the congregation needs to see the children as ones they depend on in coming together to worship on any given Sunday. It is not that we would seek to involve the younger generations, but that we may see ourselves as adults as actually dependant on them for the service. In that way we may become intergenerationally interdependent.
- Fred P Edie, and Mark A Lamport, Nurturing Faith: A Practical Theology for the Educational Mission of the Global Church (2021). Kobo ebook. Chapter 14. ↩