Multigenerational ministry
One of the sweetest things about our life together at RBC is the way the older and younger generations love one another. I am so thankful that our ministry is multigenerational.
D. A. Carson gives a keen insight into factors that tend to splinter the generations apart from one another. Read it. Consider it. And then step out, in love, toward the other generation.
Doubtless there have always been generational conflicts of one sort or another. Arguably, however, in some ways they are becoming worse. There are at least two reasons for this. First, the rate of cultural change has sped up, making it far more difficult for older people to empathize with a world so very different from the one in which they grew up three or four decades earlier, while making it far more difficult for younger people to empathize with a world in which people used typewriters and wired telephones and had never heard of Facebook or Twitter. Second, and far more important, the social dynamics of most Western cultures have been changing dramatically for decades. The Sixties tore huge breaches into the fabric that had united young and old, assigning more and more authority to the young. The cult of youth and health that characterized the Eighties and Nineties, complete with hair transplants and liposuction, along with gated communities for the middle-class elderly and social welfare that meant families did not really have to care for, or even interact much with, the older generation, built a world in which integration across generational lines could be happily avoided. Even the new digital tools that facilitate interaction tend to enable people to link up with very similar people—very much unlike the way the church is supposed to be, bringing together very different redeemed people who have but one thing in common, Jesus Christ and his gospel.
You can access the whole article here:
http://thegospelcoalition.org/themelios/article/generational_conflict_in_ministry