a Biblical thought...
I will refine them like silver and test them like gold. They will call on my name and I will answer them; I will say, 'They are my people,' and they will say, 'The LORD is our God.' (Zechariah 13:9)
I will refine them like silver and test them like gold. They will call on my name and I will answer them; I will say, 'They are my people,' and they will say, 'The LORD is our God.' (Zechariah 13:9)
a Book thought...
Good fathering can be learnt: many fathers have found books and courses on fathering very valuable. (p196)
a Dave thought...Kimball estimates that 90 percent of worship services targeting a younger generation run into serious trouble after three years. One factor is the way these age-specific ministries isolate young people from the rest of the church.
Kimball questioned whether a ministry based on generational preferences could long survive.
"If we are talking about a mindset, then to make someone switch to another approach to spiritual formation and worship when they reach a certain age is a difficult undertaking," Kimball wrote in Emerging Worship. "It would be like birthing a Korean worship service that uses Korean language, Korean music, and a Korean mindset in all their communications, and then—when they reach a certain age—telling them they can't worship as Koreans anymore."
"If your model is based on the big event with one person teaching, I just don't think it's going to work."
Kimball learned this lesson the hard way. In the mid-1990s he served as the young adults pastor at Santa Cruz Bible Church where he began experimenting with a new worship gathering. He darkened the room, arranged the chairs, lit candles, and served coffee. While these moves seem cliché today, they were radical for the time. Within a few years, Kimball's experiment had become the church's largest worship gathering. Then the questions started. When will the twenty-somethings start coming to "normal" church?"I feel that if we can see church as the people, and not just define church by the worship gathering, a lot would be solved in bridging generations," Kimball said. "We could focus more on the older mentoring the younger, the older opening their homes and being sages and guides to the younger. Instead we focus so much on getting the twenty-somethings into the main worship gathering. But just sitting in a room for an hour and half looking at the backs of everyone's heads does not make something intergenerational."
Just a thought.
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2 comments:
I too have watched Churches who are designed for the Y Gen grow into large groups but as one group comes in the front door another group goes out the back door. It is because they only relate to that type of worship for a time and then because they know no-one in the following generations they just fall away. Church needs to be made up of all generations as each has something to offer to the other.
I understand the concept of attempting to grab attention through various strategies and techniques. And yes it is true, gen y are and can be a very fickle bunch.
It is tricky. These people do need God, and do need aspects of worship and church that they can "fit into" but how much is too much? Is making it all about gen y neglecting other aspects of faith, coming together, worshipping God, laying down of self?
It has to be about Him and not about us. To hear from and be led by God in what we are to do in worship, in message, in strategy, and let Him do the rest. Only He can pull the heart strings of our soul, not man, and certainly not by our flesh, but by His spirit.
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