This was a mini rant I was giving to my parents and thought it was perhaps worthy of a blog post.
Lets be clear, there are certain things that I don’t want to hear from the older generation. Firstly I don’t want to hear them grumbling about the mess the church has got into. Not because the church is not in a mess, but because its a method of seeking to make other people (i.e. the younger people) responsible for getting the church out of the mess. Lets start with facts, the church did not get into this situation overnight, it has taken decades to get into it, and in each preceding decade it would have been easier to rectify than it is now. The people responsible for things in previous decades are now older people. So the grumbling is asking others to get you out of your mess.
Secondly I don’t want excuses not to engage with the younger generation. One of the things that has happened is a disconnect between the Church and the vast number of younger people. It started before 1970s, as I can remember sitting in school in the late 1970s and finding myself the only person familiar with the Easter story amongst my class mates in high school (I hope it was Easter, it may have been Christmas). They already did not know the grand narratives of the Christian gospel. That gap is partly your making, help us bridge it.
Please don’t think you can pass this onto us. What you tried to do then obviously wasn’t enough because it did not halt it. This means there are fewer of my generation in church than of yours, in case you had not noticed it. Expecting us to make the effort to connect with those younger and provide a chaplaincy service for you that allows you to stay within your comfort zone ain’t fair. I suspect our priorities have to be to get the gospel out to those who are younger than us. So yes things are going to be more uncomfortable for you. Believe it or not, its not half as uncomfortable as it is for us.
Now I am really not interested in blame, blame does not solve anything but I am interested in getting you on board, realising that you have a role to play (your retirement from church is cancelled just as mine from work is).
What is more it means change, its not the church kids we need to connect with or keep. I am sorry but we have consistently failed to find a way to keep them through college, when grants came in in the 1960s we should have started looking for new ways to connect. Chaplaincy is often under funded and does not connect back to the local congregation.
It is the secular 20 to 30 years olds who are just setting up a home in the area. How do we reach them? I don’t know, but we have to try experimenting to find a way.
That of course means our resources are directed elsewhere, not to keeping the body of the church functioning as it is, but on trying to develop relationships with people , people who are distinctly different from most of us in their attitudes and ideas. People who are a lot younger and therefore a lot more technologically au fait.
So if you are up for the challenge, welcome to the team, we need all the hands we can get, no matter how weak and full of arthritis they are. If you are not, then I am sorry, but we have more important things to do and at least you can stop grumbling.
