Leadership Journal

When Pastor Rehoboam took over the flock after the long tenure of his father, change management was his number one challenge. Everyone had different ideas about how he should lead the community. Some of the members of the congregation met with him to politely suggest some policy changes focused largely on the optimal intensity of membership requirements.

Rehoboam requested more time and decided to meet with his leadership team. He split the team into two groups: the rapidly aging Boomer leaders and the emerging leaders. Not surprisingly, they gave him diametrically opposite advice. He took the advice of the leaders from his own generation and crafted a compelling strategy ("My father scourged you with whips; I will scourge you with scorpions.") People by and large did not get on board with the new vision.

When Rehoboam sent out a staff member named Adoniram, who was in charge of equipping ministries (the TNIV translates it "forced labor"), the people stoned him. There was a big church split, there were serious worship wars (and in those days worship wars were worship wars), and after two and a half millennia, things still have not completely healed.

The moral of the story is that you should have all generations represented in a single leadership team. Actually, you could probably draw other insights from the passage (2 Chronicles 10) as well. But it is striking that even in the Bible, one of the ways that human community becomes disrupted is the generational divide.

If the generational divide was a gap then, it is a canyon now. We are niched by generation as never before. Thirty years ago, families had one TV with three channels; and if people watched something, they watched the same something together. Today there are more channels than you can count, and they no longer broadcast; they narrowcast to a little sliver in the age spectrum.

I serve at a 135-year-old Presbyterian church with a wide span of ages in the congregation and a leadership team with members who range in age from 26 (not me) to 68 (also not me). They are a fabulous group of human beings. Navigating change wisely is the subtext beneath almost every conversation we have. I will tell you what we are learning about generations working together.

Multi-generational church ministry in our day is uncharted territory. In past centuries, because culture changed more slowly, when people entered the church, they entered church culture. They sang common music and spoke a common language. Today, church life has largely been contextualized to reach people in popular culture. But pop culture has fragmented into all kinds of micro-cultures. Generations are generally segregated by media, clothes, music, entertainment, and technology. Trying to reach different generations simultaneously has become like trying to design one church that will work in both Spain and France.

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