The most spiritually formative moments of my life didn’t happen in an age-targeted church program. They happened across a table.
Bill, a retired pastor who was in his 80s, took me under his wing when I was in my late 20s. We didn’t meet for a curriculum. We met for coffee, short walks, and conversations that wandered through life and arrived at truth and grace. He listened more than he taught. When he spoke, his words carried weight because I knew the life behind them. His simple faithfulness helped me imagine obedience over the long haul.
At the same time, Lisa and Steve invited me over for family dinner. I was single then, still learning what adulthood looked like. We ate while they wiped up baby drool and cut food into toddler-safe bites. No lesson plan. No hyperspiritualized talk. Just a quiet, embodied glimpse of patience, partnership, and peace.
In these moments, I was discipled without anyone using the term. Yet formation—slow, relational, generational—is what many churches are missing. In trying to serve people where they are, churches have sorted them by life stage: Elementary children, teenagers, young adults, and empty nesters are siloed from one another. Most programs begin with good intentions and meet real needs, but we rarely pause to ask what we built or what it might cost us.
We’ve built systems that connect people but keep them apart. We’ve separated people into peer groups and fragmented spiritual formation. More than that, we’ve subtly taught people how to treat the church. If our ministries are built around personal preference and presented as optional, affinity-based experiences, then church feels like another consumer choice, privileging convenience over communion. People learn to engage with church on their own terms instead of on Christ’s. Deep Christian maturity doesn’t grow best through segmented programs but through shared life across generations.
Barna’s February 2025 report “Discipleship Across Generations” reveals this trend’s cost: While 87 percent of Christians over 55 say it’s important to continue growing spiritually, only 18 percent say their church helps them connect across generations.
This fragmentation didn’t begin as strategy. It began as sacrificial service. In late 18th-century England, Sunday school arose not as a church-growth tactic but as a gospel response to child labor. Children worked long hours six days a week without access to schooling. In response, churches gave up their one day of rest to offer literacy and Bible teaching—meeting families where they were and at great personal cost. Over time, however, outreach turned inward and programs evolved into unquestioned, self-serving norms. By the mid-20th century, as new educational theory and consumer culture shaped Western institutions, churches followed suit: organizing ministry by age, life stage, and felt need. But in mirroring the world’s categories, we inherit its isolation.
Today, in a cultural moment already marked by loneliness, screen-mediated relationships, and generational suspicion, our siloed structures risk reinforcing the very divides the gospel is meant to heal. Paul insists that in Christ there is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female (Gal. 3:28). We might add: no boomer or Gen Zer. In Christ, the old categories give way to a new kind of family united not by age or affinity but by grace.
Comfort, surely, can be found with one’s peers: One Gen Z friend of mine joked that his megachurch’s college group is the only place where he can meet girls who love Jesus. Older adults gain strength walking with others who are navigating similar losses—empty homes, lingering regret, the slow grief of aging, or the deep ache of losing a loved one. Parents know the relief of handing a toddler to a volunteer who knows what to do. It’s the recognition of friendship, as C. S. Lewis wrote: “The typical expression of opening friendship would be something like, ‘What! You too? I thought I was the only one.’ ” But while life-stage spaces can be meaningful, they’re not the point of church, nor do they often lead to Christian maturity.
Psychologist Jean Twenge notes that today’s generational divides aren’t simply cultural but are also digital. Time spent behind screens profoundly shapes how young people relate, learn, and believe. As technology rapidly rewires childhood norms, age-based ministry can be crucial. Full-time youth workers who make it their job to understand the shaping forces of digital addictions can strengthen the work of family discipleship.
But affinity should never become identity. Affinity groups risk forming Christians who know the events calendar but not the church family. The danger isn’t just isolation—it’s discipleship drift. When church always serves up what we want according to our felt needs and stage of life, then spiritual formation, too, becomes curated. Conditioned by constant customization, we treat church like a buffet: choosing ministries and communities that feel familiar, favoring teaching that confirms our instincts, and connecting with peers who share the same stage of life.
The result? Spiritual formation happens apart from the very people who might stretch us most toward mature Christlikeness.
Younger believers long for connection with older ones—but only if it’s relational, not transactional. As one Gen Z believer described, “I know I need older people in my life. But I also don’t know how to find them. And when I try, it doesn’t feel like they’re really listening. It’s like they’re trying to teach more than relate, as if I’m a project and not a person.” What younger believers are looking for isn’t mere correction disguised as care. It’s presence and relationship—the kind of discipleship that happens at a kitchen table, over reheated coffee and real conversation.
Some older believers hesitate to step into these relationships because the cultural gap feels vast, the vocabulary unfamiliar, and the pace of life exhausting. “I don’t want to make excuses or sound out of touch,” one older church member told me. “I just don’t know what they need from an old-school guy like me.”
That hesitation is understandable. But Scripture offers a different perspective. To the one worried about seeming irrelevant or obsolete, Proverbs reminds us, “Gray hair is a crown of glory; it is gained in a righteous life” (16:31). It takes a lifetime to acquire wisdom—and younger believers need it. They don’t need someone who has all the answers. They need someone who’s been through the questions.
Younger believers fear being misunderstood, patronized, or not taken seriously. But Paul tells Timothy, “Don’t let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example … in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith and in purity” (1 Tim. 4:12, ESV). Spiritual maturity isn’t always measured by age, but by faithfulness.
Multigenerational relationships will have their awkward moments. There will be missed cues and mismatched expectations. But maybe that’s the point. We don’t just need relationships that are easy—we need ones that carry us into maturity. And often, the very disorientation we feel is what makes us need each other most.
That kind of growth doesn’t come from doctrinal content alone. It comes from life-on-life proximity. From interruptible rhythms, shared meals, and the long obedience of everyday Christian faithfulness. To follow Jesus in our time, we need voices formed in earlier times. And to stay softhearted in a jaded world, we need the questions, energy, and urgency of the young.
We don’t need to scrap programs. But we may need to rethink what they’re for. Programs are best when they scaffold shared life, not replace it.
I’ve seen it happen, and it’s beautiful. A retired widow singing beside a high school student on a Sunday morning. An empty nester bouncing a newborn so an exhausted mom could take Communion. College students hauling boxes for an aging couple and then staying after to swap stories of faith, doubt, and fidelity. Single adults and families trading tips, career advice, and prayer requests.
These moments don’t start with a strategy. They start with a shift in imagination—a willingness to slow down, to move toward people in other stages of life, and to see the church not as a cluster of affinity groups but as a family already bound to one another in Christ.
The church was never meant to be a gathering of generations under one roof living separate lives. It was meant to be a spiritual family. Some things are best learned by walking with someone who has walked a little further than us. Some burdens are best carried with someone whose shoulders aren’t already stooped by the same weight.
For me, it started when someone made space. Bill invited me to walk his yard, sit for coffee, share a table. He didn’t organize a program. He simply showed up—and kept showing up. That simple act of hospitality became holy ground. It starts with a seat at the table.
Chris Poblete is editorial director for CT Pastors at Christianity Today.
