I've been thinking a lot about Mult-Generational Ministry lately. A couple of years ago my church decided that one of our values was to be an "Intergenerational Blessing" to each other. We have had a difficult time figuring out what this looks like for our youth department. We're a "community" church so there are many families involved and our Youth Staff team does a really good job of interacting with them. We take a lot of parents on our summer trips and missions events. But, I wasn't feeling like that was taking it far enough to really be "Intergenerational" it's easy to do "family" stuff but to reach out to the "whole" church is a different thing. I want us to be a youth ministry that values young adults, senior adults, parents, single people. I want us to expose our students to the "Church" and the "Church" to our students. I want the older congregants to know that we care about them and need their history, wisdom and faith to be shown to our students.
Last year we took a group of HS students to Israel and while we were there my High School Director Kevin and I talked a lot about what it would look like to have more than just students with us. Sitting next to the stream where Gideon's army was shrank we made the decision this year to open the trip up to anyone in our church that wanted to come with us. At the time we had a conversation about the difficulties of what this would look like. We decided though that we would go ahead with this idea and deal with any potential issues when they came up.
Is it going to be messy? Yes. Is it going to be amazing? Yes. We're so stoked to already have 7th graders and 70 year olds coming with us. We've got full families, young adults and individual students. We've told everyone that this will still be a "youth" trip so we will have more active type of things to do but we're going to try and cater to everyone.
I'm really looking forward to what the training for this trip will look like. We want everyone on the trip feel a part of the team and not give any more leadership, authority or deference to any particular age group. We have one student coming who was with us last year and we've already told him we will expect him to do some teaching at Holy sites. I'm really looking forward to seeing what it will look like to have a senior in high school be the expert teaching older adults.
So much of this Israel trip involves being on a bus with our group. I can't even begin to imagine what it's going to look like next summer to have that diverse of a group on the same bus.
What Multi generational things do you do in your Youth Ministry and what works for you? If you could dream big what would it look like?
I love this idea of “joint” ministry. Especially have a senior student teach in Israel. More opportunities for students to teach and lead vs spectating will cause a deeper spiritual focus. Even in church settings. I have had HS students teach parents of JR high students, things that Jr higher will experience. Good stuff Lars!