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April 14, 2008Food for Thought
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Stephen Ong, pastor and founder of Victory Baptist Church in Greeley, Colorado, chose to build the church on an intergenerational model. "Too many families were living Christianity only at church," Ong says. "It wasn't being applied at home. I figured if we could bring families together in their walk of faith on Sundays, it would create a mutual accountability that would stay with them throughout the week."
Advocates of this ministry model tout the home as the primary center for faith formation. Often their top priority is training parents to impress the faith upon their own children. But successful intergenerational ministries incorporate more than just mom, dad, and the kids.
"The single most important thing in intergenerational ministry is to include the non-nuclear family units," says Eric Wallace, director of teaching services at Harvester Presbyterian Church in Springfield, Virginia, and author of Uniting Church and Home. "We call them 'households' - the widows, singles, single-parent families, etc. If you don't include them, you're just creating a 'family' fragment with separate needs and separate relationships from the rest of the body. The goal is to build unity and faith in every home, no matter who lives there."
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Comments
This is one of the best articles I have read in this publication. What a great reminder that we are all wounded/hurting and that the church is the triage center. I will remember that. Thanks.
Posted By: Mac Larsen | April 18, 2008 9:41 AM
Very good point. Sometimes it feels like we have too many programmes, etc, that fragment the congregation into various age groups or life circumstance groups that mean those who don't fit into those groups are just left out, and they don't learn the things that God intended them to learn from being family.
Posted By: Louise | April 21, 2008 6:24 AM