Attempting to Bridge the Gap

You can’t blame people for behaving in ways you’ve taught them to behave.  And you can’t get mad when people fail if you’ve set them up to fail.

I’m beginning to realize that we’ve set-up a lot of church people to fail (especially teenagers and their families).  And I’m finding myself getting frustrated for how people behave, when they’re only doing what I–as a youth minister–have taught them to do.  Let me give you the most recent example:

Last Wednesday night, I decided to bring our youth up to join the adults in their Wednesday night Bible Study because my good friend & our Minister of Education, David Walker, was going to do a study on the idea of being created in God’s image.  As we talked about it I commented on how appropriate that would be for our students to hear.   This summer we’re taking a more casual and laid-back approach to our Wednesday night youth program anyway, so why not do something radical and merge with the adults for one night?

I got the word out through Facebook, texts and phone calls to our students.  With our summer-time attendance slump, I was expecting at least 10 or 12 show up and couldn’t wait to see how impressed our adults would be with the depth of insight they could bring to the discussion!

Guess how many showed up?  Lower…lower…there ya go!  ONE. Yep, that’s right.  And it was our minister of music’s daughter. We even had a couple of youth there for supper with their family get up and leave to help work with the children’s program.

But as I sat there frustrated and discouraged, I realized that we have set-up our students for this very fall.  We have been operating a youth ministry built more out of what Mark Yaconelli calls “adult anxiety and teen angst,” and this was  a perfect example of teen angst.  It frustrated me because if we had met as usual in the Warehouse for youth Bible Study we would have had a decent group.  But because we were going to join the adults up in the “big church” they stayed away as if we were hosting a missionary showing mission trip slides!

This is a problem that MUST be fixed! The “generation gap” must be bridged!

And we are taking “baby steps” to do just that.  One thing we’re doing more of is family-based events instead of just planning multiple events for adults, children, and youth that just end up competing with each other for buses and calendar dates.  Tonight, in fact, we are taking a whopping 44 people to see the Atlanta Braves play!  We’ve promoted it as FBC Family Night @ Turner Field.  We have whole families going together…parents, teenagers, and younger siblings.

It’s a youth event…no, it’s a children’s event…no, its a FAMILY event!

Bridging the Gap!

And in a couple of weeks we’re transforming our annual Youth Lake Day to a Family Lake Day.  We’re hoping we’ll have families of all kinds come: those with small children, teenagers, or no children at all.  We’re having a fish fry that we hope will help even bring out our senior adults.

They’re not world-changing, earth-shattering events.  But they’re baby steps in helping our adults be less anxious about being with teenagers, and helping our youth feel less angst about chillin’ at the lake with our older generations.  I feel as Kara Powell does in the latest issue of Immerse where she said,

“I’m inspired by churches that are realizing that the Kingdom is more than separate adult and kids’ tables; it’s followers of all ages who feast together on the goodness of God’s Kingdom and invite others to join the celebration.”

I want our church to be one of those churches.  I look forward to sharing more about our adventures in “attempting to bridge the gap.”

Tags: Church, Family, Family Ministry, Generations, Student Ministry