Resurrect Communications within the Church

“I was recently in a church service where the message of the sermon was about the intergenerational representation of congregations, and one of the points was that previous generations need to realize that younger generations can’t be told stories the same way the previous generations were told them. The language has changed. The environment…the substrate upon which we now build has changed. Because of this, the pastor added that previous generations needed to be willing to listen to the stories and voices of the younger generations as well.

Now at some point in the midst of this great message the children in the Sunday school class had been taken outside to play in the grass with some balloons, and you could hear their laughing and shrieks of joy and surprise outside the windows of the sanctuary.  What an appropriate backdrop for such a message!

And then it happened.

An older gentleman in the congregation stood up, walked clear down the side aisle, opened the door to the church yard and told the children that they needed to quiet down because a service was taking place inside.

And in that moment something in me broke. Some dark, black, gloomy hole within my being dropped into endless freefall. During a message about generations needing to be willing to listen to one another, some guy actually got up and told the younger members of the church to shut up.

Any hope I had for change died in that pew. Any hope I had for conversation, for renewal, for cross-generational interaction choked to death center-aisle on the cranberry-colored carpet runner and to the sound of the words: “You kids need to quiet down.””

What you have just read is a quote from a June 5, 2012 post on the Blog site Scriptorium http://grunewaldguild.com/blog/?p=1757. This is the first time I have been to the site. I was moved to visit there through a Facebook post by the Diocese of Eastern Tennessee. Their post coincides with the upcoming national convention of the Episcopal Church, where among other issues the diminishing census of our churches will be discussed.

I would like to touch on just one point the writer of the blog alluded to.  We are in fact in a time that most of the information that we take in and put out is via some electronic medium. Most of this information is only moderately relative to the moment and even less relevant to our general ability to live in and cope with our world. Church has become a thing that we do, rather than a part of the essence of our being. It is those of us in the clergy who post or tweet about things religious, not our congregants or the public in general, with the exception of feel good platitudes and sayings or quotes of the day/week that contain a Bible verse. It seems most of the time that we know a great deal about each others daily routine and know almost nothing about the faith, needs, wants, emotions, and impactful experiences of one another. We have forgotten how to communicate.

“…one of the points was that previous generations need to realize that younger generations can’t be told stories the same way the previous generations were told them.”

The generations of story telling and storytellers have faded away. I can remember when I was young; I could spend hours listening to my grand parents, older relatives and neighbors, and even my parents telling exciting and interesting stories of how things were in the past. There are two reasons that this type of communication is nearly gone. We have run out of storytellers in the older generation, it has become a lost art and we have no listeners in the younger generation. Today’s young (I consider anyone between 2 and 60 young) don’t have time or are too distracted to sit and listen.

“Any hope I had for change died in that pew. Any hope I had for conversation, for renewal, for cross-generational interaction choked to death center-aisle on the cranberry-colored carpet runner and to the sound of the words: “You kids need to quiet down.””

I guess that I am just old enough to look at the dilemma being presented as an opportunity rather than the death announcement of inter-generational communication. I believe that we can resurrect (an interesting term in a religious conversation) the art of communication in the church, to the end that we are not running the younger generations away.

The chance lies in whether or not we, the Church, are willing to make a very deliberate effort to create an environment conducive to effective communication. This deliberate effort has to be designed to place the three or four generations of congregants in contact with one another on a regular basis.  We must develop storytellers willing to sit or stand before others and relate their stories. We must involve the older folks in situations were they can observe and listen to the younger members of the church. This could begin with developing young storytellers who can do presentations during adult functions. You can take this model and mold it and shape into hundreds of different applications and programs. All of this must be framed in love, God’s abiding love, bathed in prayer, monitored with patience, promoted and supported by the Rector (Pastor). There is not a short term fix. It will be a longer, even lifetime, effort; it will be a change in the lifestyle of the church.

The author of the blog says of himself and his peers: “Because this is a generation of self-starters and micro-entrepreneurship. They have no problem whatsoever starting up their own things. And they have been. And they are. And they will continue to do so.” A key place to begin a process may very well be within this very group of people. A focused effort must be made toward this demographic to recruit their self-startedness, micro-entrepreneurship, and energy to be a driving and integral force in the mechanism of transition back to communications.

This is a good blog post, relevant to what is currently going in the church in general and across denominational lines. I encourage you to read the entire article, highlighting every thing that you see happening in your church.  Then I ask that you go back and make a list of things you can do to begin the process. When you do begin, start a blog or find an existing blog to post your ideas and programs. Let each other know what works for you and doesn’t work. Learn from one another, have seminars, and present homilies that support this new way of doing an old thing… talking to each other.  Blessings.

 I.N.J.