Worship Weblog

Surrey Book Group (Wilma's Group) – First Meeting

Posted by cicw

Tuesday, July 28th, 2009

Book Groups

We invited 34 book groups across the U.S. and Canada to meet and discuss The Church of All Ages and its implications for their worship, and to share their notes here.
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Our group consists of a writer, a counselor, a home-schooler, a worship director, a music leader, a pianist, a children’s pastor and a Bible teacher, all in the Christian Reformed church, 3 different churches represented.

We began our first meeting praying Ephesians 2:11-15 and considering the breaking down of “the dividing walls of hostility”. Several members described powerful, natural experiences when walls between generations were/are down and unity is deeply experienced (homeschooling, Marches for Jesus in the ‘90’s etc.) but how disappointingly rare it is to experience these in other settings, especially worship.

We noted that it seems to require a lot of hard, intentional work in all the churches we’re part of to make inter-generational anything happen, let alone worship and wondered if this could be because a niche/programmatic approach to worship and life in general makes us accentuate differences between the generations and stereotype them?

We recognized that the need for authentic exchange/conversation between the ages is vital but we wondered here too, why is it so awkward, so hard to have this kind of exchange? The informal style of Vineyard worship and time, even in the sermon, for interaction was offered as an example of something Reformed churches have very little of.

In fact, we all agreed that the Reformed tradition does have a few strikes against it in seeking authentic inter-generational contact: we are not a particularly vulnerable, open group even amongst same age groupings, and can actually be quite cliquey. As well, parents are often willing to let the Christian schools do the work of spiritual bridge-building for them. We actually need to do a lot of work educating parents in the church as to what i.g. worship could look like and how they could be part of it.

We did recognize that it’s an unfair burden to place all the “fixing” of inter-generational issues on 1 hr. of worship: we need lives lived together in many ways with worship as a particularly rich example. Because what IS worship anyway? Christianity is very radical, going against the grain of the world: how do we train for that? We felt excited thinking about worship as training for living life all the time, everywhere, deeply and without fear, even though it seems like Christians in our part of the world live quite safely and find it discouragingly easy not to integrate faith and life (another reason it’s so hard to bring the generations together?)

All of us found the chapter on Fowler’s stages of faith very helpful and more evocative than speaking of the generations: it’s places on the journey we should emphasize, more than age. A few of us felt disappointed that the book dismisses Stage 6, Universalizing Faith, as “quite rare and beyond the scope of the book.” Isn’t it the natural outgrowth of a deeply discipled life? Why are we not noticing the Mother Teresas in our own neighbourhoods and, in fact, nurturing towards this, trusting this as the natural progression of a Christ-life? Are we stuck programming for different ages because we’ve lost a picture our common destiny as “one new humanity?”

A particularly rich image of authentic intergenerational life that was given was the martial arts, where more advanced participants are still in training with the younger ones, all in the room together! Iron sharpening iron…

Tags: bgsurreywilma, Book Groups 2009, intergenerational worship