Worship Weblog

Schenectady Book Group – First Meeting

Posted by cicw

Monday, November 30th, 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 is a gathering of seven people from three RCA churches in Schenectady Classis, including three pastors, three other adults and one high school youth.

At our first meeting I asked the group for their first impressions about the book and the overall topic. What was noted by all was that RCA churches in the east tend to have a quite different ethos from many of the congregations depicted in the book.

Generally our churches are 1) historic in nature (many over 150 years old), 2) traditional in style, and 3) small in size. None of the churches we represent have families with five generations involved (although we noted how beautiful that would be); many have no more than one or two. Because of the traditional and long-established nature of our churches, there is also a lack of willingness to change, and small size does cause us to wrestle with the reality of diminishing resources and the fear of diminished effectiveness.

We noted that, although there are signs of the “blended congregation” “where a conscious effort is made to appeal to all the generations it encompasses,” churches in our area tend to be more of the “inherited-tradition” variety, where “members of the congregation practice what they have inherited, rather than work at adapting it to new circumstances.”

One of the stated reasons for accepting this study invitation was to discover ways to help our churches become more inclusive; that is, to ensure that no group within the church feels left out in either the planning or the implementation of worship. We are committed to an ethos of valuing every part of the church, and we asked the question of “who are we under-valuing?” Some of the answers were teens, the elderly, empty nesters, and men. One member noted that, while there is a “Women in Ministry Sunday,” there is no“Men in Ministry Sunday.”

We resonated with changing the statement we often hear— “Youth are the future of our church”— into the more inclusive “All parts of the church are our now.” An important part of this “now” is for the church to “bend” through small changes that are designed to include others whose participation is now lacking.

A challenge all of our churches face is in the “missing generation”: people between 18 and 35. We noted some of the reasons for this are the increased mobility of our society, the increasing poverty of our area, and the increasing demands placed upon youth by school, etc. It was noted that teens feel that older people are unwilling to undergo the changes that would be necessary to attract and assimilate them in the worship of the church.

Finally, we appreciated the biblical values that inform the desire to become more fully inclusive of all ages, notably the values of unity and covenant. We also resonated with the idea that faith formation is a community event rather than simply a matter of individual salvation.

Tags: bgschenectady, Book Groups 2009, intergenerational