Other "Thinking Drafts" and writing by Keith Drury -- http://www.indwes.edu/tuesday .

 Praise choruses, drums, and guitars
...the "generation skip" in today's churches

Older people are astonished when younger pastors dress up in sweaters, and do away with all the hymnals in favor of singing off an overhead. Out goes robed choirs and the organ, in comes praise teams and drums. Out goes the pulpit, in comes a "stage" atmosphere. Drama is introduced along with a fast-paced MTV-like production. Older people are horrified. They start complaining that the "Church is becoming worldly." Younger people insist that organs, hymnals, and dressing formal for worship are generational innovations and not inspired methods. What's going on here?

Why is there such conflict and divergent opinion regarding worship styles today? There are many factors, but certainly one of the reasons is the "generation skip." Traditionally the church has had an orderly transfer of power and leadership from sixty year old people to adults in their fifties. As the retired older people passed out of the picture (even though they stayed on the board, they became less influential) the functional leadership in a church passed to leaders in their fifties. These "younger-older" people had some different views than their elders, but generally speaking, change was incremental and orderly. As change was introduced, those in the sixties accepted the adjustments as necessary adaptations to the newer fifty-year-old leaders. We had orderly change and transfer of power without great revolution.

But this is not occurring in the church today. The baton of power has skipped the fifty year-old-generation and is being passed all the way down to the forties-thirties generation. Why?

First, there are few of the fifty-year-old generation around. Some church leaders call this the "lost generation." This crowd was born in the late 1930's and early 1940's. It is the most underrepresented decade in the church population today. So, there are simply not many fifty-year-old leaders around to take up the power.

But there is a second factor as well. This generation has produced few strong leaders. Leith Anderson calls this generation "men who implement other men's dreams." While there are some impressive exceptions, by and large there are not a lot of strong, aggressive leaders emerging out of the fifty-year-old generation. America saw this in the last presidential election. The leadership passed from a man in his sixties to a man in his forties . . . the fifty-year-old generation was simply skipped.

And that brings us to the "generation skip" in the church. Right under the fifty-year-old "lost generation" or "silent generation" came a huge "baby boom" generation, now in their forties and thirties. Unlike their fifty-year-old elder brothers and sisters, this crowd is aggressive, opinionated, insistent, demanding and often arrogant. They will not be silent. They will not wait until they are older to take charge.

All of this produces an unusual situation in a local church. Leadership often has transferred from the sixties crowd to those in their fifties (with a sprinkling of younger people who often followed along until they were in their fifties). More recently leadership has skipped the fifties generation and passed down to the forties-thirties generation. When this crowd gets control it makes changes-- with the idea, the sooner the better.

All of this shows up most clearly in worship styles. The forties-thirties crowd are casual, quality-oriented, fast-paced, and exceptionally absorbed with the positive things. For them "classic rock music" is traditional music--it is the only music style of secular society they have ever known. Since they have been raised on television, they like drama. They like to do things as a team and prefer that to a single individual "song leader." They insist on having leadership shared between men and women. They like organization, management, leadership, Xerox machines, computers, FAX machines, and cellular telephones. They want the church to run as well as their businesses. All of this has caused conflict and division in many churches. Older people say, "We want our church back" to the pastors and younger leaders who have adopted a forties-thirties worship style. Other churches have developed two separate services--one for the sixties-fifties generation and the other for the people born after the second world war. This too causes conflict. Older people suspect they are simply being asked to "show up and pay your tithe" so that the younger pastor and baby boomer board can do what they really love--"entertain the Baby Boomers in the other service."

So what's a church to do? The older generation must recognize that the extraordinary amount of change they are experiencing is a result of leadership passing down two generations at once. Older folk must adapt to "twenty years of change in five years." While it is hard to do, the "generation skip" will likely make it necessary. Boycotting services, withholding tithe, and carrying on a destructive, critical telephone campaign is not the answer. Neither is clamping down so severely that the younger folk are chased out to the thousands of new "boomer churches." Accepting the fact that we're having two generations of change crammed into a single generation helps older folk understand why "they've taken our church away from us."

But we younger leaders have to be more careful too. We must be far more sensitive to the needs of the sixties-fifties crowd. Face it, we Baby Boomers are the most self-centered generation our country has ever known. We talk about being "need oriented" and "targeting the audience," but what we often really mean is "meeting needs of people like us" and targeting our own interests. We say we are being "seeker sensitive," but in fact we are often merely designing the service to fit our own likes and style of music. And we then totally forget our need-meeting principles when it comes to anyone over fifty years of age! We devour dozens of books describing the needs and culture and value systems of Baby Boomers and Baby Busters and those in "generation thirteen." But we seldom read anything--even if it were available--about the needs of people in their fifties and sixties, or retired people. Let's confess it--we are far more interested in meeting the needs of our generation than meeting the needs of the older generation. Those of us who are leaders in the forties-thirties generation must be far more sensitive to ministering to all generations, not just "people like us."

And finally, all of us must learn to compromise, to give some and take some, to win some and lose some. Come on, be honest, it won't hurt people in their sixties and fifties to learn a few new praise choruses, even if you think they are shallow, lacking in theology, and repetitive. And come on Baby Boomers, it really won't hurt your spiritual life to sing some of those grand old songs out of a hymnal. All of us must be a bit more pliable, more "easily entreated," and more understanding of other generations in the church. If the generations cannot get along in the church, it will ultimately lead to "generational congregations." Baby Boomers will simply plant their own churches and forget the older generation, allowing those churches to decline into obscurity.

Too much is at stake to fight over these issues. Balance is the objective. And we will only achieve balance as the older generation accepts change and the younger generation now in power introduces change incrementally and with sensitivity inspired by self-less love. With a bit of understanding, and a giant portion of God's grace, we can work this out.

So what do you think?

To contribute to the thinking on this issue e-mail your response to Tuesday@indwes.edu