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 fif