Drums and Giving (by Jonathan Storment)

This is post is by Jonathan Storment, preacher at Highland Park Church of Christ in Abilene TX.

A few years ago, I read some research on Tony Jones’ blog that was eye-opening. It was about the effectiveness of intergenerational ministry between mainline churches.

The point of the research was this:  They discovered a direct and negative correlation between the use of drums and giving. If you played drums in worship, the giving of the church would drop drastically. Simply put, if you worshipped the way younger people wanted, older people would stop giving, or leave the church altogether.

Church leadership was forced to choose between either having church vitality, or being able to pay the light bills. The great tragedy of our day is that our most creative people are creating, or spending their lives serving, institutions that will only last a generation. We are guilty of what C.S. Lewis calls “chronological snobbery.”

In his book, “Adventures in Churchland” Dan Kimball tells about reading a letter that had been written to a worship minister. The person who wrote it was upset about the new songs that were being introduced to the church. Specifically, one song really rubbed the guy the wrong way. Here is what he the letter said:

“I am no music scholar, but I feel I know appropriate church music when I hear it. Last Sunday’s new hymn – if you can call it that – sounded like a sentimental love ballad one would expect to hear crooned in a saloon.  If you insist on exposing us to rubbish like this – in God’s house! – don’t be surprised if many of the faithful look for a new place to worship.  The hymns we grew up with are all we need.“

The Song?

Just As I Am.

Never underestimate the ability that we religious people have to justify our opinions and villianize the views and motives of dissenting views. When you add in our climate of consumeristic individualism, we get a tragic cocktail that creates churches that are so tied to a particular age that they are unable to pass on the gospel.

At one point, the Gaithers were cutting edge, and no matter how cool Hillsong is today, one day they will lay in the same graveyard of relevance as Ray Boltz or Carman.

Over the past few weeks, lots of people have weighed in with great suggestions on how they are working on this. Intentional mentoring and reverse mentoring, generational humility, and letting younger people lead are huge parts of the solution of this problem.

But one of the biggest solutions I know is to approach each generation like a missionary approaching a culture. In every culture, there will be both good and bad aspects, and in some ways every generation will bear the image of God and the human condition.

The church that I work at is 90 years old. It was planted when my grandfather was a toddler, and it is a great church, but it also has its challenges. It turns out that the worship wars still happen, and no matter how you slice up the 75 minutes that 5 generations spend together, most people are disappointed in something.

And for us, that’s kind of the goal.

When people talk to me about not singing enough hymns or Chris Tomlin, I try to encourage them to capture this as a moment to grow in generational generosity.  We try to spread out the disappointment. We hope there is something for everyone, not everything for someone.

John Ortberg says “Effective intergenerational worship would be a congregation of diverse ages sitting through a service of mixed styles that displeases everyone equally.” I think that’s right.

I am a fan of Robert Weber’s idea of “ancient/future worship”. His big idea is that we should take ancient liturgy and hymns that the people of God have sung for hundreds or thousands of years and translate them into the language and style of now.

But when you approach church assemblies with “ancient/future”, it begs the question, “whose future?”

Each generation has different “heart languages” (language of transcendence or wonder) and so when you find yourself in a church that just sings songs you like, and nothing ever irritates you, you are probably not in a church that is as diverse as you need, and there is a good chance it is going against the nature of the Gospel.

I once heard Tom Long point out that the Gospel of Luke starts with the seniors. You have Elizabeth and Zechariah and Simeon and Anna, people who are well into their AARP benefits. But then Long points out that the rest of Luke/Acts is the story of how the older people passed on the gospel to the younger people and then trusted God enough to trust them with it.

The senior saints had no idea that the Gospel was going to involve such a sweeping re-orientation toward so much that had been so important to them. The Temple, Passover, nearly everything was going to be changed.

It looked different from what the senior saints could have ever imagined, but it was exactly what they had always hoped for. God was faithful to his promises, in surprising people through surprising ways, and so they could say things like “dismiss your servant in peace.”

These senior saints could do that because they trusted that God was bigger than any one generation.  And I believe that is still true.

What stories or examples of churches practicing generational generosity do you see today? Who’s an Anna or Simeon in your life?