MissioLife: Intergenerational

When I was a little guy there was an old man in our church who had the right word for lots of situations. Here’s one I remember: at Christmas time, our pastor often asked college students to identify themselves and let us know where they were attending college/university. A number of schools were mentioned. About the time it was all over, ol’ Pop Brubaker would stand up and, finally grabbing the attention of everyone, would say, “I went to the school of hard knocks!” Everyone laughed, not because they hadn’t heard his story but because his story had become a fixed feature of our story and we all joined in knowing it was a good time for him to let us know again.

My church had people of all ages. We had a little kids, we had grade schoolers and junior highers and high schoolers and we had college students, and young marrieds (the natural progression back in the 60s) and … all the way up to Pop Brubaker and the Seniors my father taught in his Sunday School class.

And there’s more to this: most of us knew most of us. There is a tendency today to “do church” in niches, but this is a colossal mistake of missing the whole point. The church is a family, and a family is composed of two or three or four generations. Some folks move off and start all over again and live with no connections, but that’s not what a family is.

And the church is a family, and a part of that means the church is inter-generational. This is one thing I really like about MissioLife. MissioLife is a top caliber church resource that organically teaches the Bible — the whole Bible as the Bible’s Story, from Genesis to Revelation, for the whole church, from kids to the Pop Brubakers of this world.

MissioLife, then, then may have a powerful value in the global context. You may well realize that churches in other parts of the globe are more intergenerational than churches in the Western world. But that means MissioLife will be potentially challenging for local churches in North America.  I urge you to click on the link and consider MissioLife for your church as a resource that will connect young and old, and everyone in between.