a few totally unrelated thoughts from my life recently

Apparently I have been neglecting my blog for the last three weeks. My first clue came when I had to try to remember my log-in because it had been so long since I had actually had to use it to get in. The last few weeks have been busy and as much as I have kept meaning to come by here to write a post, there never seemed to be enough hours in a day. I have no specific thing I have been thinking about a lot recently - mostly it's been a few smaller things that have been running through my head. So this post may be a little bit random.

Last weekend I was at a conference at my church. We were using Beth Moore's Loving Well teaching for the weekend. I was challenged by her saying that we cannot love others well until we accept that we have been well loved by God. Our love for others must come out of the overflow of God's love for us in our lives. If we are only seeking love from the other people in our lives, we will easily become burnt out on loving people. The love we receive from other people should be a bonus, that comes after we have been filled up with God's love. We must continue to seek to be filled with God's love as we pour out love to others.

My sister will be here in a couple days. That is something that I am really looking forward to. Six months without seeing her is too long! I think at times I have taken for granted how much I enjoy spending time with my sisters. But in the last year I have come to a greater understanding of how special our friendships as sisters are. To this day, my sisters are the ones who can drive me the craziest and frustrate me the most. But, they can do that because of our relationship. My sisters are also the ones I have laughed the most with, cried the most with, and have the best memories with.

crossing the lines of age we draw in the church

I borrowed a book from my Mom a few days ago that looked really interesting. And upon reading it - definitely has been an interesting read. The book is called Generation Ex-Christian: Why Young Adults are Leaving the Faith . . . and How to Bring Them Back, by Drew Dyck. There is much I could write about the book, but that's not what prompted this post.

I read a few sentences in one of the chapters that jumped off the page at me because they resonated with something I have wondered about for a while. I have often wondered whether our division of the church according to age was a good thing.

"According to Smith's research,* one key indicator of whether or not young people stick with their faith was intergenerational connections. Basically, those young people who had relationships to older Christians, whether their parents or other faithful congregants, were far less likely to abandon their faith in their twenties." (Generation Ex-Christian, pg. 177)

I guess having grown up in a church that my parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were active members of, I was incredibly blessed to have those intergenerational connections happen naturally. But, I also know of many other people in the church of other generations who took an interest in my life, and still do. Until the last few years I have taken that for granted. I realized how blessed I was in a conversation with a friend who came to follow Christ as a young adult and really only knows other young adults at church well.

It makes me wonder if we have lost some of the richness of the church as the body of Christ by always segregating people by age for church events. I wonder if we need to once again become more intentional about connecting the generations in our church. After all, the body of Christ needs all of us to function as God intended it, but we cannot do that if we never talk to anyone outside of a ten year age span around our age.

There is definitely a place for youth groups and young adults ministries and seniors ministries, but there needs to be a place for ministry that speaks to more than one generation at a time. If we do not do that, we will risk losing young adults in the church. Even with the strong family of faith I come from, I love sitting around a table at the women's Bible studies I am a part of with women of all different ages and walks of life. I learn so much more than if I was to sit at a table doing the same study with all people my own age. We have much to learn from the other generations in the church.

It makes me a bit sad sometimes to sit in a church service and look around to see all the youth sitting in one area, the young adults in another, young families in another, seniors in another. Why the separation? Yes, I know we want to sit with friends or family. But, I have found that my favourite place to sit is with people who have been followers of Christ for more years than I have been alive. There is a richness to their worship that I cannot describe.

So I am left to wonder, how do we develop intergenerational connections better? How do we develop those connections so that young adults have stronger ties to the church as a whole? How do we connect youth and young adults who are not from Christian families with the older generations in the church to help them grow?

*Christian Smith, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2005), pg. 162-163

does our view of God limit our worship?

{Disclaimer: This post is not directed any one person. Nor is it meant as comments against worship in our churches. It is merely my wondering on the subject as I try to live life as a follower of Christ. I do not intend to offend anyone, only to challenge them to think.}

I was having a conversation with my Mom last night about worship songs that we so often sing. It's a conversation that I've had before with other people. We were talking about how sometimes it feels like all we sing about in worship is love - to the point where, to my Mom and I and to some others I have spoken with, it feels like the song is more something we would say to a husband or significant other - rather than to God. Sometimes I do wonder if we so easily get focused on God's love for us and our love for Him that we leave the rest aside.

I have nothing against songs that talk about God's love for us or our love for Him. That is incredibly important and we should not leave it behind. But, when I look back at the hymns of our faith, I see a broader mix of what the songs talk about. Yes, there are great hymns like My Jesus I Love Thee. But there's also hymns like A Mighty Fortress is Our God that talks about the strength of the God we serve and the battle we are engaged in as follower of Christ. Both are great. Both are right. And both are needed in our worship. Without one of the other something is incomplete. Yet I often feel as though most of the worship I am part of today tends toward songs like My Jesus I Love Thee, with nothing of the other.

This trend has bothered me for a long time. The more I have thought about it, the more I wonder if some of this tendency comes from our attempts - often unknowingly - to make God someone safe and predictable. Yes, God is loving - there is no doubt about that. But, He is also God and is beyond our human comprehension and we cannot make Him safe because we want to understand Him.

I think that when we focus on only one characteristic of God, we actually limit our understanding of Him to a greater extent than we could otherwise have. Just as focusing on only one or two characteristics of a person would mean that we would have a very small understanding of who they are, the same thing happens with God. Even if we do not prefer or cannot completely understand all of God's characteristics, we cannot refuse to acknowledge that which we do not prefer or understand.

As I said in my disclaimer above, I do not mean this to be directed at any person who leads worship. But, I do wonder if our view of God and what parts of God we choose to focus on have limited our worship.

As always, I would love to hear other people's thoughts on this. You can leave them as a comment on this post.