Building Multi-generational Church #107

Leadership Straight from Bill Hybels Building Multi-Generational Churches We want to be a multigenerational church. I believe that the vision for this has to come from the heart of the senior pastor. If the senior pastor mainly wants to talk to old people, everyone will get the signal. If the senior pastor mainly wants to be a hipster and wear his pants too tight and freak his hair out, and he wants to reach that generation, many people will say, "Ok, we know what you are trying to do." If a pastor really loves all the generations and the congregation can tell by the demeanor, the illustrations, and the way of the heart of the pastor, then all the generations will say, "I think he is on my team. I think he or she is rooting for me." I think it starts in the heart of the pastor. Second, it continues with whom you put on stage. If you say you are concerned about the 20-somethings and there is no one under 60 on your stage, the message is too loud. I do not care what you say. Music style, decor around church, all of those things speak into is my generation valued? One thrill that I have in ministry these days is both my children are quite involved in the church and they are talking to me about generational stuff consistently. They have younger friends who talk to me about their generation. We had a Human Resources consultant in recently. I really admire him. He presented data to our Executive Team and that validated the fact that millenneals and younger generations basically want the same things and management at work than people of other generations. In other words, you say, "These people are so different they want to bring their cats to work. They want to play ping pong." Our younger staff are fired up. We have to talk more about work-family balance than we do about ping pong in the office. When they believe in a cause, our younger staff are totally devoted and will work alongside the boomer or buster generation. To have that validated through hard data was encouraging.