One of my deepest faith commitments is that God wants the church to be a unified Body made up of many different parts. This week’s post is the first section an essay I’ve written on the topic.

“There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Young nor old didn’t make the list in Galatians 3:28, but perhaps it should have, for the sake of today’s American Church.

Our culture has a merked tendency to segregate itself generationally –– toddlers to day care, kids to classrooms, college students to dorms, “real” adults to work, older adults to home alone, everyone watching television or surfing the web to avoid interaction with whoever is around. Cell phones and email have reconnected people in important ways, but they bring their own problems. Churches, opting not to fight the cultural tide, provide Sunday school classes and social activities for every demographic. Generational alienation, not suprisingly, characterizes many churches.

Churches for the Ages

One response to this generational divide is to try to circumvent it. In The Emerging Church, a sort of guidebook for reaching Generation X with the Gospel, Dan Kimball describes a new breed of churches that draw generational lines almost intentionally. While mega-churches find greatest success with Baby Boomers, Kimball suggests strategies for developing new churches to involve and convert Generation-Xers, a group that often struggles to find a place in Boomer churches. Kimball quotes Rick Warren: “No single church can possibly reach everyone. It takes all kinds of churches to reach all kinds of people.”

In one sense, Warren’s approach is based on sound enough reasoning: churches want to grow and reach the lost, and congregations often find greater success programming for a particular demographic than integrating many different kinds of people into a single group. Commonalities, after all, bring people together. I myself for two years during seminary participated in a small group of young adults who shared weekly Bible study and Sunday lunch. The fellowship we experienced was powerful and valuable.

I question, however, whether it is the primary fellowship to which God has called the Church.

To be sure, the Warren/Kimball model has proved wildly successful in bringing about church growth and leading countless people to become Christians. Warren argues persuasively in the Purpose-Driven™ Church that churches must determine their purposes and focus their efforts only on meeting those purposes.

For Warren, finding a church’s evangelistic target –– the kind of person a particular church can best reach –– is a key to achieving the purpose of reaching the lost. And of course, evangelism does need to be tailored to its intended audience. However, I will argue that gathering all different kinds of people into one community under the fellowship of the Gospel is also one of our indispensible purposes. If so, churches must not build their programs with such a narrow target in mind.

I suggest that a biblical understanding of the Church as the Body of Christ prohibits us from planning our congregations around reaching particular “target” people. Rather, it requires us to allow the Gospel to bridge differences which normally separate people. Unfortunately, churches in the U.S. are already divided up in every way imaginable –– denominational, generational, social, racial. Most of us attend churches primarily made up of and led by one demographic of people or another. The broad task of overcoming divisions is likely to be painful and protracted, and I am hardly qualified to point the way.

I want to offer a more modest proposal, that we take preliminary steps towards bridging such gaps by crossing generational lines within each congregation to form meaningful cross-generational relationships. This means first that believers will commit themselves to building relationships within existing multi-generational churches rather than following Kimball’s model of starting new congregations tailored to a particular group.

Second, I will suggest a place where such bridging of generations is perhaps most needed. It is, ironically, an area in which well-meaning parents and ministers often intentionally accentuate the division: the relationship of teenagers to the rest of the congregation.

There is more to follow next week, but I would be very interested in whatever thoughts or questions this raises for people.