I have always had a thing for intergenerational church. There is something about it that appeals greatly too me.

I remember as a very young mum, not really liking having to take my children out to creche.  And then I felt from about age three that I had lost them forever Sunday School.  I felt that my children were no longer my own, or my responsibility- during meeting times.

I always felt like I was handing my children over to an institution for their spiritual education and well being.

But what can you do?   It is the way churches are set up.  Babies if not toddlers are sometimes separated early from their parents so the adults can sit quietly in church and be 'fed'.

It has always gone against my inward spiritual grain somehow.

I never felt that it meshed with what I understood of New Testament living.  It seemed to me that the radical Christian life talked about in the gospels and the book of Acts was a whole family affair with households committing to follow Jesus and being baptized.

Children didn't seem to be ushered elsewhere when Jesus taught, nor did they they seem to be in special classes when thousands were saved and filled with the Holy Spirit in the days after Pentecost.  They would have been in the middle of it all with their families.

Part of my frustration with taking children out of meeting together is that it can sometimes create the perception that it is adult business.  And while we give children an alternative often, they are not really integrated back into the life of the adult church body until late teens, and sometimes early 20's.

By this stage the generational chasms have become monstrous and no one can relate to each other any more, unless you belong to the same peer group or have a special gifting for relating to children and youth.

I am not at all against homogeneous groups perse especially for outreach purposes, but I do question the wisdom of our separatist approach to worship.

Another issue that does not sit straight with me, is the concept that the 'church' must spiritually educate the children.   While I agree 100% that a group that meets together to worship God and edify each other, should mutually grow and instruct each other, I believe that ultimately it is the parent's role to spiritually educate their children.  I believe this is seen time and time again in the bible.  We have created a mind set that is similar to school, and often emulates it as well.  Children broken up into age/grades and taught in a class room type session.

Or the new breed of Kids Church where children and teens go out to their own mini sized service, removed from their parents and the church body at large, mentored by their peers or those not too much older than themselves until the age of 18 when they are allowed back into big church.

This is not an easy concept to grasp nor to implement in a body of believers.  I know because for almost 5 years I was part of such a fellowship.  But I believe the struggle to do this was worth it in the lives of my children.  They connected with all kinds of people from all walks of life, across a spectrum of ages and were able to stand and worship along side them week in and week out.  Not just worship along side them though, often they would minister to them as well.  Old praying for young, young praying for old.  The gifts being trained and utilized by the whole Body for the Body to the glory of God.

Our time in that church was an amazing time of training and breaking mindsets, it has revolutionized my children in terms of who they can relate to, and has taken them outside of their comfort zones in terms of just being peer driven.

I will be forever grateful for that part of our journey together as a family and the training and equipping we received by those who were much further along in that journey than ourselves.

How about you?

What do you think of the concept of intergenerational worship?

There was a deeper reason why I asked the question of Luke 8 in my recent blog.

I asked who you identified most with in the passage.

LUKE 8




I have recently been challenged about how I identify with this passage as well.

I have often identified with those that have been healed by Jesus- because on many levels on various occasions I have too been healed.



I am being invigorated to identify myself with how Jesus must have felt in this passage and others in the New Testament.

To to ReJesus myself as two Hirsch and Frost might say.

".. M.Scott Peck in Further Along the Road Less Traveled recounted the episode when Baptist theologian Harvey Cox was addressing a convention of Christian healers- pastors, therapists, nurses, doctors- that Peck was attending.  During his presentation, Cox retold the story of Luke 8 of Jesus raising Jairus's daughter from the dead...

...Cox asked his audience of six hundred Christian healers and therapists to indicate which of the characters in the story they most strongly identified with. 

The bleeding woman?

The anxious father?

The curious crowd?

Or Jesus?

What Cox found that around a hundred could relate to the desperate woman;

several hundred identified with Jairus, whose daughter was dying;

the majority identified with the perplexed group standing by.

And six- yes, six- people felt they could identify with Jesus.

Peck's point in recounting this story experience was to point out that there is something seriously wrong with Christianity when only one in every hundred Christians can identify with Jesus.  Here was a story about Jesus the healer, told to healers, but none of them identified with Jesus.  Have we made him so divine, so otherworldly that we cannot connect with him anymore?  Peck suggests that this leads to the excuse that we can't really be expected to follow Jesus because we perceive ourselves way down here and Jesus way up there, beyond identification.  Say's Peck,

"That is exactly what we're supposed to do!  We're supposed to identify with Jesus, act like Jesus, be like Jesus.  That is what Christianity is supposed to be about:  the imitation of Christ.""

(Excerpt taken from ReJesus- A Wild Messiah for a Missional Church
by Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch pg 18)

We have had a very real case of bullying in our street for the past 14 months that we have lived in our current home.

It has involved most if not all of my kids at one point or another, but largely my son who is 15. For the most part it is unprovoked in terms of, what little provocation there is, the ensuing reactions are out of proportion.

Without going into the details, I wanted to ask you all about how you would respond to this kind of behavior yourselves?






I am currently reading the following book and I came across this quote that has helped me gain a fresh perspective on the bullying issue.







Suffering Prophet- Martin Luther King Jr




How would you handle bullying/persecution in your family? 
Especially the type that could escalate and eventually see someone hurt?