Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to Thriving.
Thriving is created by the discipleship and advocacy team of the Synod of Victoria and Tasmania Uniting Church in Australia.
This podcast is produced on the unceded land of the Wurundjeri people.
Hello and welcome to Thriving. It's great to be here today with Chris Barnett. Now, if you're someone who's been part of the Uniting Church for any length of time, you will know Chris well because he has been part of synod roles, he's been congregational roles, and now he's about to start a new life in a presbytery role. So he's well known particularly in the Synod of Victoria and Tasmania. Hi, Chris.
[00:00:41] Speaker B: G', day, Sandy. Thanks for the opportunity to be here.
[00:00:45] Speaker A: So it's exciting to have you. But we should also say, and we will talk about it more, that you've also been really heavily involved in the conversation around intergenerationality and what it means to build intergenerational conversations right around the world in the last decade or so. So having someone like you on the podcast to speak is not just my mate from victas who's a presbytery minister, but this is somebody who has international cred in the area.
[00:01:11] Speaker B: International cred. Not often I think of myself as having that, but yes. And we've been Bible study buddies for a long time.
[00:01:18] Speaker A: We have been Bible study buddies for.
I don't want to say how long, 30 years, at least three decades.
[00:01:25] Speaker B: That's right, yeah.
[00:01:27] Speaker A: So, Chris, tell us about you. Yeah.
[00:01:30] Speaker B: Where does one begin? So I was born at a very young age and life has progressed from there.
Interesting phase of life at the moment where I'm actually less involved in intergenerational ministry than I had been for a long season. I suppose the privilege of being in a role similar to yours currently, Sandy, for me was the opportunity to get exposed to a lot of different thinking, the opportunity to explore different places and to be part of that kind of transition from a children, children and families focus through to the intergenerational perspective. And that's been a, for me, stimulating, challenging, exciting journey which has enabled me to connect with many, many people through Victoria, around Australia and across the world. It's been a remarkable privilege to be part of the growing story of intergenerational ministry over the last, let's say, 10 years.
[00:02:31] Speaker A: So when I spoke to Dave Sinos and Tracy Smith about their new book the other week, they sang your praises and were talking about, oh, we all know Chris.
[00:02:41] Speaker B: Yes, Dave is very generous. Tracey's fantastic. That's two of the amazing people I'VE been privileged to spend time with over these last.
[00:02:51] Speaker A: That's right. So I did say to them, well, we'll leave the bit about the understanding of what intergenerational ministry is until you were here, because really you've had a fairly important role in actually clarifying how we understand multi generational, cross generational and intergenerational. Shall we dive right into that, do you think?
[00:03:12] Speaker B: Happy to do that.
Behaviour's always.
Sorry.
[00:03:18] Speaker A: We're trying to talk about growing, thriving communities. So I wonder if you could talk about intergenerationality and multi generationality, cross generationality and how that leads to a thriving community of faith.
[00:03:31] Speaker B: Yeah, very happy to. I know Dave is always very generous, you know, putting my name next to some of this thinking. But it actually was originally drawn from some work by the United Church of Canada in relation to mono, multi, cross and inter cultural ministry. And some of those principles have been picked up and adapted to the generational language. So it probably begins with the idea of being mono generational is that very much idea. It's one set, very much self contained, quite happily engaging, but almost unaware of the other. In this case, generations around. The idea perhaps of say, a youth group on a Friday night, quite distant from a lot of the other activities of the church. You might describe that as a almost monogenerational environment. The idea when we move to a multi generational environment is that sense of different generations in the same space but kind of sticking to themselves.
The idea that in a multi generational space there's tolerance, we live alongside one another, There could be superficial and polite interaction between, but it's kind of we're still here and you're over there, we're all here together, but we're still a bit separate and distinct from mono to multi. The idea of cross generational is there starts to be some sharing, some listening, some learning, some interaction across the different generations. And that's nice and that's good, but it can seem a little bit superficial. We have the interaction, I stay the same, you say the same, we smile and we move on to our ways of doing and being mono to multi, to cross. The idea of intergenerational, intercultural almost is to take a deeper step, to have that sense of as we engage with one another, we're willing to go that little bit deeper. We're actually prepared to be a little bit more open, a little bit more vulnerable, maybe a little bit ready to even change. The idea at the core of being more intergenerational is in that relationship, there's a Greater sense of mutuality. We're actually all in this together. A greater sense of reciprocity. We all give, we all can receive, and, and the idea of equality. We are all valued equally within this system, within this relationship. So they're three key words when it comes to being intergenerational. Drawn from the work in the intercultural scene of comprehensive mutuality, equality and reciprocity. And underlying this, and I think this is the key when it comes to why it's so important in our Christian ministry context, is the idea that a sense of individual or collective transformation, change, growth in discipleship, becoming more like Jesus is more likely in an intergenerational environment than a cross generational, a multi generational, or a mono generational. Each of those other environments have value, have a place, are important.
But more and more research now over the last 10 to 15 years has pointed to the idea that an intentionally intergenerational environment is more likely to encourage lifelong discipleship for all ages. So if our ultimate goal or significant goal or aspiration is growth in discipleship, engagement in a life of discipleship that is lifelong, then the suggestion is an intergenerational environment is more likely to sustain that than a mono generational, a multi generational, or a cross generational environment. How did that go?
[00:07:42] Speaker A: That was fantastic. Thank you very much. That was really helpful.
So when I was talking to Dave and Tracey the other day, Dave was suggesting that for a lot of congregations, the intergenerational is like an aspirational goal. And particularly if you're still in a congregation that's just got a maybe one generation at best, two, if you've got some 80 year olds and some 60 year olds, maybe that's two generations. And the idea of actually growing on that can feel like something very, very difficult. And so he said the big claim that Dave had made was he'd never really seen a truly intergenerational church, but he was interested that he saw that as an aspiration and talked about making the one step from where you are. So. So it's not about changing everything all at once. It's about making one small step and then another small step, which is of course what I say to people all the time. What do you think about that?
[00:08:32] Speaker B: I can only agree with both you and Dave Sinos.
Yeah, it's the idea when we start to think about becoming more intergenerational, or in fact for many places, becoming more all age. The important thing is, as you both identified, is just take the next step, just take the next step, because it's important though to know where you actually want to go, which direction that you're heading. But it's also significant not to get overwhelmed by that, but just do the next thing that is in front of you. Over the years, part of the important first step though is actually knowing where you are, knowing where you are and knowing where you want to go. So that's one of the ways this idea of mono multi cross can be helpful because it can give you your starting point. Doesn't matter where you're starting from, but it's where you want to go. If you're starting from a predominantly mono generational environment, then you don't want to jump straight to inter. You've got to begin by what's the low hanging fruit, what's actually manageable from here. The other key word often associated with this whole idea of intergenerational ministry that people grab onto is the idea. It's about being intentionally intergenerational. It's knowing where you are, knowing where you want to go, and then from a church leadership perspective, maybe planning how you are going to get there.
[00:10:02] Speaker A: So I've been using language of posture and language of practices. So posture is all about knowing who you are and how you are being, how you are living in relationship with the those that you're in community with. And practices are the things we do together which help to develop us as people of faith. Now if I think back to our community, so we, Chris and I have been part of a Bible study group that's existed since about 1990, I reckon 91, something like that.
And which makes it more than 30 years.
[00:10:33] Speaker B: I go mid-90s. But again, never argue with you, never argue with Dave Sinos.
[00:10:37] Speaker A: You could be closer to true right than me. But so we started this community in the previous millennium. And when we started we were absolutely a mono generational community of people between 22 and 30, all just getting married or still single, wanting to explore the Bible together, not feeling very happy about what we were learning or what we were getting from our church communities. And so saying actually we'll do our own thing. And so we started out what, what might have looked like a house church or a Bible study group together. Now we kind of became, well, at least multi generational by the fact that we kept begatting children in our little families. And so we suddenly had all of these small people and adults together. But I would say we were very careful even from the start in terms of our posture about wanting to be intergenerational. Can you remember some of the Things we did that helped us to make that shift in the way we did things.
[00:11:33] Speaker B: I think back then we weren't even using the language of intergenerational. We probably weren't even using the language or thinking of ourselves as all age. But what we did have, I think, was a focus on the importance of relationship. Our relationship with one another, our relationship with God, and our relationship with the wider communities of which we were a part. Often when I'm thinking and talking about ministry, I would say that the three most important things about ministry are relationships, relationship, relationship. That's core. And I think that's what we had a commitment to back then as we slogged our way through Ched Myers and finding the Strongman.
But I think because a number of us in the group had a commitment to ministry with all ages, a number in the group were teachers with a lot of experience in engaging with different generations. Once we did that, begatting, to use your words, we actually had a commitment to another generation. It was kind of built in to us, many of us, because of our life experience and experience of church. So I think right from the beginning of children coming into the group, they were treated, they were engaged with, with those kinds of things that we now use in the language of intergenerationality. There was a sense of mutuality. We're actually all in this together.
[00:13:03] Speaker A: The sense of we separated them out, did we? We never ever had, oh, the kids can go over there and do this while the adults have their proper study. We all did things together right from the beginning.
[00:13:12] Speaker B: Right from the beginning. And I think we listened to their voices, we tried to respond to what they sought to bring. And that can be strange when some of them were just babies. But even the way we adapted and adjusted were ways that we're trying to make it an environment that was suitable for all ages. And as they grew older, my sense is, and I hope many of them would back this up, it became a place where they could just as genuinely ask their questions and be taken seriously as anybody else in the group. So that sense of belonging, the sense of relationship, we care enough about you to know your name, to be in conversation with you, to be genuinely together in the space.
So the way we adapted and evolved and the way that our processes took on different shapes over time were to engage well with the different ages and stages within the life of the group. The way we engaged around the Bible together was usually in ways that were quite accessible for people of different ages. If we shift to the language of multi age, which for Me, I actually prefer to all age in many ways. That idea of multi age being multi sensory, multi intelligence, multi ability, I think we did that reasonably well over the years in that particular group. So a lot to be said about the value of intergenerational within that space and it's probably been part of the reason we've sustained the group over such a long time and the group itself has grown.
[00:14:54] Speaker A: The fact that some of those babies who are now in their 30s and some of the babies are having babies. We're about to have our first Bible study, Grandbaby. But so, you know, your. Your children are a good double the age of my daughter, for example. And so they're not even. Even the kids are not the same generation as each other and yet they will sit and listen to each other and. And ask questions of each other and engage with one another and have no sense of, oh, I'm a kid, I should just listen, or none of that. Because they've all, for their whole life in this group been brought up with the posture that every one of us has a voice that has as much to share as any other voice in the group and is cared about and loved about just as much. So I would say it's a really good test example of a thriving community. It'd be lovely to hear what the kids have got to say about that, the adult kids and the kid kids. I think the test for me the other week was Chris's kids, who we haven't seen for a while because they're living along the way, came and it was delightful to see them. But there was a real sense in which the rest of the community were just excited to have them around because we'd missed them and they seemed genuinely excited to be back and they just slotted in as though they'd never been away, really, didn't they? They did.
[00:16:06] Speaker B: It was a heartwarming parental moment, the highlight of the weekend for me, and realising, yeah, what an impact it had had on them because it was not always easy.
Let me say there were many, many nights driving home which were, let's just say, difficult in the car, but it was worth it in the long term.
I'm fascinated by your. I love your words of posture and practices. I can't do it on the fly, but I think I'm going to suggest there needs to be another P word that goes before that, because before we can get to posture and before we get to practice.
I think particularly of those with leadership roles who have a responsibility for actually shaping and helping communities move In a particular way. There's still something more foundational around actually understanding what. Well, in this case, being intergenerational is all about. And for some people, it's going to be intuitive and they're not necessarily going to be able to put the words to it, but they have a clear sense of where and the why. Not just where they want to go, but why they want to go that way and what it means. So sometimes I think about there's a foundational piece to being intergenerational that undergirds both or sits before our posture. It's the reason we have the posture and then undergirds our practice. Posture is important, the way we engage, the way we set ourselves up to be more intergenerational, the things we actually do.
But there's also an important foundation that sits below those two valuable P's. Love the P's, though, because one of the things I often talk about is the five Ps to help us become more intergenerational. So I'll have to add your.
[00:17:56] Speaker A: I can't remember what they are. Tell me what they are again.
[00:17:58] Speaker B: Thank you. That was a beautiful segue. The idea, often it is really practical. A good first step to becoming more intergenerational is looking for more opportunities to proactively bring together people of different ages. So if you stop and think about it, a lot of things we do in the life of the church involve five key phases. They involve a planning phase, they involve a preparation phase, they involve a presenting phase, they involve a participating phase, and they cheat on this one. An appraising phase, evaluation, feedback. And a great way to take one of those little first steps to becoming more intergenerational is to think about where are the opportunities to increase the number of generations involved in each of those phases. Who does the actual planning for something in your space? Is it just one person of a particular generation? Well, there's an opportunity to get some different generational invoices in and maybe do it as a pair, a triplet, a team in actual the planning phase. Or it might be really appropriate to have one person do the planning. How can you get different generations involved in the actual preparation phase? For example, how can you engage different generations in the presenting. How can you engage more generations in the actual experience? The recipient, so to speak, of the presenting. And how do you make sure you're getting appraised, getting feedback, evaluation, from not just one or two generations, but multiple generations? So part of this, taking the next little step, you don't do that all at once. But you might choose one of those phases to say, how can we engage at least one more generation in this space? And then when you're actually engaging, it's not just get the job done, do the P. But how do you use that opportunity to intentionally deepen connections between the different generations? If at its core intergenerational ministry is about creating and deepening those intergenerational relationships, then let's make the most of every opportunity we have to, to create and to deepen those things. Anyway, there's a bit of a side light, but there you go. Five P's to add to your two P's.
[00:20:18] Speaker A: I. I've never had a conversation with you about anything that hasn't had something with a set of letters that were all the same and match like you. This is one of your great skills, is putting, putting these things together. So I. I'm going to push back a little bit on practices being. I reckon they happen, they need, they happen in tandem to some extent. So, for example, I think about the community that I led in the Banyan Network, Common Ground, where we had a gratitude prayer practice. And so that prayer practice helped us to come together and it helped us to listen to one another. And it started with a question, something like, where have you experienced God this week? Or if we were listening to the woman at the well story, we might say, you know, how has God met you with living water this week? Or something like that. It had a question, a wondering question from the front. And then people would share where they had noticed God. And so we were learning from each other how to share things with each other. And I think bringing in some fairly simple practices into the way, we could do that around a meal table. You could do that as prayers of thanksgiving and a worship service, you could do it in all sorts of ways. But adding some of those things in that help us to learn to listen to each other, also help us to improve our posture. So I think that there's a bit of a feedback loop that goes on there, I reckon. Does that make sense to you?
[00:21:36] Speaker B: Yep, totally, totally iterative, integrated. Those. There's two I words. Who knew what was going to happen there? But yeah, providing opportunities, providing pathways, another P word, pathways into practices is really important.
Pathways, posture, posture and practice. Practices, practices there. And the notion of, whilst this is not the topic of this one maybe might get another turn, but the whole idea of intergenerational discipleship practices, how do we actually engage in discipleship that is more intergenerational. I think the whole idea of taking on exploring different practices is actually crucial. This notion of intergenerational thinking, of gatherings, and I'm particularly thinking messy church here as it happens. But thinking of messy church, for example, as a discipleship community. And if we think messy church can be intentionally intergenerational, what does it mean to be an intentionally intergenerational discipleship community fits in with those ideas of stepping stones to intergenerationality, intergenerationality actually enhancing and increasing our discipleship back to that really original. If we do hold that an intergenerational environment is more likely to sustain lifelong discipleship, then it applies just as much to our discipleship practices as our worship practices, as our missional practices, wherever we want to go. And I think that's where, let's say there are some great resources out there, like I'm sure touched on last time with Dave and Tracy. Their church together is a great resource that brings together some of the thinking. But a whole heap and stack of these kinds of practices that can be part of growing intergenerationality within a community
[00:23:34] Speaker A: and in fact, Messy Church. Get Messy 4 the current edition of Get Messy that comes out for starting in August this year is all around the five marks of Mission. So it's all around how to missional and spiritual practices and using them in your message church. So they're right on theme with what you just said then, Chris.
[00:23:53] Speaker B: Yeah, who knew?
Who knew?
[00:23:57] Speaker A: Amazing.
[00:23:58] Speaker B: Amazing.
[00:23:59] Speaker A: I want to go back to that idea of you talked about multivocality and multi, multimodal, multi ways. Now that that's of course my heart language, talking about doing things in multiple different ways. And I'm thinking back nowadays because we know a lot more about how brains work and we're talking about neurodiversity and people having lots of ways of actually making meaning and thinking. But I think back to your boys and my Sophia and the fact that we had those different ways of doing things I think actually helped those guys to engage along the way too. There was never a moment at which one of the adults stood up and preached, or someone stood up and gave a great big long speech and everyone had to listen and go, oh yes, yes, very wise. We were all engaged in making, doing, sticking together, creating a tower, talking about it together. So we had all these modes of making meaning which engage them. So I think, I think that's another posture maybe that multivocal, multimodal, multi ways of doing things is another posture that's really important for being intergenerational totally.
[00:25:08] Speaker B: And allowing choice, I think is really key. In there to allow people to engage with what they're wired for, for. And so yeah, and I know we're not, we're not talking about worship specifically, but these things I think apply to worship. They can apply to small groups, they can imply to just about anything. But certainly even when it comes for me for intergenerational worship, I think about it as basically multi age worship characterized by multi sensory, multi intelligence, multi ability with an intergenerational overlay where the intergenerational bit is the actual how are you creating deepening relationship as you do all those different things so you can have a fantastic all age, multi age worship experience.
That to me anyway is not necessarily intergenerational, it's more multi generational unless you're intentional around that relating piece. How are relationships across different generations being created and deepened through in that example, the experience, the engagement in worship?
[00:26:18] Speaker A: Yep. And I would say it's almost impossible to not grow those relationships if you were doing that sort of multi focused, multi work because, because people are sitting down, doing things together in, in groups that they're interested in. So I think about at Common Ground there was one of the five year olds who was super interested in maths and one of the 50 something year olds who's just finished a PhD in engineering. And those two had a really great relationship and they'd talk about the Bible like maths came in all the time. I don't, I don't think the Bible has a lot to do with maths, but I hate maths, don't like maths. But these two just had these extraordinary conversations and it was much more about who they were and how their brains were wired, how they thought about things than it was about their generation or about anything else. And I think offering the opportunity to have a range of ways in allows you to find maybe your tribe, the people who really are interested in what you are and make meaning the way you do.
That's my experience and I think that's really important.
[00:27:20] Speaker B: It is incredibly important and I'm going to say particularly important for children and younger people. My sense is by the time we're even 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, some of us even 60s, we kind of know our style, our tribe, the spirituality that kind of works for us. I think particularly for kids, it's significant they have the opportunity to be exposed to different spiritual traditions, different spiritual styles so they can actually discover the ones they resonate with. The thing that kind of breaks my heart sometimes with younger people is they've only experienced one form of Spirituality of Christianity. And for whatever reason, when that doesn't connect with them, it could be a walk away rather than being exposed to a variety of traditions and styles so they can find the one that they are wired for. I think that's so important. Yeah.
Which is not to say adults can't change, they can't expand, they can't grow, but they're kind of a bit more settled usually maybe they need to be shaken up. But for kids in particular, this diversity of experience is so important.
[00:28:36] Speaker A: So not all young people are wired for loud rock brand big youth service youth rally events. I was at a very large congregation in Melbourne, not Uniting Church for an event last year and we were talking about neurodiversity. And I spoke to the person who was the youth neurodiversity worker at this particular congregation and I said to him, so, so do the neurodiverse young people come to the youth rally? He said, oh God, no, no, they hate it. No, no, no, none of them come. And I said, oh, so what happens for them worship wise? He said, oh, there really isn't anything for them.
[00:29:08] Speaker B: Interesting.
[00:29:09] Speaker A: So the assumption is that this is what's great for this group of people. We'll do it this way and if you can't fit in, then kind of bad luck. Whereas having an option for a contemplative type thing for people who, I mean, you know, Taize is another example of a youth movement that is actually contemplative and peaceful and quiet and prayer chant and you know, slow reading of the Bible, all those sorts of things. So there are versions of things that have even been done for that particular generation or that age group, not generation, but that age group that have a different way of doing it. And I would say the most. One of the other things that's really important is having a range of options both for adults and for children to find what helps them grow, what helps them develop their understanding of who Jesus is, what Jesus might be calling them to do in the world, et cetera.
[00:30:02] Speaker B: Absolutely. And we referenced Dave Sinos earlier in the conversation going way back. His work around spiritual styles is a good starting point.
[00:30:12] Speaker A: That's right.
[00:30:12] Speaker B: Particularly thinking about children in terms of spiritual styles. And we early on talked about our Bible study home group experience for a season there. We looked at the renovare work and the six spiritual traditions through Richard Foster and again even naming those six traditions and how do we intentionally provide opportunity for each of those traditions to be explored to help people of any age find what they resonate with. Can be a really valuable thing.
[00:30:43] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, it's been a fascinating conversation, Chris. Thank you so much for joining us today on Thriving. And I might even take you up on another chat on an in depth, deep dive into something else next year. You never know your luck. It'd be lovely to have you back again.
But thank you very much for joining us today.
[00:31:01] Speaker B: Thank you so much, Sandy.
[00:31:02] Speaker A: Bye, everybody.
[00:31:03] Speaker B: Bye bye.
[00:31:05] Speaker A: Thank you for listening to Thriving.
This podcast is hosted and produced by Sandy Brodine. If you have enjoyed Thriving, don't forget to like and subscribe. Don't forget to. You might also like to share with your church community or friends and talk about how these ideas can help you grow your thriving community of faith. We'll see you next time.
