Intergenerational Starts With Me

I’m an introvert. I love people, but I hate large groups and I despise small talk.

This means that my least favorite time of Sunday mornings is “coffee hour”. I dread this time so much so that most weeks, I make a mad dash from worship to the Youth Room, skipping over the hated coffee hour all together.

I justify this by saying that as the youth worker, in order to make students feel welcome I have to be in the Youth Room early so that I can greet students as they arrive. What’s more, I know that unlike downstairs during coffee hour, upstairs in the Youth Room, I routinely have meaningful conversations with teens.

And while all of those things are true, this year, my student leaders and I set some God-sized goals for ourselves and our youth ministry. Among them: To better connect with others of all ages in our family of faith.

To this end, this year, we interviewed some of the saints of our congregation to find out why church matters. I also intentionally attended a host of holiday parties and open houses (An introvert’s nightmare!) in order to deliberately cultivate relationships with people from my congregation who are not in some way involved in my youth ministry. Yesterday, I even spent time sharing about our youth ministry with a circle (an earlier, perhaps more social form of a small group) of women, most of whom were probably in their 70s and 80s.

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