What is the will of God?

In the fifth part of our exclusive series on the Intergenerational Church, Suzi Farrant and Darren Philip highlight the importance of living out faith together and letting go of accepted practice.

THIS series has been considering what it is to be an intergenerational church – one which “intentionally brings the generations together in mutual serving, sharing or learning within the core activities of the church in order to live out being the body of Christ to each other and the greater community.” This month, we focus on living out our faith together.

Thinking about changing to be more intergenerational, many will feel caught in the middle of the pull between tradition and innovation. On the one hand, there is the pull to hold on to the way things have been done in the past, recognising how God has worked through them. On the other hand, there is a drive to keep doing new things, to move with the times and reach the people current methods are failing to reach. We would suggest that this perceived dichotomy between tradition and innovation is a false one – they are both pulling on the tug of war rope in the same direction. Tradition (us holding on to what we have always done) and innovation (us creating something new) both emphasise what we as humans are doing. They both come from a desire to answer ‘what’ and ‘how’ questions: What do we need to do to keep people happy? How can we stop declining numbers? If the practices of living out faith in intergenerational churchcommunity are instead approached by asking ‘who’ questions, we see that at the other end of the tug of war rope is God’s action. Rather than being beholden to traditionalism or innovation, we need to let go of the rope and let God’s action take precedence.

Shifting the narrative from trying to save the church through human actions to simply being the church leads to a focus on the divine action of transformation. Transformation is an invitation into grace that comes from outside of the self, changing our perception of what a good church is. Rather than numerical growth being the pinnacle of success, we come to see that it is being a faithful church that is important. It is through our encounters with Christ that God’s creativity comes to our congregations, transforming our experiences into the new community God is calling us to be. Intergenerational church is neither an act of tradition nor innovation, but God’s invitation into transformation.

A WTozer once wrote: “If the Holy Spirit were withdrawn from the church today, 95 percent of what we do would go on and no one would know the difference. If the Holy Spirit had been withdrawn from the New Testament church, 95 percent of what they did would stop, and everybody would know the difference.” Could this still be true nearly a century later? Overreliance on methods and programmes can inadvertently obscure the Holy Spirit. A desire for order and control can overtake the desire for God’s Spirit to move amongst us; perhaps we have become afraid of what the Spirit might lead us to do and of how the Spirit might unsettle our neatly orchestrated methods and programmes.

As Bonhoeffer suggests: “We must be ready to allow ourselves to be interrupted by God.” The church needs to be willing, through grace, to relinquish control and enable the Spirit to blow as, where and when she wills. If the Spirit chooses to work mightily through the lives of our children and young people rather than adults, then we need the humility to enable and encourage it. An intergenerational church should expect the Spirit to move amongst the whole community and curate the spaces and relationships through which that can happen.

Re-orientating ourselves around divine rather than human action, in order that the Spirit can transform us, requires the practices of discernment and testimony. Over the years, the term ‘discernment’ has for many come to mean the process by which someone explores a call to be a minister in the church. Yet for Bonhoeffer, discernment was not just a matter of deciding a vocation, as important as that is; discernment was the everyday process and practice of seeking to answer the question ‘what is the will of God?’

There will be as many different ways to discern God’s will as there are followers of Christ and congregations. Following Bonhoeffer’s lead, we are not going to attempt to provide a selection of tried and tested methods. Rather, we offer three discernment stages – being attentive, prophetic listening and acting. Being attentive requires consideration of how time and space is given for people of different generations to share their wonderings of God together, so that a fuller picture of what God is calling the community to might emerge. Children are naturally very inquisitive and often notice things that adults would walk past without thinking or questioning, so hearing their wonderings in the midst of all the others is important.

Prophetic listening involves intentionally staying with God, choosing to wait and trust the Spirit for leading, provision and timing. It means letting go of our own self, thoughts and feelings, and focusing on God. Instead of asking God what we can do about a situation, the question can be reframed by asking what God’s ‘best’ is for that situation or the people involved. This involves waiting with God where God is, so requires listening to the voices of those on the margins, whether that be the margins of church life or the margins of our communities and world.

Acting involves obedience to God’s will, engaging in God’s mission in the world according to God’s timing. Engaging in mission intergenerationally is a call to step out of preconceived notions about what mission is and reimagine how our churchcommunities can share God with others. This can be messy and often provides a logistical challenge, but through the contributions of each generation a more holistic understanding of mission and what it means to obey God’s will evolves.

“ Rather than being beholden to traditionalism or innovation, we need to let go of the rope and let God’s action take precedence.

Sharing stories of how God has transformed lives is a vital part of living out faith as an intergenerational church and the practice of testimony is one way of doing so. In simple terms, testimony is a story we tell in which God is one of the characters. First Peter contains repeated calls to testify, to use words to speak of God’s action in our lives. People can, however, be reluctant to volunteer their story, perhaps because they don’t know how to, they don’t think their story is of worth, they don’t know how it will be received, or they are fearful of getting it wrong, so stories need to be invited out. Being an intergenerational church means curating spaces for testimony to be shared and received, and inviting people to share them.

In considering testimony intergenerationally, it is worth remembering that the authority of any testimony lies not in the credentials or skill of the person giving it, but comes from the God-encounter it describes. Inviting and receiving testimony in intergenerational community is not only transformative for the speakers and listeners, calling both to enter into God’s story of transformation. It also sends the powerful message that each person, regardless of age, is an important part of God’s story and has a ministry to the community as a whole. ¤