I wonder about relationships

By Rev Sandy Brodine

I wonder … do meaningful relationships between the generations really help to deepen faith?

If you listen to people like me speaking about why intergenerational church matters, you’ll notice that there is one thing that we bang on about ALL THE TIME. The importance of relationships. Relationships between older people and younger people are often places where conversations about faith happen. They are also opportunities for us to watch and learn from others how to live the life of faith. I do believe this to be true, absolutely.

However just last week I was startled by an experience that reminded me just how important it had been in my own story of coming to faith.

I was invited back to my previous placement to do a funeral for a dearly loved 89-year-old woman. I had known her not just as a minister, but she had also been mother to people I had grown up with in youth group and youth church in the 1980s and 1990s. And as I thought about the life of this quiet, yet deeply faithful woman and prepared to write my reflection I mused again on the importance of relationships, and how they form us in the faith.

I was also fortunate to have a couple of conversations with friends from our youth group and a number of the other key leaders who were part of the church in those days who were helping us to prepare for the funeral. As we talked I became aware of just how pivotal the faith of this woman, I’ll call her “Mrs Mac” had been for many of us. Watching her, and others in our church, we saw what it looked like to live a Christian life. This is how I summed it up in the homily:

“How many of us young people over many years learned what it was to live a Christian life because we were nurtured by the likes of Mrs Mac and her lifelong friends at XX Uniting Church or through their service on various SUFM teams or other places? I reckon that many of us in my generation can offer a prayer of thanks to God for the way that Mrs Mac and others in her generation discipled and mentored us.  The way she lived, her very service pointed us towards the God who loved her and sustained her.”

We do not always see the fruit of our programs at the time that they are happening. We cannot tell sometimes for many years what has influenced us to live a life of faith, sometimes for many many years.

This is why intergenerational relationships in faith communities matter so much. Not because it is a way to do church with dwindling numbers: but because we learn what it is to live a Christian life from those who go before us.

I wonder if you look back, who helped shape your faith as a Christian? Was it an older person? Or perhaps a younger one?

How can your faith community help to shape and deepen the faith lives of all who worship with you?

Rev Sandy Brodine is Younger Generations Education and Strategy Coordinator within equipping Leadership for Mission