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What makes all-age worship so difficult?
In this adapted extract from Worship for Everyone, Nick and Becky Drake address the challenges of all-age worship, and suggest practical steps to help overcome them.
What makes all-age worship so difficult?
Audience, audience, audience!
There are many reasons why intergenerational ministry is hard. Whenever we speak to churches and leaders about Worship for Everyone, we ask the room for a show of hands to find out who enjoys leading all ages and who dislikes it or struggles to like it. We ask them whether they find it easy or difficult. Almost always, the majority struggle and find it hard. Over time, this has led many churches to minimise their intergenerational gatherings to either very short interactions or very infrequent ones. Some have given up altogether and have settled for age-and stage ministry the whole year round. Many have even been met with serious opposition—church members walking out because ‘it’s not their kind of thing’ or complaints from others who want ‘their normal service back’. It’s very hard to lead if there isn’t buy-in and support from the church family, and it only needs one or two to be resistant and critical to deeply affect your ability to persevere through change.
When we lived in London I, Becky, spent several years working in press and public relations. One of the first and most memorable things my boss said to me when I was learning the ropes was ‘this job is all about audience, audience, audience’. The repetition of this word stood out! She went on to advise that even when I think I know my audience, I need to narrow it down further. It wasn’t enough to say that my message was for women. She would ask me, ‘Young women? Retired women? Which postcode specifically? Are they generally single or married? What interests do they have? What do they read?’ The questions went on. I soon learnt that sending a very general message or advert to a broad group would generate very little engagement; however, the narrower my target market, the more I could specifically tailor my message and use the right media to engage and impact their behaviour.
So it’s no surprise that when we come to such a broad ‘target market’ as ‘all ages’, it can indeed be very hard to engage everyone! If, coupled with that, there is a lack of resource or vision, the whole thing can begin to feel stale and tokenistic. Once something is a token nod ‘to the kids’ it becomes boring and tiring. It fails in reaching one of our two key goals: engaging adults (it likely doesn’t truly captivate children either!).
Community and humility
It is important nonetheless to remember that unlike a PR campaign, our times together in worship are not just selling a message or product but are times of community, times to worship and encounter God’s presence and times of serving one another with humility as the big family of God. Our starting point must again come back to the core values and a recognition that, in and of itself, it is good to be together. It is important and powerful to unite across generations no matter what we may personally feel as individuals. We may not like every element of the service, nor does it have to be perfectly pitched to any one of us—there’s a bigger story going on! As we saw in the previous chapter, being together is an important reflection of God’s image and an important part of our discipleship, even if sometimes there are components of the service that we don’t love.
If you’re a leader, being honest and direct about this with your church may help switch on that lightbulb—explaining that it’s hard to get this right, but more than anything you want your community to unite and throw themselves into being together. Again, if you can bring some vision to this, it will help people to be more tolerant of the noise or the different style or whatever it is that they struggle with. The hope is that in time they will begin to see and experience the beauty of being a whole family together, even if the style isn’t always their top preference.
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