Segregation vs Sensitivity: an alternative approach to recognising and acknowledging age diversity in faith formation.

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Driving from Melbourne to Stanwell Tops last week to join theLeaders to Go conference, the clutch pedal on the Barina snapped of while driving on the highway just out of Gundagai. The clutch is an essential mechanism for transitions. Every learner driver understands that different gears are necessary for various conditions of speed and gradient, and the art of engaging the clutch and gears for the transitions is a sensitive art. Most of our faithing lives are journeys of adjustment and require sensitivity in finding alignment to travel forwards safely with others.

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I had one presentation to make at the conference.

In a three way debate  I was tasked with advocating for ‘Age-segregated faith formation’ against Tammy Tolman proposing intergenerational faith contexts and Christina Embree defending Parents families and households as the primary discipleship contexts.

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Those who have been following along at home keeping up with the waves and fashions and slings and arrows of outrageous fortune in what Phyllis Tickle calls the postchristendom “garage sale” , will realise that of these three ideas, Age-segregated or Age-specific programs have declined in favour against the rising enthusiasm for intergenerational faith formation contexts  – both focused in reengaging the family/household and  in restructuring  broader faith community.

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So in the midst of this cohort of cutting edge and long-haul leaders of leaders in Children and Families ministries of many flavours and forms arguing for age-segregated programs was definitely the underdog position.

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Added to this, I work for an organisation called ‘Intergen’ and am widely known not only for riding the intergenerational faith bus, but driving it, refuelling it, and spending a fair amount of time with my head under the bonnet fixing and fine tuning it.

The last conference I spoke at in the UK  I was invited to create my own topic and I ripped out a rabid theological defense of intergenerational faith communities on the most imperative terms: ‘Because God’. 

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So in many ways this was a bit of a set up. Friends and colleagues were waiting to see if I would perjure myself in delivering ‘devil’s advocate’ arguments I don’t buy into in my own practice.

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Within me though, this was a welcome challenge of imagination.

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Studying theology brings great gifts – many precious pearls are gained in diving deep down into the waves of history, as one feels the changing pressures through the bathys, the flow and forces of cross currents, the changing creature culture, the dimming of light from above and the biofluorescence held within.*

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To study theology leaves us soaked and breathless at the immensity of our scriptures, our traditions, our heresies, our controversies, our corruptions and crusades,  our symbols and sacraments, our spiritual discipline and practices, our cultural appropriations through the years.

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This invitation to argue for a faith practice that has come into being in the past two centuries and fallen out of vogue in the past two decades was set to the roar of the whole theological ocean in my ears, the taste of historical salt on my tongue and the smash of the waves of culture on the cliffs at my feet.

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Superficial dismissals of the recent issues of age-segregation were easy to review:

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Family life has changed and middle class  children already spend  too much of the week in age-ability structured activities and not enough time with their own families, let alone with broader companies of diverse humans.

The ‘learning’ agenda of age-specific religious education programs reduces the humanness of children and adults to educational role players.

Evicting children from the weekly gathering for worship disconnects then from the practices of faith of the whole community, and trains them to leave.

‘Segregation’ itself is a pejorative term in the late-modernity western democratic philosophical lexicon, associated with recidivist leadership and morally bankrupt culture.

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These arguments and many more have been well rehearsed in popular ministry blogs and conferences, drawing from anecdotal material. Further, the depth and longitudinal research of religious sociologists such as the giant of the field, John Roberto and the steady, prolific Holly Catterton Allen map the robust life-long faith of those who stay connected to other generations. The stories and the statistics stack up well.

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Nevertheless, most of this material is phenomenological. And I wondered if there was something we were missing theologically in all of the attention given to intergenerational and household faith formation?

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I wondered too, if we were neglecting something missiological. I’m thinking of those who live in households where faith is not celebrated or connected to a larger community. What of them?

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My charge was to argue positively for age-segregated discipleship.

There were a few things in my favour: while Tammy Tolman presented a sweeping cache of biblical examples of the people of God  in the Hebrew Bible celebrating festivals and coming together to renew their covenant with the Lord as a whole intergenerational community, these were the ‘highlights’ of the year – large seasonal events and celebrations.

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Discipleship though, is to  ‘walk in the footsteps of faith’ (Romans 4:12) and in the working subsistence agricultural communities of the ancient near east, children were gathered in cohorts to learn and contribute tasks along side an older family member as mentor. Ages were managed.

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This wasn’t strictly age-segregation, but then neither is the practice most churches have with their 5 year olds. Looking with fresh eyes into an early years room on a sunday we see a group of 4 and 5 year olds, a few adults; maybe one (the leader) is 50 and another few are in their late 30s (parent supporters) and a young teenager also helps set up, and assist the children with activities and builds a warm rapport with the children.

This then, under the heading of ‘age segregated’ or ‘age appropriate’ group is in fact a little cosmos of intergenerationality – potentially, and many who are part of these groups will witness to this, a garden of faith reciprocity as everyone in the room is strengthened in faith and delight in the life of God.

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Considering this constellation of relationships, I found myself articulating a new way of describing this: in place of Age specific, or Age Segregated – I called this Age-sensitivity.

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As I delivered my argument to my peers and colleagues in the midst of the debate, I introduced this new term: ‘Age-Sensitive’ discipleship. 

In the  debating melodrama of the moment it drew a collective ‘Oooohhhh!!’

At least in my own practice, I think this term is a game-changer, and I hope it takes off and sparks more thinking and  creative re-evaluations.

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In the week following the conference Christina Embree re-blogged an old piece from 2016, altering only one term; replacing ‘Age-Appropriate’ with ‘Age-Sensitive’.

Hat tip to Christina for being an early adopter!

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Words matter. And this was more than just a point scoring semantic twist. In riding  the currents of historical theology, revisiting scripture  and exploring the way age has been co-opted, or precluded, or  subjugated, or elevated, or ignored in the theological tides this  idea, this phrase gained buoyancy.

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Age-sensitivity bids us pay close attention to one another’s diverse humanity. Not for the sake of segregation and judgement, but to listen to the multiple voices of the Spirit of our ages.

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Age-sensitive discipleship is a necessary counterbalance to our predilections towards asymmetrical power. Intergenerational communities need to regularly exercise age-sensitive rubrics and practices in order to avoid degenerating into a conforming pragmatism of  ‘one size fits all’.  Households and families are wrought with their own hierarchies of power, and so spaces in which there is sensitivity and attention paid to specific ages, the particularity of experience of being a 7 year old, or a 13 year old, or a 2 year old, or an 86 year old, is an important guard against power injustices and presumptions. Age-attentiveness or age-sensitivity is for all of us.

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In the wake of almost a century of constructivist developmentalism arising from the seminal work of Piaget, our age-sensitivity must avoid the traps of being commandeered as an instrument of normativity, of judgement and division, of expectations and limitation for behaviour or progress or ability or cognition. Our worst mistakes arise form assuming we know. Especially assuming we know about another human being’s experience of the cosmos.

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Age-sensitivity must lead us to paying radical attention to one another, to one another as aged and ageing beings, as part of our whole humanness. 

To avoid acknowledging our age-diversity, is to risk allowing the dominant groups to set the standards. We have learned this at great cost in elisions of cultural-diversity (“We’re all Aussies”) and gender-diversity (“man up”; “you run like a girl”) ability-diversity, neuro-diversity, economic diversity. Where we fail to pay attention to difference we obscure reality. The truth calls to us.

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In the great panic of the church against post-modern philosophy, it has become a commonplace to warn against the danger that postmodernism affirms a relativism among individual claims of perception, replacing a monolithic and stable ‘Truth’.

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I think there is a greater danger in resisting naming and affirming the differences and distinctives of all the lives in our midst. This must be done not through clumsy batch labelling. But through genuine sensitive attention to the micro-stories each person shares of themselves,  as they identify themselves as an age, a person.

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In the best intergenerational faith communities – and I know a good fair few that are wonderful  – and robust and real households of faith – and I know a good fair few of these too – strong attention is paid to difference and commonality, divergence and sharing, distinctives and connection. Age sensitivity is an essential communal skill worthy of practice and cultivation, not disregard and disdain.

The truth of one another calls to us.

Let those with ears listen sensitively.

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*This metaphor of the ‘ocean of theology’ is thoroughly investigated in the work of Nathan Hunter. See the Allegory p 111-112 developed as a tool for interviewing participants in his study of spirituality and depth.

https://repository.divinity.edu.au/843/1/2011Th_Hunter%2CN_Making_Theology_Accessible.pdf

Read more of Phyllis Tickle here:

http://www.phyllistickle.com/wp-content/uploads/Emergence-Chrisitanity.pdf