Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Love those old people

Matt Chandler, who isn't an old person, led a church of 100 through substantial change - and now has a congregation numbering some 6000. There's a short interview with him here on the rev.org site. What I appreciated were these two paragraphs, though he has some other very good things to say too.

There were a lot of older people in the church, and here's what I did not do: I did not walk into that place and beat up old saints and demand that our way was our way and they could just deal with it. I'm mortified at how often it plays out that way. And I don't know what young guys think they're doing; I don't know how they think they're pleasing God by beating up people who have been nothing but faithful to Him.

So first I started taking all these old guys out—to coffee, lunch, and dinner—and the message I communicated over and over again was the same: We need you, we need you, we need you. I immediately started putting 20 year-olds together with older folks. "Hey, this guy can show you how to live life; he can teach you about the Bible, he will have you into his home…" There's a hunger among twenty-somethings for that type of mentorship. And at that point the old saints don't care about peripheral things any more. They're not arguing about music and style and whether I'm wearing jeans or not any more.

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