His comment felt like a dagger to my heart: “It’s time for leadership to emerge from younger couples.”
I understand what he meant.
When you’ve served faithfully for decades, you’re tired. You need someone else to step up. You want someone else to step up. You hope someone else will step up.
After all, you’ve served for decades because you care about the church and young people’s faith. You want what you’ve spent your life building to continue long after you’re gone.
Which is exactly why we still need you.
In ministry circles, intergenerational has been a buzzword for decades. But intergenerational ministry is more than a strategy for keeping churches alive. It’s one of the ways faith becomes real.
I know because it happened to me.
When I was little, my church had an adopted grandparent ministry. Children were paired with older adults in the congregation and given intentional opportunities to build relationships.
My adopted grandma was Lois.
I don’t remember much about Lois’s life outside of church. I remember that she was kind. I remember crafting with her at our Advent festival. I remember that every Sunday, she looked for me.
She called me by name.
She asked about my week.
She hugged me.
I knew that if I wasn’t there, Lois would notice, not because she was keeping attendance or because she wanted to guilt me into coming back but because she cared whether I was there.
Long before I contributed anything to the church, Lois made me feel like my presence mattered.
Because Lois was there, I wanted to be there too.
That’s stayed with me.
Today, I oversee the kinds of ministries I benefited from as a young person. My team works hard to create opportunities for people of every age to serve in family ministry.
I have a particular affection for the saints in their 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s.
They bring something to ministry that only comes from having lived a lot of life.
They know how to linger. How to listen without rushing to fix. How to pay attention to the person in front of them. They know that sometimes the most important thing you can offer another person isn’t an answer or a program or a perfectly planned experience. It’s your presence.
They’ve also lived long enough to watch their faith change.
They know faith can ebb and flow without God going anywhere. They have decades of stories about God’s faithfulness. They’ve wrestled with Scripture long enough to know it well—and lived long enough to know what they don’t know.
Many have also been around the church long enough to have seen it at its best and its worst. They’ve watched it change. They’ve disagreed with it. They’ve been disappointed by it. Some have been hurt by it.
And still, they’ve stayed.
While the church has always gotten it right, somewhere along the way, they discovered what a community of faith can be. They’ve been held by it, challenged by it, and changed by it.
That matters enormously to young people who are trying to figure out whether faith is sturdy enough to hold their questions and whether the church is a place where they can actually belong.
For the past couple of years, we’ve had a couple in their mid-80s serving in our Confirmation ministry with eighth graders.
Week after week, they show up. They learn names and interests. They listen to questions. They sit with doubts. No matter how outlandish an eighth grader’s answer might be, they don’t seem shocked.
They’ve lived too much life for that.
So they listen.
Because our students know they’re safe with them, this couple has earned the right to challenge them—to ask another question, push a little deeper, and invite them to consider that faith might be bigger than they thought.
At the end of every Confirmation year, I ask our students to tell me their favorite part.
They could say the retreat…or one of our ridiculous games…or even one of my brilliant lessons.
They don’t.
Inevitably, their favorite part of Confirmation isn’t a what. It’s a who.
It’s them: the couple in their 80s. The people who, by some measures, should have stepped aside years ago to make room for younger leadership are the very people our eighth graders name as the ones who made Confirmation matter.
Maybe that’s what we misunderstand when we say it’s time for the next generation to step up.
Of course it is.
We need younger leaders. We need their ideas and energy and questions. We need to trust them with real responsibility and make room for them to lead.
But making room for the next generation doesn’t require the previous generation to disappear.
Young people don’t just need someone ahead of them by ten years. They need people ahead of them by twenty, forty, and sixty.
They need people who have lived enough life to know that doubt doesn’t scare God. That churches survive hard seasons. That faith changes. That grief comes. That prayers sometimes go unanswered. That joy comes back. That God remains faithful.
They need people who can look across generations and say, with the weight of an entire life behind them:
I’m still here.
God is still here.
And I’m so glad you’re here, too.
So yes.
It’s time for younger people to step up.
But older saints, please don’t step away.
We still need you.