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This edition of Ask the Pastor features Pastors Kiley Callaway, John Mulholland, and Jon Simpson.
Kylie Calloway
So, we were talking before getting ready, and John Mulholland just went to the what conference?
John Mulholland
D-6 Conference.
Kylie Calloway
D-6 Conference in Florida, on Intergenerational Ministry. So we just found that very intriguing. So we actually began to question him, and that's how we we're developing our topic today. So tell us a little bit, first of all, about the conference, and what this intergenerational thing even means.
John Mulholland
Sure. So D-6 is, I think they've been around for, I wanna say 15 years. D-6 is based on Deuteronomy 6. So, and I'll just, the part where they really get their--
Kylie Calloway
John, would you read that?
John Mulholland
I would read that, I will read that. The Israelites have left Egypt, have left slavery in Egypt. They're on their way to the promise land, sort of, before they take their 40 year wandering thing, and God through Moses is giving instructions about what's gonna happen. So Deuteronomy 6:4-9, "Listen, Oh Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. And you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your strength. And you must commit yourselves wholeheartedly to these commands that I'm giving you today. Repeat them again and again to your children. Talk about them when you're at home and when you're on the road, when you're going to bed and when you are getting up. Tie them to your hands and wear them on your forehead as reminders. Write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates." So D-6, this is like their foundational text of, it's the role of believers. In this case, it would've been the role of good Jews, because that's where, you know, we flow through the Bible. It would be the role of good Christians to pass along the faith to the next generation. Some things that they really find, I guess, find as values; that parents have priority in discipleship. The church is there to come alongside, the church has a role, but it's an equipping role. It's a support role, it's those kinds of things. But the main purpose of the conference is to talk about what it looks like to have a church, to have a faith that is intergenerational in nature, that's passing on that faith to the next generation. But intergenerational, it's not just one way, it's not just going down to the next generation, but it's also, you know, as a person who is in my, I think I'm Gen X, this is a lot of things that we talked about. Like how, not only are people, (I guess boomers) passing on faith to me, but what am I doing in their discipleship? So it's intergenerational, it's not one way, but that discipleship piece flows both ways.
Kylie Calloway
I love that. I actually did my master's thesis on that scripture of family ministry back in the day, more than 15 years ago. But I love that the parents are the main disciples in the home and not the church, and that as the kids come, we should just be capitalizing on what's already taking place in the house.
John Mulholland
Right, and it deals with how, as a church, we set up programming, and I mean, there's probably a million things that we could talk about over the next three and a half sessions. But, just like trying to help, trying to switch that from, you know, we live in a culture where we're constantly looking for the expert to do the thing that either we can't do for ourselves or we don't want to do for ourselves. So our culture, I think makes it easy to hand off roles and responsibilities to other people. And how do we help the church not continue to facilitate that handoff, but to give that role and responsibility back to parents? And we took all of our pastors, all of our wives went as well. We have two new pastors at Westway, one of them is in that family ministry slot. So it was a really good piece, not only for him as he's developing and learning in his role and his responsibility at our particular church, but also from a big picture standpoint. Cause this is not like, at least at Westway, family ministries is not just the job of Zane as our pastor of family ministries. But each one of our pastors, whether it's on the creative arts side or the adult side, or even on me, like each one of us need to be brought into that intergenerational piece. Cause then we're just doing the exact same thing that we don't want to do, but we're just doing it in the church and just saying, "No, that's your job to do this thing," but it's really all of our jobs. So it was an awesome, it was a great week to be able to get away and spend time with our team in Florida.
Kylie Calloway
So the amazing thing is, before you even went to this conference, God was already working in you about intergenerational ministry. And I think it's amazing as the senior pastor or the lead pastor, whatever you wanna call yourself there, and then as the family pastor, that he actually is up under somebody that is bought into this, because a family pastor would want to just be kind of an island unto himself. So tell us a little bit about what the Lord was dealing with in you about intergenerational ministry and how kind of all this came together.
John Mulholland
Sure. So I was late to ministry in life, I guess I was in the marketplace, I had a real job outside of ministry. And then, over a period of time, I just felt like God was calling me into ministry. So in 2000, 2005, I'd gone back to school, started working at a church in Eastern Iowa as their student minister. And I had a really great first ministry experience, and I had a wonderful lead pastor. And about three years in, that youth ministry had begun to shift in. So I was there for six and a half years, about three years in, we began to notice that we had more unchurched kids coming into our ministry than we had church kids. And it wasn't that we were necessarily losing church kids, but we were reaching unchurched people. And I don't know that there was one particular thing that happened, but one of the things that we noticed, especially with these kids who were unchurched was, you know, like we had them at youth group or we had them on Sunday morning in our Sunday morning ministry. There were a lot of times where it felt like what was taking place was, like, not gospel transformation, but sort of behavior management. Like, we could as a church, sort of control what was happening in our building, but then for many of these kids, cause over a period of time, we got to know their life situation, and many of them came from very dysfunctional home lives. And again, I don't know if it was one thing, but there was a switch kind of, at some point. It was like, you know, "If all we're doing," I mean, "we can proclaim the gospel to them and God is absolutely faithful and God's gonna do what He wants in that hour or that two hours a week." And we did see evidence of transformation and at the same time, it's like, we can do all of these things, but at the end of youth group we're sending kids back home into this, whatever this dysfunctional environment is, or after Sunday morning. And at that point it was kind of like, "Well, what we really need to be doing is, we need to figure out a way to get their parents," like that's as good and beneficial as it is to minister these kids and disciple these kids. And I believe those things are true 100%. The real, I guess, the real long-term change was gonna happen when we could reach the family unit. And that began, so that was like, I wanna say that was 2008, 2009. So that's like a 14, 15 year kind of journey for me then of, what does it look like to try and reach families? And I mean, that caused all sorts of inner turmoil, not only in me, because I had to be honest and think about what I was doing in my student ministry. Like, if I believed that parents were the primary disciple makers of children, like, what systems and structures was I setting up that were the opposite of that? Like, you know, I had this belief system and there were so many things that I was doing that are like, "Well, I really don't believe that, because...Like, I'm doing these things and they're unintentionally hindering that handoff back to parents." We had parents who, you know, at the same time were bringing a lot of unchurched kids into our ministry, and we didn't have a lot of parents who felt this way, but we had, I would say we had some who didn't want their kids exposed to that other element of kids that were coming in. And that was a challenge. I think as three senior pastors, lead pastors, whatever you wanna call us, I think we probably experienced that from people within our own, like adults in our church body, you know? We wanna make like, what's the element that we're letting in, we don't wanna keep those people out. I know we would never say those things, but kind of in the back of our minds. So, when I would have those conversations, it was like, "Well, what would it look like then, if you discipled your children at home, they came to youth group and interacted with and discipled those kids that you don't want your kids hanging out with? And then we, as a church could focus our ministry on equipping you to disciple your children and then being a--" who was it, Spurgeon that said, 'a hospital at the gates of hell,' "then we can then serve our function as being a hospital for people who had no idea who Jesus is." So then I'm not worried about like, and that sounds strange, but I'm gonna just let that sit. I'm not worried about like, it's not my job to disciple a kid who knows Jesus in a family that knows Jesus, because that's the parent's job. So I can equip you, I can serve you, I still want to edify them, I still want them to come to youth group and learn and grow. But what I really want them to do is to love and serve people who don't know Jesus and befriend them, and then hopefully get those kids into your house. Those unchurched kids into your house so they can see, you know, what the faithful Christian life looks like. So that was, I think that was really step one and I know we're coming up on our time, so I think I wanna stop cause like, there are obviously a number of things that happened after this, but initially it was a shift of man. We have these kids in for an hour a week and I'm really concerned that like, again, God can do whatever He wants to with an hour a week, and I'm really concerned that what we're doing, as good as it might be, and when we see fruit from it, we're thankful for that. I think we can be more faithful to what God calls us to be.
Jon Simpson
Yeah, you're talking about getting the church on mission and encouraging, not just the adults, but the families to reach out and be able to reach others. And that's really key for the church in America to accomplish what we're called to do. I think we hear a lot about people leaving the church. And through COVID that's accelerated and even been amplified. So it's like, you know, getting discipleship, which is really what you're talking about in a sense, it's discipling parents so that they're able to disciple their kids. And what have we done as a church? Or are we doing things like you were saying, to short circuit that, or even say to parents, "Hey, no, no, no, you can't do that. We'll do that. We've got it."
John Mulholland
Yeah. Bring your kids here. We've got it.
Jon Simpson
We'll take care of it. And that really is an attitude that as a youth pastor, I started a youth ministry. I wanted to handle it. And maybe part of it is cause you were older when you started doing stuff, but you had a little more insight into that. It took me a while to figure some of that stuff out and go, oh boy. You know, honestly, to see kids that were really a part of my youth group and leaders and then they leave, go off to college and it just falls apart and you're like what happened? And obviously that's a constant battle for anybody that ministers to young people. But yeah, if we can get the kids to grab it and grow.
