December 15, 2005

Age and Height

Category: Theology - Ecclesiology :: Permalink

Mark Driscoll on categorizing people by their age into “baby boomers,” “busters/Generation X,” and “millennials/Generation Y”:

Evaluating people by their age group makes about as much sense as categorizing people by their height. Not all six-foot-tall old men are the same, and neither are all fifteen-year-old women…. Christians have fallen into the same trap, starting different services at their churches and hiring a pastor who is same age as the group the services are supposed to be reaching. We must dig deeper into our understanding of the people we are seeking to reach than simply noting their age. People are highly complex, and any attempt to divide them by something as arbitrary as age is naive, silly, and doomed to fail.

How smart would it be to have three church services targeting people according to their height? The first service would be for people under five feet tall, the second for people between five and six feet tall, and the third for people over six feet tall. And how wise would it be for each service to have a different pastor carefully selected by his height, and worship music that incorporated a lot of prooftext verses about height…? Reformission requires that God’s people pay more attention to the particular people in their culture than to the many books on generational theory written by self-appointed experts who, in the end, are speaking at best of only a narrow, white, suburban slice of the generational pie (The Radical Reformission, p. 128).

Posted by John Barach @ 3:35 pm | Discuss (0)

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