Being a home educating family has influenced us a lot and we’ve found a lot of resources from the homeschooling community. (Home educators tend to rebel against sending their children off to segregated groups – and I know others feel the same way!)

It’s exciting to see all ages involved in running the service and learning together. We have a 10yo operating the digital projector and the first week a 7yo gave the main talk – brilliantly! Adults can speak too of course!

It requires a lot of creativity so we keep praying for ideas! It is a relaxed environment and quite noisy. It is much more geared to participation than performance; involvement than excellence!

We have a play area for young kids but also encourage them to join their parent(s) at the tables for some activities and give them instruments for the songs. We use a variety of music – some adult focused and some children’s songs.

I’m sure we’ve lots to learn, but it’s exciting. We’ll see where God leads with this. Only by His Spirit can it bear fruit.

I am working to cast the same vision at the church where I am at. If God can bring forth praise from the mouths of infants (Psalm 8), how many voices have we been excluding!

I would appreciate hearing some of the stories, best practices, etc. from people who have helped bring about intergenerational worship in their churches.

On one hand I wish we all lived closer so we could worship together with the kiddos, yet it’s probably good that we’re all spread out trying to implement these ideas is so many different churches.

Within the last 4 months our church has started to “allow” parents to keep their kids in church. As the pastor, my wife and I are doing our best to model this with our 5 kids. My older 3, (12,9 and 7) sit and listen and participate, my younger two,(2 1/2 and 13 months) sit on the carpet and are able to move around.

We are encouraging parents to try it out, yet still providing some classroom space for parents who are new to this idea and have not done adequate training at home.

I borrowed some verbage from the Solomon’s Porch website and re-wrote some of it for what we are trying to do. If you’d like to take a look at what we are learning and trying, go to: http://www.coastlandschurch.org/teams_children.html

And there are some really good resources here in the UK (I think you could probably get hold of them via the internet). Look here: http://www.barnabasinchurches.org.uk/isbn/9781841015033.htm
and here: http://www.grovebooks.co.uk/cart.php?target=product&product_id=16171&category_id=288
to start with!

Marcus–

Tell us more about what you consider a “growing movement.” Sounds like good news–maybe even a little difficult for me to believe. Other than the people on this blog, I only know two people who “get” the things we’re saying here. I live in Seattle and I’ve asked around at the “cutting edge” churches. In fact I’m involved in one. I can see that people are ripe for it (I keep meeting families who don’t think they can be a part of church without splitting up), but I’m not seeing evidence of the beliefs you wrote about (and, btw, I agree wholeheartedly with) in actual Christian community practice. The idea of all age communities (not to mention, children) seems to be ignored by the part of the emergent church movement that I’ve seen so far. There are several ways that Maclaren’s _Generous Orthodoxy_ is pretty conventional when it comes to children and all age communities. I find this phenomenon frustrating. If we’re going to be so “revolutionary” on so many levels, who not this one? So, to repeat my question more specifically–Do you know of any congregations or people (UK or US) who are passionately working toward all age Christian communities?

Holly–

We’ve experimented a bit with what you’re dreaming about–not with the whole church, but (so far) with other families. Every week our small group does a “family worship liturgy”–it’s short but has all the traditional elements of a worship, and the children know many parts of it by heart now. We also did something similar for a “families doing advent” gathering that included a candlelight service. If you’d like to see the details I could em them to you.

Arden–

How wonderful that you asked, and that your congregation is already learning how to incorporate more than the usual number of generations.

By far the best resource I have been given is _Including Children in Worship: A Planning Guide for Congregations_ by Elizabeth J. Sandell. It’s approachable, clear, easy to read, and step by step. A gem, really. I wish I could point you to congregations actually following Sandell’s book, but I don’t know of even one.

Incidentally, I just looked it up on Amazon and found another book titled _Get Ready! Get Set! Worship!_. Looks interesting but I’ve never seen it in person.