When the generations at church grind against each other, most of us can explain in detail what the other side keeps getting wrong. This guide asks a harder and more useful question: what part have you played? It is built on one plain sentence that Dr. Bobby Manning, a pastor in the DMV area and the author of Gentegration, says shows up in every age group. People get frustrated, he says, “because that’s not how I would have done it.” The aim here is to catch that sentence in your own reactions, test it against Scripture, trace where it came from, and give up one preference for someone else’s good.
You can work through this alone in about an hour with a notebook. A group can use it across two meetings, ideally with people of different ages in the room. One ground rule holds the whole way through. Every prompt points at you. If you notice yourself answering for the other generation, stop and turn the question back around.
Catch your own sentence
Start with memory. Think back over the last year and write down three moments when something done by a person of another generation at church bothered you. Describe each one in a single line, as plainly as a news report. Then, under each line, finish this sentence honestly: I was bothered because…
Manning names where these moments usually come from. Some are visible: worship style, lights up or lights down, stained glass or fog machines. Others are quieter, and he lists them too: methods of communication, how problems get solved, how vision gets cast. If your three moments all came from Sunday morning, go back and look for one from a meeting, a group text or a planning decision. The quieter ones often carry more heat.
Now read your finished sentences slowly. For each one, ask whether it really says that was wrong or whether it says that was not how I would have done it. Manning puts one of the biggest hurdles in multigenerational church into four words: “Well, that’s not my style.” You are not trying to prove you were wrong. You are trying to see which standard you were actually using.
Read the passage Manning points to
When Manning was asked what he most wanted people to take from his book, he went to Paul. Read Philippians 2:3-5 in the KJV, ideally out loud:
Let nothing be done through strife or vainglory; but in lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves. Look not every man on his own things, but every man also on the things of others. Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus:
Before applying it, observe it. Paul is writing to a congregation he loves, urging them toward one mind and away from rivalry. He is not giving instructions about music or lighting. Work through these observation prompts:
- Notice the small word “also” in verse 4. What does it suggest about whether your own interests count at all?
- Verse 5 ends with a colon. Read verses 6-8 and describe in your own words the pattern Paul has in mind. What did Christ do with his own standing?
- Vainglory means empty glory, the wish to be seen as right or important. Where in your three sentences from the first exercise does that show up, if it does?
Then add a second text. Psalm 145:4 says, “One generation shall praise thy works to another, and shall declare thy mighty acts.” Look closely at the direction. The verse does not say the old declare to the young. It says one generation to another. Ask yourself whether you have assumed that faith flows only one way on your church’s calendar, and which way you assumed it flows.
Manning also draws on the story of Elisha, who would not leave Elijah. In 2 Kings 2:2, “Elisha said unto him, As the LORD liveth, and as thy soul liveth, I will not leave thee.” This is narrative. It describes what Elisha did; it does not hand every church a rule for succession. Manning uses it as an illustration, and his lesson is modest and practical: “One way to show trustworthiness is just consistency.” Hold that thought. It returns in the test below.
Trace where your preference learned to speak
Manning’s research for Gentegration began when churches kept asking him to explain millennials. He realized he could not explain his own generation without first explaining theirs, so he studied the experiences, household staples and cultural heroes that shaped each living generation. His summary is short: “our values come from our experiences.”
That claim turns the next exercise into detective work rather than confession. Pick the strongest of your three sentences. Then answer these in writing:
- When did you first learn that this was the right way to do it? Name a place, a person or a season if you can.
- What did that way protect or accomplish back then?
- Is that thing still at stake now, or has the situation changed?
Manning offers one example worth testing yourself against. He describes older believers whose loyalty says a church was theirs before a difficult person arrived and will be theirs after that person leaves, and younger believers who move more easily. Of his own generation he says, “it’s not that we’re not loyal, it’s that we’re loyal differently.” Then he draws a firm line: “faithfulness is faithfulness.” Loyalty, in his account, takes a shape from your generation. Faithfulness, sticking with something through its hard stretch, is owed by everyone.
Look back at your sentence. Is it defending a value your generation happens to hold, or a virtue every generation owes? Write the answer in one line. If you are unsure, say so. Uncertainty is an honest result.
Test it: when the concern is real
This exercise can be misused. If every objection becomes mere preference, no one can raise a real problem. Lisa Fields presses that point in the conversation. She says some boomers are right that some millennials are not trustworthy, and that simply having been around a long time does not make anyone trustworthy either. Manning agrees and lists what earns trust: consistency, an understanding of history and real competence. He is blunt about the shortcut some younger leaders take, choosing to run something smaller rather than learn under someone “because I’m not willing to be a follower before I’m able to be a leader.”
So sort your three sentences into three groups. The first holds concerns about faithfulness to Scripture or about someone’s character. The second holds concerns about trust and competence. The third holds matters of style. Then run a simple check on each: Would I object just as strongly if someone my own age did exactly this? If the answer is no, the concern probably belongs in the style group, whatever it sounded like when you first felt it.
Keep whatever genuinely lands in the first two groups. Those deserve a real conversation. But notice Manning’s warning about expectations on every side: it is unrealistic, he says, “if any of the generations expect that another generation is gonna meet them all the way where they are.” A legitimate concern still does not entitle you to have it resolved entirely on your terms.
Go deeper: the weight you carry into the room
Some reactions are larger than the moment that set them off. Lisa Fields observes that people who carry wounds from family or from earlier churches sometimes come looking for spiritual parents, and that “the unprocessed trauma sometimes causes you to put too much weight on the capacity” of their leaders. When a leader then makes a wrong move, she says, the reaction runs high “because it’s not just the current moment, it’s the past.” Manning adds that this is not about any one generation. “That’s a human thing,” he says.
This part is private by design. You do not need to write anything down or tell anyone. Simply ask yourself whether one of your three moments stung more than it should have, and whether it reminded you of something older. If it did, that does not make your concern false. It may mean part of what you are reacting to belongs to another chapter of your life. If old wounds keep surfacing in ways that weigh on you, talking with a trained counselor is not a failure of faith. It is one way of caring for the life God gave you.
There is a second kind of weight, and Manning names it for leaders of every age. When our identity gets tied to a role, we defend that role as if we were defending ourselves. His question cuts both ways: “who am I outside of what I do?” If you serve in any capacity, write one sentence describing who you are that does not mention the role. Notice how easy or hard that was.
The practice for this week: lay down one preference
Manning makes a pointed observation about churches and ministries. Every one has a target audience, whether anyone planned it or not, and most hit it. “It might be because your target audience is you,” he says. “And you hit you every time.” The test he puts to leaders applies to anyone with influence over anything, even a greeting table: “am I willing to put my personal preferences aside for kingdom building purposes”?
This week, do two things.
First, choose one small thing you actually control: how your team communicates, the songs you choose for a class, the time a meeting starts, the way you welcome newcomers. Ask whose taste it mainly serves. Then change it once, at a cost to your own preference, for the sake of someone from another generation. Make the change small enough that you will really do it.
Second, have one conversation in which you ask instead of assume. Lisa Fields tells of a gathering in Raleigh where younger women who had left older Black churches for new church plants said they had no one ahead of them to help raise their children. In Lisa Fields’s retelling, an older woman answered, “I didn’t think y’all wanted our help.” Both sides had acted on a guess about the other. If you are younger, ask an older member why a practice you find tiresome began; Lisa recalls the old advice to find out why a fence was put up before tearing it down. If you are older, ask a younger member what kind of help they would welcome. Then listen without correcting.
For groups
If you are leading, go first. Read one of your own three sentences aloud and say which group you sorted it into. That gives others permission to be honest without being pressed. Let people pass on any question, and never ask anyone to share from the private section above. When the talk drifts into complaints about the other generation, which it will, gently ask the speaker to finish the sentence I was bothered because… about themselves. If your group is all one age, say so plainly at the start and agree to speak about the absent generation as you would if they were sitting there.
Questions to talk through
- Which of your three sentences was hardest to sort, and why did it resist?
- Manning says “our values come from our experiences.” Which of your church preferences can you trace to a specific experience, and does knowing its origin change how tightly you hold it?
- Psalm 145:4 speaks of one generation declaring God’s works to another. What has someone younger or older than you taught you about God that you did not expect to learn from them?
- Where is the line, for you, between a concern about trust or competence and a matter of style? Give an example where you think you got it wrong in either direction.
- Manning distinguishes being loyal from being faithful. Which of the two has been easier for you, and what would the other one cost you?
- What did you change this week, and what did it reveal about how much the preference mattered to you?
A question to carry
Manning reminds his listeners that the complaints older believers make about younger ones were once made about them, and that he and Lisa will make the same complaints about their own children’s generation. “We just have to grow grace,” he says. Lisa Fields points to where that grace starts: “that grace comes from remembering your own story,” because “you weren’t always who you are today.”
So before the next frustration arrives, sit with this: when you were the one doing it differently, who made room for you to stay? Your answer may tell you exactly what to do the next time you hear yourself thinking that is not how you would have done it.