SENIORS TALKING TO SENIORS {About Why We Came Back} [W, 10-27-21]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

 

That’s how our pastor, Mary Beth Morgan, referred to our Zooming session with Arianna. Helen and I are among the most senior members of St. Mark’s UMC, worshipping here even before we were the first couple married here. I was an unpaid assistant pastor to Dick Hamilton, the founding pastor, during my final semester at IU. After 56 years of going where the bishop sent us and following the grandkids, we returned “home,” to Bloomington, and to St. Mark’s.

Arianna is a college senior, Indiana University, and came to church here as a kid, then moved away with her family, but decided she wanted to be baptized into the Christian faith--which wasn’t automatic, since her mother is a Persian Moslem--and she knew she had to come back to St. Mark’s for that ritual. She started college at St. Mary’s at Notre Dame, but after a year transferred to Indiana University, and so returned to St. Mark’s once again. She is an IU senior and helps out with the Sunday School and youth group. [She was going to help the teens carve Halloween pumpkins after we zoomed.]

So, it being stewardship season, and Rev. Morgan scrounging for a sermon approach to appealing for folks to pony up bucks and hours on behalf of the church, she wanted to ask us seniors why it is that we keep coming back to St. Mark’s. What in the past 65 years of St. Mark’s keeps drawing us back, and what do we think SMUMC needs to do in the next 65 to be so appealing that folks keep wanting to return?

It was such a delightful conversation that we decided we want to do it again, without even needing to produce a sermon for Mary Beth! [Although she did mention that we need more trunks for the Halloween Trunk or Treat at church, so Helen and I are now signed up to provide a trunk full of candy for the masked and masquerading children, and have promised to save a Reese’s for Arianna.]

We decided that one thing that will make us a desirable church, one to which people want to return, is an inter-generational approach. I am always so energized by meeting a young person like Arianna, and young folks appreciate it when older people will listen to them. Mary Beth pointed out, without telling her age exactly, that just in our four zoom boxes, we had three generations. That made our conversation so much more fun than if were only young people telling other young people how far behind we are on our studies, or middle-aged people telling other middle-aged people how worrisome our aging parents are, or old people telling other old people how decrepit our bodies are.

Now we’re thinking about how we can make this inter-generational fun available for others.

Zoom makes intergenerational sharing possible even in a pandemic, or for old people who are home-bound even when there is no pandemic. Vulnerable-though-vaccinated old people like us can talk with young people who are out in the world, because we are safely in our own homes. Yes, Zoom is not ideal, but, once you learn not to talk over one another, it goes just fine.

I feel so much more positive when I’ve talked with some Arianna, or some Aaron or Brianna or Rodney or Joe or Levi or… I suggest that if you want to feel better about the world, and even yourself, go inter-generational. If you have a minimal Zoom IQ, like mine, you know somebody who knows how to Zoom… well, it’s just fun to talk to folks in other walks of life.

John Robert McFarland