Multigenerational Worship: How we Found a balance and what it looks like – Transcript
Jim Latimer
Welcome to Coaching for Interims. We are about empowerment for interim ministry, best practices and quick help. Wisdom from the field. This is our collaborative Wisdom from the Field project, featuring short interviews with transitional interim ministers and others with practical help and wisdom to offer those engaged in transitional ministry and ministry in general. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of Wisdom from the Field. Today, we have the delight of being with Reverend Allison Palm. She is the minister at the Unitarian, Universalist Church of Nashua New Hampshire, and her fellow staff member, Sadie Kahn-Green. Sadie is the Director of Faith Formation Programs at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Nashua New Hampshire. I met Allison about six years ago. We’re both in a program of the Hartford Institute for Religion Research, which is connected to the Hartford International University for Religion and Peace. The program is called the Pastoral Innovation Network of New England. It’s a really cool program that gathers earlier career clergy from lots of different denominations. We explore innovation and learn from each other. And in the process of that, five or six years ago, when I met her, I was in her space, in her congregation, and I just sensed, Oh, there’s good energy here! Obviously, there’s different generations, and everybody’s trying to figure out the multigenerational thing. That’s a high ideal, but how do we actually make it work – practically work? And it seemed to me, they were doing it. And so, I invited them, Sadie and Allison, to speak to us today, and they kindly said yes. And so, I will invite them to speak to multigenerational – how they do that. Allison, where would you like to start with that? We’re going to do two podcasts on two different subjects related to this theme. This is the first one. So, Allison, please.
Allison Palm
Yes, thanks, Jim. So, we really wanted to start by talking about Sunday mornings, because Sunday mornings are really the central place where our whole community is together. And both Sadie and I grew up unitary Universalist, so we’ve experienced Unitarian Universalism over many years now. And I think we both grew up in a model of a lot of separation between the ages. So, on Sunday mornings, there would be the kids go one place, and the grownups go another place. And sometimes there’d be a little bit of togetherness, but a lot of it was separated. I think that worked really well for a time, and for that time, and when I started seminary about 15 years ago, it was clear that that wasn’t working anymore. And so, there was a lot of talk about maybe what we need to do is to worship together all the time. Maybe, maybe the way to go about this is not to separate kids out from adults. Maybe that will help kids stay in Unitarian Universalism more. Because all the mainline traditions, have problems retaining young adults. And so, there was this idea of multigenerational worship all the time as being the cutting edge ideal. And so, when I started my ministry here in Nashua 10 years ago, I had that in my head as the thing everyone was saying was the future of faith formation. And I don’t believe that that is the future of faith formation anymore.
Jim Latimer
Alright, put it out there!
Allison Palm
I’ll just put it out there, yeah. And that has been a real journey for us. And it has been a journey of trying to figure out what it is we want our Sunday mornings to look like, and what really serves our community, which is a very multigenerational community. Right now, in our congregation, we have a baby as young as four months, I think. And we have elders as old as 93, and they’re all together. So, figuring out what, what does it look like if it’s not all together all the time or all separate all the time? What is the balance that works for us?
Sadie Kahn-Green
Yes. I’m Sadie Kahn-Green, and that was the question that we’ve been playing with and exploring. As congregational leaders we have been reacting and pivoting to the needs of our congregation since March 2020, and really exploring what we could do with what we had at the time, and what we knew and what we were hearing back from our people. And so, through the past several years, we’ve been experimenting. We’ve been trying new things. We’ve been working and adapting as we go. And then as we’ve been doing that, we found that we went into a rhythm that really worked for us, and this new rhythm had balance to it, and that’s where we’re calling this finding the balance. So, both of us love all ages worship. That is something that we work together really well on, and I know we both enjoy leading worship with all ages. And also, we know our community and us don’t want to do that all the time, because there’s different ways that worship can reach different age group identities.
What we’ve worked on with each other in planning, we didn’t start by thinking, Okay, we need more balance on Sundays, what is this going to look like? It started as, Okay, what kind of Sunday morning programming and worship can we do with what we have right now? And what are the needs of our community? So that’s where we started, and this was as we were coming back from having been mostly online, because our congregation really did online worship very well. We learned a lot from that time, and as we were starting to come back, we knew we couldn’t go right back to having a whole bunch of workshops. We call our religious education Sunday school. We call them Workshop Choices.
So, we weren’t going to go back to having three or four Workshop Choices for children on Sunday morning. We didn’t have the volunteers for that at that time. We didn’t know who was going to be there at that time, and so we explored a lot of different options, and then we came into this rhythm that I mentioned before. And so, we will talk about what that looks like. So, our rhythm of the month, we have a different way that we gather on the first Sunday, second Sunday, third, fourth, and then occasionally, when there’s fifth Sundays, we do something different. So that’s what we’ll share with you how we do it. On the first Sunday of the month, I with faith formation volunteers lead a children’s chapel for the whole Sunday morning program time. And at the same time as Allison and worship leaders lead a full-length worship service in our sanctuary space. And on those times, it’s a little bit different than later in the month, where I’m not telling a story for all ages at the beginning, there are maybe stories that are used as Allison uses, you know, what would what do you call it when you use a story in service?
Allison Palm
I sometimes call it just a story or a wisdom story. But typically, on other Sundays, on Sundays where we do have kids explicitly in the service, we often do a Wonder Box, which is a box with an object in it that then we either tell a story that has to do with that object, or some kind of object lesson, and a kid gets to open the Wonder Box, and it’s a lovely wondering moment. And we explicitly don’t do that on the first Sunday of the month, and part of that is just because, you know, we love ritual, but also sometimes we need a break from those. And so, the first day of the month we do other things. So, there may be a wisdom story, but I’m not gonna open a Wonder Box.
Sadie Kahn-Green
Thank you, Allison. And on those Sundays, we’ve also found that our older youth can choose whether to attend the mixed age children’s chapel, which some of our children are as young as three in that space. Sometimes in the past, we’ve had two-year olds join with their parents, and our older youth can either come and attend that sometimes they’re there as helpers. More regularly, recently, they’ve been choosing to stay and attend the full service and be engaged as a worship participant in the sanctuary space. So, in the first Sunday of the month, we have two separate worship spaces, a learning chapel that has a lot of movement and hands on activities for our youngest church goers. We also have childcare for the really young ones, and then the worship space.
Jim Latimer
Let me pause you there, Sadie. So those are segregated then, right? Yeah, we have the grownups here, and then you have children of various ages, and they’re separate. They’re segregated the whole time on that Sunday morning, right?
Sadie Kahn-Green
They are. Yes. Just the first Sunday of the month. And sometimes parents choose to go to that children’s chapel with their children. So, for some of our families, that’s a family time together. Generally, families that are visiting and newer come together to those, and that works nicely, because they’re really learning chapels. I’m explaining the different parts of a worship service that they will mirror what happens in the sanctuary, and talking about why we do what we do. It’s a hands on, learning chapel, And then on the second and third Sundays of the month, is the pattern that we found where we all start together in the sanctuary and start with this hopefully engaging wonder box moment where a new almost every Sunday, it’s a different child. We have enough children in our program that we introduce a new kid or youth. Every Sunday, we have a brief conversation about the item, tell a story. Sometimes they’re involved in the story. And then our congregation will sing a departing blessing, and the children leave the sanctuary with myself and volunteers.
And at the moment, fun fact, our church community is out of our building right now, so we are in a borrowed space while our building is under construction. And this year we are having all of the elementary age youth go to one large space, and then our teens and tweens, so our middle school and high school group, go together. We don’t have enough to have two separate groups at that point on Sunday morning, so that age group. And then we have a childcare space, and so we have enough volunteers for that. And in the elementary space, we have what are called Workshop Choices, and we follow the theme of the month. So, this is getting into the weeds, really, but we have choices for our elementary age children that reflect our core values as a congregation and explore them in engaging ways. So, we have wonder art. So instead of just saying art, it’s art with a wow factor that kids can choose from. If you ever do watercolors and sprinkle salt on it, you there’s a little bit of a wow factor in that art project. We have love in action, Legos. So, we’ve got a core group of younger Elementary and older elementary who just love Legos, and they’re building while exploring the stories that are being explored that day, and working together. And then a games group. So those who kids who really want to move and explore and play together.
Those are the those are the options that our elementary can choose from, and that’s that model has been working for us very well, And our volunteers do pretty much the same thing two Sundays in a row. So that’s a balance that we found, where I’m not training and providing curriculum or asking for volunteers to do something totally different every Sunday of the month to come prepared to lead something new. One, we found that not all families come every Sunday the month, and we let them know that that’s okay. We want them to come when they can. And for some if they came one week, and then they can come back, they can repeat, doing what they enjoyed, or try a different option. So that model has worked for us. And our teams get together for games. And so that’s the second and that’s the second and third Sundays. And then the last Sunday of the month, we’re all together for an all ages worship service.
Jim Latimer
Good. Okay,
Allison Palm
Do you want me to talk about switch it up Sundays?
Sadie Kahn-Green
Oh yeah! Sometimes there’s a fifth so let’s not forget. There’s not always a fifth Sunday, but we do something special on those days. Go ahead. Allison.
Allison Palm
A couple times a year there’s a fifth Sunday of the month. And of course, that breaks our pattern, right? But it breaks it in a good way. And what we started doing with those is what we call Switch It Up Sunday. And initially, when we did that, we kind of like flip-flopped what people were doing. So, we sang the adults out to workshops, and the kids stayed in the sanctuary. But then, pretty soon, I think we only did that once or twice, pretty soon, we realized that we actually wanted everyone to go to workshops during that time. So, we have a very short worship service. We just do like the core of worship, introduce whatever the theme is for the switch it up Sunday. And then everyone goes off and they can choose a workshop to be part of.
And some of those workshops are explicitly multigenerational. And some of them are less. You know, kids can choose to go to any of them. We have some that kids can go to without their grownups. And we have others that if they’re going to go to that they have to take their grown up with them, basically. But we usually have five or six options, plus one or two online, and we have a different theme for each one. So, one of them, we did Unitarian, Universalist history. One of them, we had social justice as the theme. In some ways, it’s our way that we like trick our adults into doing some faith formation, because they’re there, they’re gathered, so they’re going to do whatever we tell them to do for that hour. And people have really liked it. It’s a fun way to change things up. That’s what we do on the fifth Sundays.
Sadie Kahn-Green
One thing that I want to add, is that we also still have an online option, and some of them are streamed online, and then some gather on Zoom. I think that’s why we switched to not having the children in the sanctuary, because the sanctuary is streamed out and recorded. And so that wasn’t the space for that. So, we moved the children’s space, into a place that was not being recorded. So, we just kept that in mind.
Speaker 1
Sweet! So, did you have something else, Allison?
Allison Palm
I was just going to talk about why we think this feels like it’s working. One is that people get a chance to experience most both multigenerational and age specific spaces. And to experience all of that on Sunday mornings. And there are lots of options. So, we have, like Sadie said, we have an online option and an in-person option. We also allow kids to choose to be in the service or not. So, when we are in our sanctuary space, we have a space in the back that is specifically set up for little ones. So that if little ones are going to do better staying in the service, or they want to stay in the service, there’s a space where they can move a little bit, and there’s some quiet toys. Right now, while we’re not in our space, we don’t have an area for that, but we have what we call wonder bags, which are little bags that have quiet activities for the kids, and they can take that in to the seats with them. And we also always have our kids worship room open, which is our child care room. So, every single Sunday, no matter what that space is, open. So, there’s always a space. If there’s a kid who just being in worship right now is not the thing, they can always go to that space, especially our littler ones. Our one and two-year olds, that’s like the prime time for it to be hard to be in worship because they’re moving they don’t have a lot of impulse control. So, lots of options.
And Sadie already talked about our older youth also have the option of staying in the service or going. So, lots of options, letting people decide what works for them, what works for their kids, what works for their family. I think it also feels like it’s working, because there’s a rhythm. People know what to expect. They can they can know what kind of Sunday they’re walking into, and everyone gets to experience different kinds of worship. So, everyone gets to experience story-based worship and ritual based worship and sermon-based worship. So, all of those. We get to do different kinds of things on Sunday mornings, and everyone gets to experience those different kinds of worship. And I think the last thing that feels like it’s really working is that kids are learning how to worship. They are in the sanctuary enough and have the option to be in the sanctuary enough and feel like it’s a place they’re welcome. And so, they’re learning how to worship. They’re learning when to listen, when to talk, when to sing, and they’re also learning how to be a part of worship.
We have some really strong readers. We’ve been doing a ton of readers theater stories, because we have a set of strong readers who we can call on, like the day before sometimes, and they’ll come and do just a lovely job of participating in worship. And that started with the Wonder box, but it has expanded to other parts of worship as well. In a few weeks, we have a five-year-old who is going to sing a duet with one of our adults in worship, and this is a five-year-old who loves being in the service, but also is learning how, like still figuring it out and figuring out how to do that. That’s a little why it feels like it’s working for us.
Jim Latimer
Wow! That’s a beautiful recap. Thank you so much for that. It’s the why that it works. My concluding comment would simply be that it takes good leadership for people to thrive in any organization, including religious organizations. Leadership has got to be good, and to really collaborate – both the professional paid leadership and also the volunteer lay leaders. Clearly you two collaborate well! And my sense is that, as you’ve described, that the lay leaders collaborate well with themselves and with you, and that collaboration is something that has to be created and built, and it doesn’t just happen on its own. Maybe that’s a separate podcast. So, let’s wrap this one up here, and then the next one on this two-part series here is how you do multigenerational community specifically. So, it’s worship here and then community in general. Thank you so much. Allison and Sadie for this first segment. It’s been grand.
Allison Palm
Thank you.
Sadie Kahn-Green
Thank you.
More Bits Of Wisdom from Rev. Allison Palm
More Bits Of Wisdom from Sadie Kahn-Greene
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