Throughout all generations . . .

Twelve years ago I was in a bi-vocational phase of my work life. I served part-time in a parish as an assisting priest and worked full-time in the marketing department of a non-profit organization whose mission was to further the career development and job satisfaction of working women. In my full-time job, I interacted with many managers, executives and business owners. Prior to that time my work had been in social science research and the performing arts. I left that position for full-time ministry several years ago, but the knowledge of the business world that I developed in the marketing job has informed my work as a parish priest and contributed to my understanding of my parishioners needs and stresses.

The Internet boom of the late 20th and early 21st centuries was in full swing at the time when I was doing a lot of reading about business. One of the hot topics was managing inter-generational communication and conflict in the workplace. Members of Generation X were entering the workforce with a very different ethos and agenda than the baby-boomer managers to whom they reported. Low levels of unemployment motivated companies to reconsider policies, perks and benefits to attract workers. Executives were becoming aware that different generational cohorts valued different things.

Inter-generational issues are still a hot topic in the workplace despite a very different economic situation. Businesses in 2013 are challenged with harmonizing the values, interests and work styles of the baby boomers, Generation X and the Millenials,those born between 1981 and 2000. Generational distinctives are as real now as they were when the phrase "don't trust anyone over 30" was coined. The man who first said it, Jack Weinberg, will be 73 years old this spring.

Everyone has heard of the mythical northern-California Internet start-up where the employees all bring their dogs to work and all human interaction is mediated by text messages. Banks and professional firms swing the other way with dress codes, strict hierarchies of relationship and serious consequences for rocking the boat. The ethos of a particular business at one end of this spectrum or the other might impact the generational composition of its workforce somewhat, but the ages at which people typically enter and leave the workforce all but guarantee that most business will have employee bases in which a maximum of three generations are represented. There will be outliers at places like fast food restaurants where 16-year-olds can get a job or professional firms where the work is not physically taxing and knowledge and experience acquired over decades is highly valued. But managers of businesses really need only deal with the generational quirks of three cohorts coming together in common life and mission.

In the church, the relationships between staff and members are different and the relative status of any individual members of the community may be determined by very different criteria than in a business. What the two have in common is that they're groups of people coming together to create a common life and pursue a common mission. But six generations are represented within the membership of the church. Parishes still have members eighty-five and older from the GI generation. People born between 1930 and 1945 are frequently the backbone of a church's volunteer and financial support. Baby boomers, well into middle age now, may not support the church as fervently as their parents did, but they are still well represented. Generations x and y are the holy grail of congregational development, the mythical young families and people in their teens and 20s that every parish hopes for more of. And school age children, the offspring of those young families, born since 2000 populate our Sunday school classes and middle-school youth groups.

It isn't easy for businesses to balance the needs, interests and prerogatives of three generations of workers. It's not surprising that the church is struggling to attract and build authentic community among six generational cohorts. Obviously, not congregation has members representing the full range of age within the span of these six generations. But those that do are envied by the "graying" parishes where young people visit rarely, seldom return and whose Sunday school rooms have been empty for a decade or more.

What does it take to create and sustain a level of inter-generational community across a broad range of ages within a congregation? Do businesses offer clues that the church can learn from? How do churches that have built this kind of community do it? More in the next post.

Essay from the Basement During a Storm - Original date May 25, 2011

The sirens are blowing outside. I've gone to the basement of my workplace, St. Mary's Episcopal Church. It's a 153- year-old brick building in downtown Kansas City. We are having a wild day of storms here. One is directly overhead right now. For the last half hour the siren has wailed out its warning. We are all hypersensitive to the weather, with the deadly tornado earlier this week in Joplin.

Yesterday the weather experts warned that Kansas City could experience tornadoes today, developing from a eastward moving weather system that caused a deadly storm yesterday in Oklahoma. I watched today's weather develop from my second floor office window with a view to the south. The roof outside my office gives me a panoramic view of the city east and south. Minute-to-minute, block-by- block commentary from the new television in my office accompanied my real-world observations.

Last night I had spent some time considering where to go for shelter, should the weather turn bad during the workday. The church building has a basement. Most of it is barely below grade with lots of windows. All of it has thousands of pounds of bricks overhead.

The Joplin tornado was very unusual for many reasons and a lot has been written about it already. After reading those articles I know details about tornadoes, their genesis, structure and movement that I never knew before. I am no stranger to them. I've lived in a tornado-prone region for most of my life. My great grandfather, Joel Campbell Lyon, died a century ago when a tornado struck the log cabin where he lived in southern Indiana. I grew up in Hickman Mills, where a large and powerful tornado struck in May 1957. Although my family didn't move there until 1959 the tornado was a profound part of the culture of that neighborhood. When one of us meets someone else who grew up near there the first question asked is whether or not you witnessed the tornado.

When we moved to Kansas City from Des Moines, I didn't know what a tornado was. I became familiar with the routine of summer storms during my school years. A certain combination of heat and humidity, a hint from weather forecasters early in the day and the darkening sky in the afternoon or early evening prompted my mother to turn on the radio. The TV was already on, with local weather interrupting the program for brief updates. But the radio was battery operated and would keep us informed if the electric power went out. The wind grew stronger. Moms watched from the windows. Dads and some kids stood in their yards looking toward the southwest. When the rain and hail began the men stepped inside their opened garage doors and sent the kids inside. The open garages would provide ready access to the basement for neighbors running next door or across the street for shelter. Our houses were built frugally at the end of World War II and only a few of them had basements - ours didn't. When the sirens blew we headed across the street to the neighbors' basement. My mother would shout at us to put on our shoes, grab the radio and she and my father would push us out the front door and pull it shut behind them. The water table under the city of Joplin is very high. One of the reasons so many people died in the May 22 tornado is that very few homes there have shelter below ground.

I am thankful that all of our family's sojourns in the neighbors' basement ended with an all clear. The closest we came to danger was the tornado that struck Overland Park, Kansas in 1967. I heard my sister say "mom, it's a tornado" as she looked through the back door of our house. I ran out the front door and across the street without looking back. I think of friends and colleagues in the Joplin area whose lives have been changed in ways that I cannot imagine.

Today, I thought about those hasty trips to the basement as I made my way downstairs. My shoes were firmly on my feet although peep toes and kitten heels were probably not what my mother had in mind when she warned us to prepare for a possible walk over broken glass and debris. I realized that things had changed walking down two flights of stairs carrying a cell phone, laptop computer and the cordless handset of the church landline phone. As I sat on the basement floor, I exchanged a text message with my husband. My calls to him wouldn't go through - too many people trying to call. I posted a Facebook status along with a picture of the storm taken from the roof and retrieved a steady stream of comments from friends checking on each other. For all of our ability to communicate, we can't stop the wind blowing and the rain falling. Indeed, our heedlessness of the damage we cause to the enviornment likely has increased the violence of severe weather.

I see sunlight out the window. Time to gather the hardware and head upstairs. This storm is headed north and east. Others may be coming our way later today.