Engaging Younger Leaders in Older Adult Ministry

Can a thirty-four-year-old youth pastor shepherd saints twice his age? Our first YES! webinar opened with that question, and the panel answered with a confident, biblical yes.

"Engaging Younger Leaders in Older Adult Ministry" gathers younger pastors serving older adults today alongside veterans who have spent decades bringing the generations together. In about an hour they trade stories from real congregations, dig into what Scripture says about the generations discipling one another, and leave you with ideas you can put to work in your church this month.

Watch the recording

Recorded live on August 14, 2024. About an hour, including audience Q&A; captions are available in the player.

Meet the panel

• Ryan Marcella, our moderator, serves as associate pastor at Orangeburg Avenue Baptist Church in Modesto, California, where he leads both the youth ministry and intergenerational worship.
• Dr. Amy Hanson teaches gerontology at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and has served the church in 55+ ministry since her teens, asking churches for a senior adult internship at nineteen.
• Wes Wick co-founded YES! (Young Enough to Serve) with his wife Judy in 2008 and is the author of HALF TWO.
• Dan and Shani Parotti are co-directors of YES!. Dan entered older adult ministry sideways: hired as a church facilities director, he kept slipping into the seniors' lunch to clear plates and build friendships, until the church made him its senior adult pastor.
• Christine Turner, a women's ministry leader, hosts a weekly Testimony Tuesday in her home, where women from their thirties to age ninety-eight share their stories.

Why the generations drift apart

Amy named the pattern most of us live in without noticing: school sorts us by age, work sorts us by career stage, retirement sorts us once more, and the church "kind of followed suit." Peer friendships are good and worth keeping. The trouble comes when peer-to-peer is all a church has.

Wes offered a family test. If someone evaluated the health of your extended family, they would never look only at same-age relationships. Parents and children, grandparents and grandkids, aunts, uncles, cousins: a real family is thick with age-vertical relationships, and the church is meant to be the family of God.

The stakes are higher than sentiment. Pointing to the Sticky Faith research from Fuller's Dr. Kara Powell, the panel shared a sobering finding: students who kept walking with Christ after leaving home typically had at least five solid Christian adults praying for them and encouraging them. A young person whose entire spiritual world is the youth group too often graduates out of the youth group and out of the faith at the same time.

Wes also recalled a conversation with a faithful older leader from a large church who admitted, "I'm kind of ashamed to admit this, but I don't know anybody by name under age thirty-five." He was a great guy in a siloed system. As Wes put it: those kids need you, and you need them.

Stories from the field

The webinar is at its best in its stories, and they come from every direction:

• Intergenerational missions trips. Dan and Wes have led teams that mixed retirees with young families, from Mexico to a VBS trip to Italy where a seventy-two-year-old retired schoolteacher saw needs the younger team members never thought of. Next up: a team of all ages heading to Brazil to help build a nursery wing for a fast-growing church.
• Life groups that bridge. Asked to lead a large older-adults class, Dan instead encouraged his seniors to join mixed-age life groups. In his own group, a sixty-year-old dad shared his struggles with his adult son, and a twenty-something across the room told him, "What I hear you saying is exactly what I'd want to hear if I were your son."
• Testimony Tuesday. Christine's weekly gathering began with a prayer and a neighbor: Shirley, ninety-five, who said she couldn't join a Bible study because reading had become too hard. So Christine built a format around listening instead. Now Shirley hasn't missed a week, and a ninety-eight-year-old recently shared her story with old photographs, right down to the oxen that carried her to the beach as a girl in South Africa.

Seven ideas worth borrowing

1. Start with one. Don't recruit fifteen younger leaders; find one, and they will usually bring a friend. Wes told of a church in Missoula, Montana where the majority of older adult ministry volunteers are now in their twenties.
2. Ask the homeschool co-op. Homeschool students are available during the day, when many older adult events happen, and service is often built into their curriculum.
3. Let the young teach. One church hosted a Saturday technology seminar run entirely by its students, complete with a genius bar for iPhone questions. On Sunday, the greetings changed: "That's Matt, he helped me with my phone."
4. Pass down a Bible. At Dan and Shani's church, older adults spent a year taking notes in a Bible, then gave it to a graduating senior. Their own son still treasures his.
5. Host a Testimony Tuesday. A living room, a screen for photos, and one person's story each week. No homework required, which is exactly what opened the door for Shirley.
6. Mix your life groups. Encourage older adults into groups with other generations instead of building one more age-segregated class.
7. Walk across the lobby. Dan's standing rule: you don't need anyone's permission to notice the teenager standing alone, learn their name, and check in on them every week.

What Scripture says

The panel kept returning to the Bible's surprisingly two-way picture of the generations:

• Titus 2 — Paul's teaching assignment for young Titus begins with teaching those older than him.
• Job 32:4-10 — young Elihu waits, honors his elders, then speaks with courage: wisdom comes from the Spirit of God, not from age alone.
• 1 Timothy 5:1 — lead older adults with honor, appealing to an older man as you would your own father.
• Psalm 145:4 — "One generation shall commend your works to another."
• 1 Corinthians 12 — the body of Christ is interdependent by design. Isolating its parts from each other is not how God built it.

Three challenges to leave with

1. Give your expectations to the Lord. Your enthusiasm won't always be matched in the first conversation. Dan's counsel: surrender the outcome, and when a door opens, even one shaped differently than you hoped, walk through it with courage.
2. Don't wait for a title. Relationships across the generations start in lobbies, on sidewalks, and over cleared lunch plates, not in board meetings.
3. Lead with humility. One panelist recalled preparing to scold an early service because no one over fifty had signed up for an outreach, and sensing the Holy Spirit say: close your mouth. She simply shared her heart instead. An eighty-year-old woman rose from the back row, told the congregation "you need to go," and forty people over fifty signed up.

Keep going

Everyone who attended live received a free Kindle copy of HALF TWO and our eight-part Finishing Strong video series, which features several of these panelists. Both are open to you as well: get the book and watch the series free.

And if you would like help bringing the generations together in your own congregation, invite YES! to come alongside your church, or reach out anytime. We would love to serve you.