Carol and I took a walk this afternoon, and while we were walking we each complained about two different organizations we belong to:– call them the Hippie Organization and the Staid Organization.
“They’re just not focussed on their mission,” said Carol of the Hippie Organization, to which she belongs. “They’re spending thousands of dollars on [name of program deleted], but they’re requiring that their big annual conference make a profit. It should be the other way around, they should subsidize their conference because it’s better at promoting their mission.”
“I know the feeling,” I said. I told her how the Staid Organization, to which I belong, has had a mission statement that sets very low expectations, asking very little of its members. “I give them credit for working on a new mission statement this year, although it’s not guaranteed that anyone will do anything differently once the new mission statement is in place. But something’s got to change.”
We traded stories back and forth about how we’re plotting to change these two organizations from the inside. Finally, Carol said, “I’m tired of all these middle aged men who don’t do anything.” (I’m a middle-aged man, but I didn’t take offense because I knew just what she meant.) “I feel like the Baby Boomers, people who are older than us but younger than my parents, are stuck in their ways. I think there’s a generational difference.” Carol belongs to Generation X.
“You know, I hadn’t thought about that, but — yeah,” I said. I told her that most of the people in Staid Organization are older than I am, and are Baby Boomers. “Technically, I’m a Baby Boomer, too,” I continued, “but I’m barely a Boomer. It seems like the Boomers who lived through the 60’s got really good at criticizing and tearing down institutions, but they’re not so good at institutional maintenance and direction.”
“Although if you really look at the Baby Boom generation,” Carol said, “only about nine percent of them actually were involved in the counter-culture, and the rest were just like Tricia Nixon. But now all the Boomers are proud of the whole 60’s rebellion thing. I’m just not interested in that:– ‘protest, protest, protest!’ It doesn’t really get anywhere.”
We also talked about when it’s time to cut our losses, and resign from the organizations. I’m giving Staid Organization another six months; Carol is giving Hippie Organization another two months. We each have limited time and energy, and don’t want to waste it on organizations that don’t seem to be going anywhere.
Is the generational difference between the Boomers and the younger generations really significant from the point of view of institutional life? It may well be true that Boomers are more intrested in being rebels and less interested in being good institutionalists — not each and every Boomer, but the generation considered on average. And it may be true that Boomers are more likely to have a modernist mindset and less likely to be postmodern systems thinkers — it seems that each succeeding generation contains a few more systems thinkers. (Research on generational cohorts seems to support these two views to a certain extent.) But do these generational differences actually affect the flesh-and-blood people in your congregation?
So now I’d love to hear how my readers perceive generational differences in congregations (or other institutions and organizations)….
If you respond, please say which generation you were born into, based on Strauss and Howe’s generational divisions in their book Generations [summary]:– G.I. Generation (born 1901-1924); Silent Generation (1925-1942); Baby Boomer (1943-1960); 13th Generation, a.k.a. Generation X (1961-c.1981); Millennial Generation (after 1981).
