Cathy Vitek
Children's & Family Ministry Pastor
Bethany UMC, Ellicott City, MD

We are three weeks into our five-week Living in Faith Together Dinner Church (LIFT) at Bethany UMC, and every week I am amazed by how the Holy Spirit is at work!  I had anticipated that our gatherings would attract families and individuals who are not easily able to join us for Sunday morning worship. We do have some new friends and friends that we don’t see often on Sunday mornings, but a good number of our attenders are engaged in Sunday morning worship and then join us also for Sunday evenings.

Another surprise has been the number of friends in the over-50 age range who are joining us. This is not the first intergenerational experience we’ve offered, but it is the first where people with no children have decided to join us.  We have so many in this age group that they have their own table. I know this is not ideal, but from an intergenerational perspective, they have participated in every activity, and if their attendance is an indication, they are enjoying both getting to know people they didn’t know before and worshiping together, wondering together, playing together, eating together and praying together with other generations. In other words, they haven’t checked-out of the intergenerational experience in order to spend the extra time chatting with their own age group. Sometimes their interactions with the children seem to bless them to tears!

And I have a story to share that brought me to tears . . . I love that GenOn Ministries' LIFT  curriculum has detailed “Getting Started” pointers, including helpful hints on table groupings.  I prayed over the names of people who had registered and felt like one of our more mature women would be a good fit with a particular family of five, even though they likely had never met.  Fast forward to the “playing together” portion of our time together, and I noticed this lovely woman holding this family’s baby like an experienced grandmom. When I said something to that effect, she told me that she “never got to be a grandmother.” It’s like the Holy Spirit knits together church family to meet our deepest longings, whether we have words to express them or not. I so love that about our God!

This is Cathy's second article about engaging church members through LIFT. Read the first post and stay tuned for her third and final article. LIFT is GenOn's 45-60 minute curriculum to bring generations together to pray, play, learn, and break bread.