There is something special about a mother’s hands.
As a child, I remember looking at my mother’s hands—examining them, twisting her rings around her fingers, and finding unique comfort in them. My mother used these hands to take care of me, hold me, and love me.
The setting of this vivid memory is church. Many times throughout childhood, I remember laying my head on my mother’s shoulder while her hand rested on my leg. I watched as her hands rubbed my brother’s back. Then I watched those same caring hands rise, worshiping the Lord. I watched her clap in praise and use them to open the Bible so we could read the Scriptures together.
Even as a 48-year-old woman with children of my own, I still remember how sheltered I felt within this sacred, shared place. It wasn’t just about being with her, but about the care and closeness to each other and God that these hands represented. Present with my family, all together in a row and gathered with the congregation, we worshiped. We sang together, shared communion, and read the Scriptures in unison.
All Ages Worshiping Together
For centuries, this was how children, families, and congregations experienced church. Families would sit in shared rows—Grandmas and grandpas, aunts and uncles, moms and dads, kids and cousins, blood relations and “family of the heart.” People of all ages and stages gathered as the church, each a part of the larger body.
So when did our togetherness change? At what point did a family arrive at church only to go different directions, worshiping in separate spaces?
These are good questions, ones that deserve our attention. Let’s dive into the history of intergenerational worship and the reasons that sharing a family pew on Sunday is no longer the norm . . . even if it’s still God’s ideal.
The Early Church
The New Testament is our best lens into the early church, giving us a snapshot of how the first Christians gathered in worship. Early believers assembled in homes. They read aloud messages or letters from other believers or the apostles. These words instructed those gathered about how to live new lives in their old world.
The apostles—Paul, Peter, John, or James—often mentioned people or groups by name. Groups included husbands, wives, and children. W. E. Strange helps us understand the place of children in these gatherings:
“To some extent the presence of children in the worship of the first Christians was a matter of necessity. But Paul’s acceptance of children of the church as ‘belonging to God’ or ‘holy’ suggest they were not only there because they had to be. They were there because they belonged there.”1
If we could peek into one of those first gatherings, we would see an assortment of ages and stages. They might be listening, speaking, or even sleeping (just ask the young man who fell out of the window while Paul spoke!). Nevertheless, their diversity represents the body of Christ.
The Growing Church
The way believers gathered became more formalized as Christianity spread across the globe. Prescribed roles for leaders and laity appeared. They solidified their liturgy, rituals, and practices. But even so, there is evidence of all ages gathering together. Young men served as acolytes, and infant baptism—which welcomed the youngest children into the church family—became widespread.2
The Start of Sunday School
But in the late 1700s, something shifted. That shift began as a beautiful thing. A man named Robert Raikes recognized a critical social concern. The children in his parish, especially the poorest, were unable to go to school. As a result, they were illiterate. Therefore, Raikes began hosting a school on Sunday. The Bible was their textbook, and using it, he taught the children how to read and write.3 Raikes birthed Sunday school!
By the mid-1800s these schools had changed significantly from their humble beginnings. Children of all socioeconomic levels began to attend. Although the teachers were originally paid, most became volunteers at this time.4 Eventually, the public school system expanded, and this change shifted the Sunday school schedule so that it took place at the same time as the church service on Sunday.
Over time, all ages—even adults—participated in Sunday school. However, most families went together to a Sunday school class and then participated as a family in the worship service. Slowly however, even that practice changed. Churches grew. Some had multiple services. Some met on Saturday nights. So, Sunday school classes overlapped with church services.
The Modern Church
By the mid-1900s, regular practice looked like sending children to Sunday school or children’s church while parents, grandparents, and other adults attended the worship service. The larger worship gathering earned the nickname “Big Church” from children’s ministry workers. What started with the goal of fair treatment and inclusive education resulted in separation within the church body.
By the height of the megachurch movement in the 1990s—even in small, family-focused congregations—many churches hired separate church staff to care for the various ages and generations in their congregations.5 Any given church may now have a pastor, associate pastor, youth pastor, children’s pastor, and perhaps a Christian education or discipleship pastor, etc. Therefore, modern church planners create vast buildings with separate rooms for each age and generation.
Where Are We Now?
For the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the church saw a sharp decline in the number of young people choosing to affiliate with the church. The church failed to retain their youngest members—millennials and Gen Z.
Through their research, Fuller Youth Institute, Barna, and Pew Research Institute not only painted a picture of these “prodigal generations” but also of the young people who stayed connected. Over and over, the key to keeping a young person connected to church wasn’t having an amazing youth group experience, incredible worship team, fantastic teaching pastor, or an architecturally stunning building. According to Dr. Kara Powell of Fuller Youth Institute,
“Of the many youth group participation variables we examined, involvement in intergenerational worship and relationships had one of the most robust correlations with faith maturity.”6
The research from The Institute for Family Studies and Communio demonstrates that parental involvement is also crucial to faith longevity for the rising generations:
“Congregational involvement on the part of both parents and adolescents is linked to higher levels of faith commitment when children reach adulthood.”7
Designed to Be Together
As research is making increasingly clear, intergenerational faith formation—the opportunity for all ages to learn, worship, and grow together—is not a thing of the past but the way of the future. God designed us for connection. He designed us for lifelong discipleship. Faith formation shouldn’t stop because we stop going to children’s church or complete confirmation or graduate from youth group. Faith formation happens when, as the psalmist states in Psalm 145, one generation proclaims the great deeds of the Lord to another generation and that generation testifies to the goodness of God (Psalm 145:4–7). It’s a process that takes place over a lifetime in relationship with each other.
Scriptural Evidence for Intergenerational Discipleship
When asked by his disciples who was the greatest in the kingdom, Jesus placed a child in their midst and said, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:3). When the writer of Proverbs instructed the young man how to live, he told him to listen to his father and mother and learn from them (Proverbs 6:20). When Paul wrote to Timothy, he commended the faith passed to Timothy from his mother and grandmother (2 Timothy 1:5). In Titus 2, he told the older women to teach the younger women (Titus 2:2–5).
Story after story in Scripture reflects our need for generational overlap—from Samuel and Eli, and Ruth and Naomi, to Barnabas and John Mark. Israel worshiped together, the early church gathered together, the people of God learned together, across generations. Woven throughout the story of the church, faith passed from one generation to another, in community and relationship, together.
God’s Ongoing Plan
So, we return to my mother’s hands holding mine in church. My hands clasped in prayer with those both older and younger in faith, and we all lifted our hands in praise. Our congregation of all ages worshiped God together. This is the church’s legacy—it’s history and God’s ongoing plan.
Woven throughout the story of the church, faith passed from one generation to another, in community and relationship, together.
But history continues. We (the current church) can set it on a new course. Keep an eye out for additional articles focused on cultivating intergenerational spiritual practices and identifying intergenerational opportunities that already exist in our churches. Thankfully, this new direction is an old one. So let us intentionally and hopefully begin—once again—to practice faith as a community of God, together.
Article by Christina Embree.
- W. A. Strange, Children in the Early Church: Children in the Ancient World, the New Testament and the Early Church (Wipf and Stock, 2004), 76. ↩︎
- Nicholas Orme, Medieval Children (Yale University Press, 2003), 4. ↩︎
- Britannica, “Robert Raikes,” April 1, 2026, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Robert-Raikes. ↩︎
- Doris Freese, “The Role of the Sunday School Conventions in the Preparation of Protestant Sunday School Teachers, 1832–1903” (PhD diss., Loyola University, 1979), 19, 25, 36–39, https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/1846. ↩︎
- Nathan Joseph Saunders, “Crabgrass Piety: The Rise of Megachurches and the Suburban Social Religion, 1960-2000,” (PhD diss., University of South Carolina-Columbia, 2015), https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd/3091. ↩︎
- Kara Powell, Brad Griffin, and Cheryl Crawford, “The Church Sticking Together,” Lifelong Faith Journal vol. 6.1 (2012), 18–25, http://www.intergenerationalfaith.com/uploads/5/1/6/4/5164069/the_church_sticking_together.pdf. ↩︎
- Jesse Smith and Jane Lankes Smith, “Passing the Torch: How Faith Moves Across Generations,” The Institute for Family Studies and Communio, June 2026, https://ifstudies.org/report-brief/passing-the-torch-how-faith-moves-across-generations. ↩︎
