I don't want to be "managed" by Generation X.
Nothing against Gen X per se. It's the assumptions about generations that bother me: At a consultation with and about young adults, a self-identified Generation X'er (34 year-old) reported that the management challenge for her peers is to navigate between the Millenials (or Gen Y) and the "80 year-olds." Both groups have equal knowledge, according to what she'd been reading. As one on the old people's side of the equation, I guess I should be grateful to be considered a factor at all.
But equal knowledge? Really? Do my years of trying and failing and learning and trying again have only the same weight as a college degree?
It is true that we are living and working amidst tremendous generational diversity and it can make things harder. Members of different generations don't automatically understand each other. We are sensitive about different things -- maybe like the very idea of being managed. I myself don't want to be "managed"-- I want my life to be valued (For a quick and dirty summary of the differences sans racial, ethnic, class or socioeconomic analysis, take a look at "Managing Four Generations at Work.")
Christian leaders are not exempt from the tension of generational differences in congregations or church-related organizations. Each of us comes into leadership for the church having been formed by the culture with significantly different expectations about our roles in the workplace. We have to deal with this honestly.
So, I gave myself a talking to: Don't just stomp your foot and pout. Maybe you're overreacting. It is true that the experts seem to talk only about how to accommodate young people, while no one speaks about what it might be like to become the older generation. Maybe we would do well to acknowledge our own hopes and fears as new generations join us in work about which we care deeply.
It is a good thing that we are not all the same. It's been proven that when people share core commitments, greater diversity leads to better decisions (See here "The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies" by Scott E. Page).
People in every generation want to be respected. We all want our lives to be valued. As a Christian, I have promised to remember this and to act as if being valued is not a zero sum game -- a belief profoundly counter-cultural to the patterns of work we learn. Might this mash up of generations actually deconstruct the assumptions about value that put us one-up and one-down? Could this lead to breaking apart and reconstituting fundamental ways of relationship in common spaces? Maybe this could happen first in the church where we already claim that value is not conditional on what you know or how you know it. Could Christians from twenty-somethings to the Greatest Generation and all in-between treat each other as if those claims were really true?
Joel prophesied that God would pour out God's spirit on all flesh to dream dreams and see visions-even on flesh that doesn't glow with youth.
Melissa Wiginton is Vice President for Ministry Programs and Planning at the Fund for Theological Education.
