By Howard Bowman • Illustration by Andres Alvez
In response to surveys showing a lack of conversational skills stemming from an over-reliance on video games, text messaging and TiVo, a number of American mainline churches have begun to offer classes in fellowship and social conversation with Generation Y’ers.
“We feel this is meeting a real need in our congregations,” said Jerod P. Ainsworth, youth director at Loma Linda Presbyterian Church (LLPC), a leader in what some observers have called the “small-talk education movement.”
“This is causing a real rift in congregations that is breaking fellowship between the generations,” Ainsworth said.
The classes offered at LLPC include “Me and My Friends Alone: Clique Talk in the Foyer,” “Endless Conversations about One’s Children,” “Endless Conversations About One’s Grandchildren,” and “Biblical-Seeming Gossip.”
“These young people seem so immersed in their own world, they just cannot seem to share in this centuries-old tradition,” said Forbes McGintley, head of a commission designated by mainline churches to study the problem.
Suggestions offered by the authors break the problem into four distinct areas of instruction for the parents of Gen Y’ers:
1. How to talk about one’s children and family (and others’ families exactly like it) to the exclusion of all other topics.
2. How to network and bring up one’s job and/or profession in subtle yet profitable ways.
3. Exclusive vacation spots, including activities like skiing, para-sailing, kayaking, bicycling, and (of course) golf.
4. Talk about God-given possessions like cars, jet skis, pools and spas and “most importantly, improvements on the house.”
The group also considered, but tabled for future consideration, topics that would appeal to, in its words, “older demographics”—such as:
1. How to make small but effective gossipy criticisms of the pastor, beginning with “I think he gives the best sermons but there is one area where he might…”
2. “Oh my dear, I love you as a Christian, which is why I must mention ....” and
3. “Bless his (her) heart, but he (she) has such an unusual ....”
The classes will be offered in the typical between-service Sunday School time slot, but will, according to their syllabus, “be unique in that this kind of fellowship conversation never mentions God, and is ‘all about me.’”
“One of the reasons the new generations aren’t going to church is they don’t know how to Talk the Talk, much less Walk the Walk,” McGintley said. “It’s our job to initiate them into the divine mysteries of meaningless, self-serving chit-chat.”