Generation to Generation: Inter-Generationality and Spiritual Formation in Christian Community
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The witness of the Scriptures and of virtually every human culture suggests that one of the most pivotal and thus crucial dimensions of human formation, and thus spiritual formation, is the intergenerational dynamic: older men with younger men; older women passing on the faith to younger women. One generation encouraging, blessing and transmitting wisdom to the next generation. And yet, it is often observed that this is a missing dimension of congregational life–that congregations are increasing stratified along generational lines. Thus this essay will make the case that the church is a liturgical, catechetical and missional community and that faith formation, in Christian community, will happen through the interplay of the generations in worship, teaching/learning and service. And that therefore congregations would be wise to be more attentive to how they foster intergenerational connections, rather than inadvertently or intentionally create generational divides in the church. Also, it is important to stress that a critical part of congregational life is that of equipping older men and women to be a means of grace to their younger counterparts. The essay will draw on the Biblical references to intergenerational formation, the insights of contemporary social-psychology and the observations of the author regarding contemporary congregational life.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".