Nobody hands you a manual for leading an intergenerational choir. I sure never got one. My first week, I was handed a folder of anthems, a piano that badly needed tuning, and a room full of people who had been singing together since before I was born. So when I surveyed music ministers back in 2014, I asked a practical question. Where did you actually learn how to lead across generations? Not where were you trained in music, but where did you learn this particular skill, the one nobody puts on a seminary syllabus.
The answers stacked up like this, in order:
- On the job experience (77.4%). Almost eight in ten of us learned this leading a real choir, in a real room, making real mistakes with real people watching.
- Watching or being mentored by another leader (61.3%).
- Conferences and continuing education (56.5%).
- Formal coursework or seminary training (46.8%).
It’s not that formal training doesn’t matter. Nearly half of us point to it, and I certainly wouldn’t have written a dissertation on this topic if I didn’t believe in the value of formal study. But the clear front runner, by a wide margin, is simply doing the job long enough to figure it out. There’s only one way to learn to lead a choir across three generations: one Sunday at a time.
If you’re early in ministry and you feel like you don’t yet know how to shepherd three or four generations at once, take heart. Most of us didn’t either at your stage. I certainly didn’t. My first Homecoming Sunday, I programmed an anthem I was sure would wow the whole room, and about halfway through rehearsal I found out my altos had sung that exact piece at three different Homecomings before I was old enough to drive. I learned more from the look on their faces that day than from any textbook I owned. This is learned in the trenches. But notice the second place finisher. Sixty one percent of us learned by watching someone else do it first. Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another. Proverbs 27:17 (ESV). Experience alone teaches you what went wrong; a mentor teaches you why, and saves you a few of the harder lessons along the way.
That’s really the practical takeaway I’d hand to anyone reading this. Don’t wait for a class to teach you intergenerational leadership, because it mostly won’t. Find someone a step or two ahead of you who’s actually doing it, not just talking about it at a conference, and go watch them run a rehearsal. Ask them the awkward questions about the things that go wrong. That combination of lived experience plus a mentor’s eyes on it is, by this data, how the vast majority of us actually got here.
Who was the person that showed you how to do this? I still think about mine more than I probably let on.
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