I recently attended a gathering where we were reminded of the unbroken intergenerational praise of a worshiping community described in Psalm 145:4: “One generation shall laud your works to another and shall declare your mighty acts.” 

At this gathering, I talked with Black Christian leaders concerned about the future of the Black church. Aging congregations struggle to articulate the good news of Jesus so that young people keep the faith. Some of these congregations are stuck in nostalgia of how the Black church provided a liberative and empowering community in the past but are failing to translate that into faithfulness today. 

I see this trend in Anabaptist communities from a variety of backgrounds. Many point to previous times (even all the way back into the 16th century) while struggling to bear witness in compelling ways to young people today. 

In Psalm 145, the psalmist isn’t describing private piety but public praise and testimony. The psalmist describes a communal rhythm of remembering God’s goodness and proclaiming divine faithfulness so that the next generation will know who God is. In this way, public praise of God’s delivering deeds within history becomes part of passing on the faith. 

This is grounded praise in the form of storytelling that orients the whole community toward nonconformity and resistance. Intergenerational worship isn’t about traditional vs. contemporary genres. It is the bridge that keeps faith alive when the world distorts the name of Jesus.

We need that bridge now more than ever. Christianity in the United States has been in decline for decades. At the same time, White Christian nationalism has grown emboldened. On one hand, you have young people disgusted by the behavior of Christians who have supported policies and use rhetoric that harms vulnerable groups. On the other, you have young people assimilating into White Christian nationalism, which has become normalized and mainstream. 

Both are a result of Jesus’ name being vandalized and distorted. 

Mainstream American Christians bless policies that aid the powerful, justify the status quo of capitalist greed and White supremacy while remaining unbothered by genocide, neo-fascism and the disproportionate suffering of fellow image-bearers. 

It’s no surprise that so many young people are prone to wander right now. Some don’t want to be associated with such a mangled witness. Others are assimilating into death-dealing religious forces.

But psalm 145 refuses to let God’s story be told by empire. It calls us back to a lived testimony. Not superficial “witnessing” that makes a target out of a person by rehearsing a salvation formula. I’m talking about the time-tested praise of a people who’ve tasted and seen that the Lord is good. 

The psalmist declares: “The Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. The Lord is good to all, and his compassion is over all that he has made” (verses 8-9). This is the God our children need to hear about.

These stories need to be told in community, across generations and across the gap between a sustaining memory of God’s faithfulness and resurrection hope bent towards God’s dream for a healed world. Intergenerational testimony is where the elders tell what God has done and the young people point to what God is doing. 

This won’t happen on religious autopilot. It will require courage to tell the stories that contain genuine treasures while exposing the counterfeits. 

Let’s be honest about how Christianity has clashed before — in Zurich and on the streets of Birmingham and still today. Christianity has baptized conquest and slavery — and sometimes it has resisted those same forces. Let’s not leave the next generation without a compass to navigate when Christians are behaving badly.

We must bear witness to the God who has never abandoned the martyrs and the enslaved, because Jesus joined the crucified and led the way to resurrection. Every generation needs to hear the stories of Abolitionists, peacemakers and contemporary Anabaptist resisters — ordinary disciples who refused to bow before empire.

The temptation is to give up and abandon the faith or settle for a counterfeit. Psalm 145 offers a more faithful way. It invites us to become a praising people who remember rightly and live faithfully. It calls us to keep the song going and refuse to let the melody get lost. 

So don’t stop telling the story. When Christianity is behaving badly, when empathy is drowning in the streets, when love gets trumped by hate, don’t stop telling the story. Let one generation tell the next that God is still good.