Maybe you can relate to this. You want to talk about something deep, something important with someone of a different generation than you. You love them, you love them a LOT. But you also realize that you are pretty different in a lot of ways as well. You like different music, get information from different places, use different terms, maybe even care about different causes or political ideologies. You might even read the same Bible, but interpret it differently … and can’t see how something that is so clear to you can be so difficult for another person to see. But you want to have this conversation … and it seems to go nowhere. You get stuck in the same place each time, or are turned off by one another’s language, one another’s progressivism or conservatism, or the sense that in the conversation you start to devalue one another.

In the past few years, the nation has become increasingly polarized. Important conversations aren’t happening. It affects churches, social circles, and families… often along generational lines. Some of these conversations are about race, some are about justice, and some are about just about responding to the changing world. Some of us don’t think that people are changing fast enough, and others of us don’t want it to change as fast … or maybe change back to the way things were before, or change because we have new information now that we didn’t have before. There is a lot of complexity.

These intergenerational conversations are increasingly needed and increasingly rare. Our team of antiracism educators and friends talk candidly about how we experience these conversations in our conversation that we want to share with all of you.