Your introduction to a new, nationally representative YouGov survey of 1,500 U.S. adults on the topic of cogeneration in faith spaces. You’ll learn about the potential of cogeneration to revitalize religious and spiritual communities, along with the challenges.

Featuring:

• Eddie Gonzalez – CoGen Impact Fellow and hospice chaplain working at the intersections of spiritual care, community engagement, and storytelling. Eddie will present and discuss the findings from a new, nationally representative YouGov survey of 1,500 U.S. adults on cogeneration in faith spaces.
• Danielle Goldstone – Founder of innoFaith, a multi-faith network and platform for social innovation that fosters interfaith collaboration. Danielle will serve as a moderator for the discussion.
• Eunice Lin Nichols – CoGenerate Co-CEO and founding member of a new neighborhood church. Eunice also moderates the conversation.

This discussion explores the potential of cogeneration to revitalize religious and spiritual communities, along with the challenges facing intergenerational engagement in faith spaces today.

Transcript (machine generated):

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Eunice Lin Nichols 

Hi everyone. I’m Eunice Lin Nichols, Co-CEO of CoGenerate. We’re a national nonprofit focused on the power generated when we bring younger and older generations together to co-create a better future, something we’ve been calling cogeneration. In a country that’s experiencing unprecedented age diversity alongside age segregation, we’ve been focused on institutions that can play a powerful force for cross-generational connection and collaboration, like schools and college campuses, community and service organizations, our workplaces and even places where we listen to and make music together. But no institution in society is more tied to the cycle of life and to rites and rituals throughout the life course than religious institutions. And no other institution in society is so aligned with the value of intergenerational ties, the power of life long purpose and the importance of a sense of the wholeness of life than religious institutions. So it’s a critical part of our social infrastructure that connects us as humans. But equally important, it’s a space that has access to actual infrastructure, buildings, property, places to convene and resources that are embedded in the neighborhoods we live in. So it’s with that spirit that we invite you into this conversation today, with support from the Templeton Religion Trust, we launched a body of work this past year to prepare the ground for a major initiative that we’re really excited about that’s all focused on faith across generations. We hope it will be a body of work that can inspire and equip religious institutions, faith leaders and spiritual communities to bring generations together in new ways, ways that solve shared problems, strengthen congregations, combat big issues like isolation and polarization, and provide a vision for thriving in our new era of age diversity. So to get started with that body of work, we knew we needed two things. One was a start with a national survey to learn about attitudes, beliefs and behaviors of people in the United States, about their religious and spiritual communities, their interactions with people of other generations, and their views on building connections across different age groups. So we did that. We partnered with YouGov. They surveyed 1500 adults, ages 18 and older, and we’re going to dig into some of that data shortly. Secondly, we knew we needed the right person to drive this project. Eddie Gonzalez, who joined us as a Cogen Impact fellow, is exactly the right person to do that, and I’m eager to introduce you to him. He’ll give you some of the insights we got from that YouGov survey. But Eddie’s also been doing a deep dive, a bunch of interviews with religious leaders, with spiritual innovators, with people who are leading community, faith, connected community services. And we’re just learning so much. So we’re just at the beginning of that, and at the end of this project, this summer, we will produce a landscape report with some of those deep dive insights, but this conversation with you is part of that. So without much further ado, I want to introduce you to Eddie. He has a background in Journalism and Creative Writing. He was also a hospice chaplain. He most recently was at Story Core. Is a masterful storyteller. And then he was at on being where he learned how to ask some of the biggest, deepest, most interesting questions I’ve ever had the privilege to engage in. So I’m excited to have Eddie take it over from here.

Eddie Gonzalez 

Thank you, Eunice and hello everybody. It’s a pleasure to be here, a pleasure to welcome you into this conversation. And I’m excited also knowing that you all are bringing your own perspectives, your own experiences, into this and so one of the things I want to invite from the beginning is just starting to notice how all of this sort of relates to what you’ve experienced in your own communities, whether that’s in faith communities or whatever you might call spiritual or even just in your families, in your in your local sort of areas. But eager to show you, I mean, five key insights that sort of came from that You Gov survey that Eunice was just talking about, and the you know, the big takeaway for us when we looked at that those survey results was that faith communities can be really powerful spaces for intergenerational engagement, but there are challenges, of course, to address, and with those challenges, of course, also new opportunities. So let me tell you some of those insights. And again, we sort of boiled it down into five. The first one was that religiously engaged respondents already value cogeneration, and they’re already doing it in all aspects of their life. And thank you, Duncan, I noticed you’re putting these insights into the chat while I’m speaking. So yeah, they’re already doing it more, and they really value cogeneration. The second key insight was that it is an incentive for religiously engaged adults to participate in their faith communities. So I believe it was like 60 something percent of all respondents said that if their religious community reached out to say, Join us for this project, and it has a specific aspect to it that’s intergenerational, they said, I’m more likely to say yes to that. So that’s about, you know, two thirds people saying yes. That’s it’s pretty big. The third insight was that most religiously engaged adults think their communities need to do more to bring generations together. A lot of people said that they’re, you know, that things happen unintentionally, but that there’s not a lot of intentional outreach or, you know, sort of project building around it. But when we also asked them, you know, what kinds of approaches might be possible, a lot of respondents said they didn’t know. They struggled to envision new approaches to connecting generations. Among the things that they did imagine, of course, and this is the fourth key insight, cross generational mentoring is an appealing approach, but it often falls short in execution. So people said, you know, mentoring opportunities that already existed were not really succeeding. And again, when asked, like, what would make them better, there was a lot of, I’m not really sure, I don’t know, a sort of lack of imagination of what to do. And the fifth one, which has been actually really big in conversation with a lot of the leaders I’ve spoken to, is that cogenerational opportunities are unlikely to draw non religious people into faith spaces, but they could draw religiously engaged people out to the wider community as a force for good. And the statistic there that I found really compelling was that like 92% of people outside of religious communities said that if they were invited into a specifically intergenerational project within a faith community, they would still say, No, 92% it’s a big number, and they oftentimes cited a distrust of religion as the reason for not non engagement. So those are the five key insights. I really encourage you to go to the website to check out those. We have, like much more detail. We also have graphs with the, you know, statistics, the numbers, a link to the full data. I mean, it’s a really robust site. You can also go to the five key points and click on each one. It’s really easy to navigate to get more data, but yeah, I’ll leave that there for the five key insights. And it’s a pleasure now to introduce you to Danielle Goldstone, who is the founder of innoFaith, a multi faith network and platform for social innovation that fosters inter faith, collaboration, and Daniel, I’ve been so excited to engage with you today, to have a conversation and to ask you some of the questions that I’ve been asking people as I’ve been doing this landscape analysis and these interviews, particularly asking sort of how this data resonates with you, how is it relevant to what you’ve seen in your life, in your work at Interfaith and also what questions come up for you as you look at this data and as you sort of take in these insights.

Danielle Goldstone

Yeah, well, thank you, Eddie and Eunice for inviting me into this conversation, and thank you just for this work that you’re doing to explore this area of cogeneration and faith communities, I think you know. So the first thing is that I don’t think it’ll be surprising to anybody in the faith sector that religiously engaged people are more likely to interact with other generations, which was, I think, one of the things that came up in that first insight we all know that faith communities, our faith institutions, are one of the remaining few, remaining third spaces in our communities where people of different generations interact outside of of work and families and so. So I think that is not surprising, but what I found striking was how much people feel that the religious communities are not doing cogeneration well, like not even social gatherings, because you guys, the data sort of breaks that down. And so that, to me, suggests that there’s a really big opportunity here, because there’s clearly both the interest and the unique context for cogeneration work in religious communities, and yet it’s not happening or not happening well somehow. And so that, to me, is a giant opportunity, kind of staring us in the face. And I think where CoGenerate with your expertise in this area can really add value in terms of bringing ideas and imagination. As you said, we may be lacking an imagination in this regard. The other thing is that I’m looking at this data from. The you give survey alongside other studies about the religious landscape that we’re seeing right now. So if folks here are kind of involved in the faith sector, they’ll probably know that after many years of seeing declining religious affiliation in the survey data that the latest Pew study on religious the religious landscape shows that that trend of declining affiliation may have plateaued or slowed since 2020 and that’s been big news in the faith sector, because we’ve been living in this narrative of declining affiliation at the same time, it doesn’t negate the longer term trend in the sense that young Americans are still a lot less religious than older Americans in terms of their in terms of practice, so young people attend religious services less often than older adults do. But there was also a recent study done by More in Common that was about the perception gaps in terms of the differences between what Americans think people of faith believe and what they actually believe. And one of the things out of that study was that two thirds of Gen Z says that their faith identity is important to them, which is actually only 9% below that of baby boomer boomers. And even more interestingly, that Gen Z is actually more likely than older generations to turn to their respective faith traditions, specifically for belonging and community, among the many things people turn to faith communities for. And so I think that also speaks to other data that we’re seeing about increasing social isolation in our country, especially among young people. And so looking at all of this data, and the You Gov survey that you all have done, this is sort of what I see. I see that religious communities, we’ve been wringing our hands for a decade or more now about how young people aren’t joining our communities. We have this situation where the decline in affiliation may be or the decline in non affiliation may be slowing. We’ve we have young people saying their faith identity is important to them and that they turn to their traditions for belonging and community. And so I think there is a moment here to stop bringing our hands and ask right not what programs will be bring young people back, but how do we take advantage of this moment to build something different and build something that’s truly like build truly cogenerational communities that respond to the needs of different generations, and maybe, probably, definitely that means that we need to stop asking, how do we get young people to come to service, and instead ask things like, what do different generations need to feel belonging in community? And what are we trying to do in our larger communities where both younger and older folks could be of help, and how might we ask them for that help. And then the second thing I just want to raise is because we’re doing some work with partner organizations on mapping a spiritual innovation trend where folks are innovating new ways to bring spiritual and cultural traditions to bear, to pursue new forms of faith and spirituality in action, most of whom are doing that outside of our religious institutions, and so this is a space where you will find many more younger people who aren’t going to traditional religious institutions. And one of the challenges, I think, for these newer communities is that it’s not not always the case, but you tend to see less generational diversity, and we’re hearing from many of those innovators that they’re seeking the engagement of the people, the wisdom, the assets of traditional faith institutions, but in many cases, are being turned away because what they’re doing is not seen as within the box of ministry as those institutions have defined it. And so this is, I think, another big opportunity. You know, what are the spiritual innovators in our community doing? And how can institutions create some open, experimental space to engage with those innovators? And that, I think, is really ripe ground for potential cogeneration because of just the demographics of those different those different groups. So those are a couple of the things that that have come to mind in looking at this data, a couple of the questions. One is that something we hear from folks, particularly young people in faith communities, is and I think you guys have been hearing this too in your conversations. And Eddie, I’m eager to hear more about some of those conversations, but the big challenge is the power dynamics, right? So, so kind of young people in religious communities often feel like they do not have actual power in those institutions, that it’s sort of a one way kind of flow of, you know, to the point of. Internship, like, that’s maybe one of the things we think about, but, but that’s sort of a one way intergenerational engagement, right? Which is not what cogeneration is about. And so, so that power so all of this raises the question for me, of how we tackle that power dynamic in in religious communities, and then also just kind of what unique aspects faith communities bring. I’m curious because you guys work in a lot of different communities on cogeneration, and you know, I’ve shared a little bit about what I think faith communities have to bring to this space. But I’m curious also, for you guys, looking at at various different sectors and communities, what you know, what we think that that religious communities uniquely have to bring to this conversation of of cogeneration, but I know Eddie, you’ve been talking to a bunch of folks, and I’d love to to hear more about the stories behind the data, in terms of what you’re hearing from folks? Yeah,

Eddie Gonzalez 

Well, a few things were coming up while you were talking and, you know, sort of talking about bringing young folks in the sort of anxiety about that. I mean, that’s something I’ve definitely heard from some faith leaders. One faith leader came to mind while you were speaking, a rabbi who shared that when he was coming into sort of congregational ministry, he was kind of encouraged by people that were there, who had been there for a while, that if he wanted to make a successful program for youth, it was good to make sure that they had the opportunity to potential meet, meet a love interest, and also add some fun, lower the barrier of entry, maybe add some alcohol, and that he has learned over the years that he had to work to really change the paradigm of his community and the leadership. Because he said what he learned was that young people were really yearning for a place to pick up big questions, to be taken seriously, to be engaged in something of substance and of meaning. And he said that it was also a chance for them to step out of even the sort of pressures that they could feel within their own age group, to be a certain way, to believe certain things, and to so that that opportunity over time, I think was was something that he felt was a real possibility. And what you were saying about finances and money, I mean, definitely power. Power sharing is a struggle. This is not easy work. And I’ve heard a lot about the sort of nuances and complications of doing this type of work, really practically. There was a another person that I had interviewed who had talked about sitting with some young people who, one of whom had said, you know, don’t just tell us that you really believe in our work, because the encouragement is great, but we don’t have the ability to do this work without resources to, like, actually fund our projects. Like that would be what’s most helpful. And then I’ve heard the tensions of that a pastor in North Carolina who told me that in their community. They’re really struggling, because the people who have held the sort of institutional power have been the people that have been there for the longest. They’ve kind of built the community in a lot of ways, through their volunteer hours, through their contributions. And he’s and they said, you know, we’re facing real, real questions, because it’s hard to get the buy in sometimes of folks who are saying, Why should we put resources towards, you know, group of people, young people, who aren’t volunteering the way that we used to, who aren’t contributing to the community in the way that we used to. So yeah, different stories like that are definitely coming to mind. And, you know, there’s a lot more in terms of, like, the barriers that exist to this kind of work. But, I mean, I’ve also heard incredible stories of possibility. You know, of course, it co-generates ecosystem. There’s just incredible experiments and projects, things that have included spiritual accompaniment. You know, churches that are hosting pot luck dinners according to zip codes, young people doing residencies with Catholic Sisters. You know a Jewish rabbi who’s been living with a young, fourth year rabbinical student, and what that has been like to be in residency, beautiful, personal stories of mentorship. I mean, so that it’s it’s been a really interesting conversation to hear all of the possibility and the hope and what’s really beautiful in terms of relationship. And maybe I’ll just say this at the very end, which is, as you were mentioning, how many like are the pews filled? Is one way of looking at it? Are people coming in that’s one way of measuring success. But so often the measurement of success that people want to bring into this, which is hard and impossible to measure, is like depth of relationship, depth of spiritual growth. And so the tensions of how you how you measure the success of this. Kind of work and what it means to do it meaningfully.

Danielle Goldstone 

Yeah, yeah. And I’ll just add quickly also, you know, we had an event last year on faith rooted innovations, addressing the social isolation crisis, which I know you guys have been engaged in as well. And we were joined by a woman, Sherry Moloch, who is the psychologist and a pastor, and she started an initiative to get the black church involved in helping address the mental health crisis and suicide rates among black youth, and for those churches, it has meant one getting out of the church and going to the places where young people actually are, which means sporting events, music events, things like that, and also getting over the taboos of talking about mental health in the church community, and so these are not that’s just one example, but these are not easy, natural things for the church, but I think it is possible, and we need to start thinking in these in these creative ways.

Eunice Lin Nichols 

Love this conversation. I hate to crash in, but I want to make sure we have time for some of the questions that are popping up in the chat box. So I might just pick and choose a couple. We’ll just see how many we can answer in the time we have. So it’s very tied to what you were just talking about. Karen Pearson said she would like to hear more about why mentorship is falling short, what you’ve heard or what you think, just so Karen knows we this was a with any nationally representative survey, we didn’t get a lot of open ended questions where people would just answer in whichever way they wanted. So we have the data we have, which you’ll see in the report. That’s one reason Eddie has been doing the deep dives on these interviews. So a lot of what we’re learning there comes from that any responses from Eddie you or Danielle?

Eddie Gonzalez

Danielle, do you mean, I have a couple that have come up, yeah? Go for it. Go Yeah. One, one has been around just sort of the sort of an orientation towards mentorship that was sort of one directional and that what can sometimes happen is folks are looking for less for somebody who’s coming in to fix a problem that they’re bringing into a mentoring relationship. People will say, you know, oh, I’m sort of working on this. And sort of old way of approaching this might be, oh, well, you know what you should do and try to, you know, give the solution or fix it. They said, where the energy of mentorship, and I hear this from older and younger, that they’re really eager to have, is actually like, I’m here with you, and we are going to figure this out together. And comes with a certain sense of curiosity and also a mentorship, especially within an institutional leadership structure that is less about let me tell you how to do it, but I believe in your ability to figure this out, and I’m going to support your ability to make the decisions you feel like you need to make in order to make it work with me here, helping to figure it out. At the same time, it’s a very different orientation. And then the second thing that I’ve heard is that it used to be sometimes in jobs, you know, let me pick up the phone. I can introduce you to somebody. But it’s a different landscape in terms of work right now, and it’s not the way that it used to be. So that old way of sort of opening doors for folks doesn’t work in the same way. There’s it’s a different to different work environment. And younger folks are encountering that,

Eunice Lin Nichols 

Oh, go ahead, Danielle

Danielle Goldstone 

I was just gonna add Yeah. We in religious communities, right? We’re all about formation of young people, which is super important. And that often means we don’t listen. We don’t feel like we can be formed by them as well. And and I think if the current religious landscape is telling us anything, it’s that we should be doing. You know, more of this two way kind of engagement and listening? 

Eunice Lin Nichols

I want to bring in a question from Alyssa that’s kind of interesting. It seems like there are maybe pre but certainly post pandemic, increasingly, some hybrid online plus in person, religious communities, any insights on how generations are or are struggling to connect when it’s a hybrid kind of situation.

Danielle Goldstone

I don’t know, Ed, if you have the only thing that I’ve heard is that it’s just like it’s much easier for young people to operate in the digital world. I think we’ve all gotten a little bit of training in that, with the with the pandemic, so that’s helpful. But I think for young people, it’s less of a It’s not I feel like, for older generations, it has felt like they’re really missing out on something, not being if they’re not in person, and that’s been less so for younger generations, because they’re sort of digital natives, and this is normal for them, but yeah, and I think there are some good examples out there of how communities are are making that work. But. 

Eunice Lin Nichols

I’m curious, Eddie, if you feel like you’ve seen while, while young people are digital natives. I do think that there is a sense of craving community, deep, authentic community, and to the extent that the online maybe that’s where it starts, but can lead to in person relationships. I’ve just been in many different rooms, both religious and not, where young people are saying, where we want community and belonging. How much can you get that if you’re only ever in the virtual space? So I think looking at that hybrid setting is really important.

Eddie Gonzalez

Yeah, I think that really resonates. And I think it’s, I’ve heard from, you know, it’s sort of a mixed bag. On one hand, folks see a lot of opportunity in terms of how these platforms and different apps like what kinds of opportunities they open up. And at the same time, you hear from both older and younger, there’s no substitution for being in person with one another and attuning to each other in physical space. So, yeah, I mean, it’s a it’s mixed. It is also one of these things that’s causing a bit of generational divides. Because younger folks are tend to be more, you know, digital natives. They have access. They’re looking at social media more. They’re getting a whole bunch of perspectives. And what that brings into a room with older adults who aren’t accessing, you know, that much information, that much from social media and online. Yeah, how that changes things? What it does inside of a room is really interesting. 

Eunice Lin Nichols

Yeah, here’s what I’m going to say. We are at the two minute mark. We wanted this to be a briefing about the work we’ve started to launch about intergenerational dynamics within faith settings. This is just a taster. So what I love are some of these questions. Kris Kateri, others who’ve asked about models. I encourage you to follow our work as well as Danielle’s at innoFaith, we are deeply interested in what the bright spots are, what are the models and then what is missing? Because, for sure, there are gaps. We’re as interested in what, what faith communities, religious institutions are doing well, sort of the spiritual technologies that are embedded and sometimes caught in those settings that the rest of the world doesn’t know anything about. And when, in a time when we know young people in particular, struggling with mental health, with lack of connection and lack of belonging, we have to free up some of those spiritual technologies to be used in the wider world. But I also know that often religious environments can be very skeptical about great learning that’s happening outside of their religious walls, like, you know, will that actually mesh with our own value systems or beliefs? There are some amazing intergenerational work and models happening outside, and we just have to open up the channels to talk about what we’re learning. So this was just like the opening salvo with a little bit of data. Encourage you to look at the at the insights, the five insights that Eddie talked us through. We can put that link back in the chat box. There are a set of discussion questions at the end. Eddie and Danielle kind of modeled what it looks like to use that survey as a starting point for deeper conversation. And then we encourage you, as you engage in that, we would love to hear back from you what sparked in your mind when you looked at that data or other data, there’s so much data right now, actually, about this issue, the world is interested, including the study some of you may have tracked that just came out on human flourishing. And what was interesting about that came out of open science, Harvard, Baylor University, is people who are engaged in religious activities or religious communities are flourishing more. We can think about why it’s you know, in person, engagement, a sense of belonging, activities that you do together. You don’t need to know each other that well to in a non awkward way, engage in that community. What can we learn from that elsewhere. So join us in this exploration. We encourage you, as you dig into that data, to write to us. We have a Google Form link here. Tell us what your insights are. What are your stories? Are there people and leaders and spiritual innovators that we should be talking to, because we are going to, at the end, write a report that will have a lot of these models and bright spots in it. What are the gaps? And then what do we collectively need to do to put these puzzle pieces of older and youngers back together? So thank you for joining us. Encourage you to fill out that Google form. We can get in touch with you on that and just really appreciate you being here with us. Thank you, Danielle, thank you Eddie, for being part of this journey. Danielle has been an advisor on this project, along with a handful of other amazing leaders. Look forward to introducing you to more of them ahead. Thank you.

Eddie Gonzalez

Thank you all. Thank you.