As my church began to reflect the massive multiculturalism of Toronto, the pastoral questions became much more difficult to answer. I quickly realized there was a missing piece in my understanding of family. I just hadn’t put enough thought into the relationship between the generations. I was living according to culture, not scripture.

Multiculturalism has a fascinating way of messing with our presuppositions. We find to our surprise that what is normal to one person is foreign to another, that what is good within one culture is evil within another. We find that much of what we believe to be objectively good and true has actually been filtered through a subjective cultural lens. We find that we need to look to the transcultural Bible to ask, “What does God say about this?”

When I was a child and I was forming a sense of how the world works, my part of the country was still largely monocultural. My culture was fully Western and with it I inherited the idea that the ideal relationship between generations is one of independence. One generation was to give birth to the next, fulfill the duty of getting them through college, then pursue the “Freedom 55” dream of a long and lazy retirement. There would be very little overlap between the generations beyond the occasional Easter or Thanksgiving meal. Certainly there should be very little sense of duty or obligation toward grown children or elderly parents.

But then Toronto changed. The world was invited to move to Canada and I began to see that other cultures view the relationship between the generations very differently. Where in my culture the circles of grown children and elderly parents barely overlap, in other cultures they are barely separate! As my church began to reflect the massive multiculturalism of Toronto, the pastoral questions became much more difficult to answer. I quickly realized there was a missing piece in my understanding of family. I just hadn’t put enough thought into the relationship between the generations. I was living according to culture, not scripture.

I began to find myself wondering, How should I relate to my children in the inevitable days to come they are the strong ones and I am the weak one? How should I prepare them to relate to me when they are increasingly capable and I am increasingly needy? Does the Bible have anything to say about children and their aging or elderly parents?

I went looking and landed on 1 Timothy 5 where the issue gets addressed as clearly as anywhere. Paul tells how children are to care for their parents in such a way that they “make a return” for all their parents did for them. It seems Paul does not see a total separation between the generations, but rather a healthy overlap. One generation does become independent of their parents, but then reaches back with love and care.

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