The Executive Board of the South Carolina Baptist Convention voted to approve the formation of a new staff group during its December meeting in Columbia. The Generations Group will provide a comprehensive approach to age-group church ministry support, intentionally building the framework of spiritual formation concepts for children starting in preschool that carries through their college years.

Steve Rohrlack has been named director of the Generations Group, and said he is excited to build a team of leaders who can help create this new approach of encouraging churches to view children, parents and families in a more holistic way instead of a Sunday-to-Sunday approach.

“This is an intentional reorganization to better address the spiritual developmental needs of children and students, and a focus on the end result of growing fully devoted followers of Christ. We also will be working with parents to build their awareness of how children should be growing and developing spiritually at these different stages,” Rohrlack said.

A recent nationwide spiritual development study was done on teenagers, including teens not involved in a church or spiritual organization. The data gathered from that study is being used as a resource in the work of the Generations Group.

“As we have looked at these studies we see that Southern Baptists are leading in overall spiritual development, but we also know that parents have the greatest influential role in a child’s life. We are planning an intentional emphasis on reaching parents with greater tools to grow children through this process as well,” Rohrlack said.

Rohrlack has set some early goals which include fully staffing the Generations Group and meeting with church staff members from around the state to help identify existing needs and benchmarks for the new ministry approach.

“The staff piece of this process is just as important as working with individual church volunteers. We recognize that few church staff members have single-focus disciplines. Many relate to multiple age groups, such as the youth minister who relates to both teenagers and their parents. We also hope to help churches of all sizes better work together as a team. Churches are a resource, and we can be a resource to them,” Rohrlack said.

The Generations Group currently consists of Rohrlack and Associate Director Cory Singleton. Ken Owens, director of the Collegiate Ministry Group, will also be key in the development of this ministry process.

“As we assemble this team and begin to function effectively, we will begin to help produce something that doesn’t exist anywhere else. We plan to make this a reproducible and customizable team concept so that churches of any size can also create a similar team to meet their own ministry needs,” Rohrlack said.

For more information on the Generations Group, contact Rohrlack by email at steverohrlack@scbc.discoveram.com or by phone at 803.227.6153.