by Eddie Pipkin

Image by Willfried Wende from Pixabay

I had a great Father’s Day last weekend, and if you’re a dad (or a bonus dad), I hope you did, too.  I received some fun gifts (a very cool jumbo National Parks themed rubber ducky) and some edible gifts (here’s looking at you, prickly pear cactus gummies), but what really made the day was a throwback afternoon of video gaming with my baby boy (now 29).  Nostalgia is the gift that celebrates yesterday’s good times today!  And it’s a powerful tool in ministry as well.  Summertime is a great time for nostalgia time!  Come for the memories; stay to make new ones.

Recently my son, Nick, and I unearthed an old Nintendo GameCube that had been all the rage for the kids on the block back in the early 2000s.  We dusted this gizmo off and determined it was still operational with the addition of a memory card from Amazon, then my son had tracked down a particular video game title we had played together one epic weekend when he was 10 – all Friday night and all day Saturday until we finally had beaten the entire game.  The console was Medal of Honor: Rising Sun, and you fought your way across WWII’s Pacific campaign.  After a hearty breakfast of blueberry and cream cheese pancakes and bacon, we began our battles at Pearl Harbor and didn’t let up until six hours later when we destroyed the Bridge on the River Kwai.  It was the good ol’ days from nearly 20 years ago brought back to life as my progeny schooled me once more in how to operate the game controller and how to stay alive long enough for him to do the heavy lifting that advanced us through each level.  Good times.  We laughed a lot (pixelated video game violence notwithstanding).

Nostalgia has a powerful pull.

Whether it’s old video games, familiar songs, happy or sad, movies we were moved by, or trips we still love to tell stories about, the experiences we hold dear to our hearts have even greater emotional impact as we remember them fondly.  Any chance to relive them in any form with old friends is time well spent.

This is, of course, as true for church families as it is for nuclear families.

Local churches can take advantage of the pull of nostalgia to host events that welcome back former members of the flock, and by doing so, give people who have lost their connection a chance to reconnect.

Most local churches use summertime activities as a way to naturally twang the emotional heartstrings of nostalgia-tinged events.  Vacation Bible School, summer camps for kids, summer mission trips for youth, and special summer Sunday events from skating to cookouts to field days tap into generational nostalgia and rites of passage as family members who once attended such events are now the ones introducing their own children and grandchildren to them.  When done well, these activities are multi-generational celebrations that both capture the memories of bygone days while introducing creative new iterations of fun for all.

Such activities can also act as a platform to engage the wider community.  So universal was this kind of summer fun a generation or two ago across geography and denominations that it can be a great way to tap into the experiences for people from the neighborhood who have never even been a part of your church.  As a bonus, it can also be a way to promote a “no phone” event that encourages everyone to really embrace the past by getting off of their smart devices for a few hours and interacting with flesh-and-blood people in timeless activities.

Make it a point to intentionally stress the throwback nature of the event, a bit of a time machine portal to when things were done without so much technology.  Remember when?  Well, now you can come experience the nostalgia with us.  You might make an old thing go viral as a new-old thing with sack races, an old-time sing-along, or even . . . wait for it . . . a good ol’ fashioned tent revival.  One spin on this would be to keep the framework of the nostalgic event, but get the young folks involved in putting a modern spin on it (whether they eschew technology to do it, or come up with some snappy new way to leverage technology to make it cool in a way it never was before).

Homecomings aren’t just for the history books either!

You can celebrate a dinner-on-the-grounds and send homecoming invitations far and wide, welcoming back old faces from the past and inviting a guest speaker from your church’s former leadership.  There are people who have become disengaged not only from their old home church, but from church in general, and those people often find it awkward to insert themselves back into your community no matter how desperately they might want to do just that.  A homecoming event provides the perfect entry point to get them back on your property and into your fellowship.  It’s a strong opportunity to reconnect and reengage.

Mix up the leadership of these events, sharing it between some leaders from the past and some leaders from the present.  Not only will this tap into the good vibes of attendees old and new (who are, of course, sometimes the very same people), but it can be the genesis for some unexpected creative energy and connections that may well last beyond the specific event they are co-hosting.

Don’t limit yourself exclusively to large-scale events either.  Summer can be a great time to encourage small groups and individual ministries to do some reconnecting.  Provide ideas for hosting a dinner or pool party to get former small group participants together, or host a “blast from the past” reboot of a former ministry project to reconnect former ministry partners.  Someone can put together a collection of old photos or provide an album in which people can write down memories which the group can share together.  It’s amazing how such gatherings can rekindle former ministry efforts and get people together to refire relationships and establish new links between the old and the new.

It’s good that churches let events and ministries fade out when their time of relevance has passed.  Churches that refuse to let things die become churches that themselves begin to die, but that doesn’t mean the past can’t be revisited or even revived.  We must be doing new things to stay fresh and continue to have meaning as our communities evolve around us, but many times an old idea can find new life in a new iteration, and a pause of a few years is just what is needed for a reboot, a rebrand, and fresh ideas to emerge.  Nostalgia can play a big role in that kind of evolution, tapping the memories of those who served in an area before to help fresh faces figure out what they’d like to do in the here and now.  That won’t work if there is a cabal of people who are trying to bring back an idea from the dead in exactly the same form it previously held (like some kind of ministry Frankenstein), but it can be a beautiful progression if the experienced players help the rookies breathe life into their historically inspired vision for the future.

What are some of the ways that your local church taps into nostalgia to promote fun and connection?  Do you have a specific example of the way an old idea has inspired something new, fresh, and relevant?  Is it true that sometimes nostalgia can serve as a roadblock to ministry progress?  How do we tap the best of those past memories to provide inspirational fuel for novel ideas?  Share your nostalgic insights in the comments section below!