Hello friends welcome back to another episode of Theology in Iran. I guess today is Dr.

Holly Allen who was a former professor of Christian Ministries and Family Science at Lipscomb

University in National Tennessee before she retired in 2022. She's the author of several books

including the most recent her most recent book Intergenerational Christian Formation.

Bring in the whole church together in ministry community and worship and that is the focus of

our conversation we talk all about what it is to create and maintain intergenerational

ministries in our churches today. So please welcome to the show for the first time. You want it

only Dr. Holly Allen.

Holly thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. I know you've had quite the journey

of the last several months so yeah thank you for yeah make it on the podcast. We're really

excited to talk to you. Thanks for having me Preston. So just tell us a little bit about who you are

just some basic you know 30,000 foot background of who you are and how you got into academia and

then I do want to jump pretty quickly into your passion. I would say maybe lifelong passion for

intergenerational ministry in the church and yeah so who is Holly Allen? Well actually I came late

to academia. I stayed home. I taught school for a while. Got my master's in educational psychology.

I had three children stayed home for several years and actually my academic career dovetails

nicely with my passion my initial passion for intergenerational ministry. In the 90s we were part

of a church that was intentionally intergenerational. We met in small groups on Sunday evenings and

it was a church plant so at first we had one small group. So we met on Sunday evenings together.

We had about 25 people but half of them were children. We were just you know had a lot of kids

and that grew and grew in four years then it was about 700 people. We had 25 groups but we met

together all the small groups met together on Sunday morning and worship together but much

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