Crucial Conversations

Why Intergenerational Conversation?

It is predicted that by 2025 the amount of information at the fingertips of humanity will be doubling every 12 hrs. Yet despite the seemingly infinite waterfall of information, literally at our fingertips, most of us find wisdom elusively beyond our grasp. Within our information age engagement with content is measured primarily through clicks, likes, & views, all of which can be consumed entirely alone. But if sociologists are right that humans are fundamentally social animals then content consumed alone is not only powerless to combat the fragmentation of our communities, it is making it worse. At SLAQ we believe that one biblical catalyst for transforming information into wisdom, and content into community, is intergenerational conversation.

“We have the concepts of the ancient morality of virtue and goodness, but we no longer have a system with which to connect them”

- Alasdair MacIntyre

Since 2020 Crucial Conversations has facilitated over 900 intergenerational, wisdom seeking conversations between parents/pastors/teachers/mentors and the youth they are discipling.

Format of Crucial Conversations

Three months of Household & Community Conversations

Each Conversation Series is 12 weeks long and follows a rhythm of three weekly “Household Conversations” followed by a monthly “Community Conversations.” This adds up to a total of 9 household conversations and 3 community conversations over the course of three months.

12 week rhythm = 3x household conversations, 1x community conversation, repeated 3 times.

Household Conversations

Everyone who participates in Crucial Conversations does so as a part of an intergenerational Conversation Group who engage the Conversation Pieces of a given week, and converse about it together in what we call “Household Conversations”. These groups may be made of parents and their teens, pastor’s and their youth, teachers and their students, or mentors and their mentees (adult-youth ratios from 1-1 through to 1-3 will work). All that matters is that they meet each week that there is not a Community Conversation, throughout the three month series for a total of nine Household Conversations.

Community Conversation:

Each month for three months all of the Conversation Groups will gather together for a “Community Conversation” wherein participants will: 1) get to hear reflections or teachings from community leaders 2) engage in dynamic small group break out conversations, and 3) test their knowledge of the previous months content through a group trivia game!

Watch Parties

An optional (but fun) part of the series will include one movie a month that we encourage conversation groups to watch together. It is especially fun when multiple groups order pizza and throw a watch party all together.

To Learn about the “Why?” behind Crucial Conversations, as inspired by the story of young Jesus in the temple Check out this

CruCon Intro Video: How? (5 Min)

CruCon Intro Video: Why? (20 Min)

Checkout Our Past Conversations Series