Whatever your view on the outcome of the EU Referendum, the polls suggest that 75% of voters aged 24 and under voted for Britain to remain in the EU while 61% of voters aged 65 and up voted to leave. The dividing line seems to be that the group of voters aged under 50 voted to stay and those 50 and upwards voted to go. It’s possible then that if younger voters had turned out in greater numbers, or older voters had stayed indoors on polling day, the result might have been different. Someone has pointed out that those who will have longest to live with the consequences of the vote are those most likely to be dissatisfied with the outcome. An older couple who attend church here – unabashed Daily Mail readers but very nice nonetheless – told me that that they had voted #Brexit and that their children were no longer talking to them. “But we did it for our grandchildren”, they told me.

Some took to Twitter and other social media to complain that younger people had been ‘screwed’ by the older generation. You can, no doubt, fill in the gaps as to why the vote might have changed with the age profile of voters – older people perhaps look back to those halcyon days before Britain’s entry into the European Economic Community in 1973, while younger people have only ever known Britain as part of the EU, and value the freedom of movement that EU membership allows. Whatever the reasons, the vote was dominated by older people who may well believe that they were acting in the best interests of everyone, including the younger generations. But those younger people would have made a different choice.

Which brings me to church. You may have noticed that those who are most active in the life of our churches tend to be over the age of 50… I’m 56 years old and I still often attend church services and other activities where I am one of the youngest people there, if not the youngest. The age-profile of our congregations is significantly older than that of the parish we are here to serve. And that’s just those who have time to attend a service on Sunday. When it comes to getting people active in taking on responsibilities in the life of the church, we’d be lost if it were not for the older generation. At Church Council, we struggle to get younger churchgoers to volunteer. They’re too busy working and raising families, they tell us. So the jobs fall to those who are retired – they have the time to give. In church, we rely on the recently-retired (and not so recently retired) to do the work. And thank God we have them!

Church decision-makers, then, come from the Brexit generation but the decisions we make are on behalf of the whole community, from the youngest to the oldest. I wonder if we are in danger of reproducing the EU referendum: older people making decisions on behalf of younger ones without reflecting their views.