It is harder to find community, and it is usually at the time when you need it most. Talk about irony.

By the way, you should check out my post about my friend who plays for the Colts, Hunter Smith-he is great. GO COLTS!!

I’m rootin’ Colts.

Bible Study Fellowship International (BSF) made that change a decade ago, placing small groups with their own age–BIG mistake imhbco!

Carolyn

When your religion is also your vocation, people (we) sometimes take advantage of the fact that you are a leader. Hope you can lay your burdens down in the class and relax a bit. I really enjoyed the class with my three daughters, and yes, it’s been a while.

On Rick’s question:
(My opinion)
One of the places the church is weak is our lack of generational mixing. We start out in the nursery with babies our age and stay with our age group through college. Then the young married class or singles, etc. etc.
We don’t even learn well how to relate to people older or younger.
It’s a socially imposed class division that the church has swallowed without (maybe) thinking about it. We try to welcome folks outside our age group to make lasting relationships, but sometimes we don’t do that too well. We are blessed in our small group to have babies, kids, college students, young parents, and us old fogies, and wouldn’t have it any other way. (Sometimes, things get a little crazy…) I say all that to get to this point:
As a church, our ideal should make us close enough to enough people(in and out of our own age/ sex/ marital status/ socio-economic/ political group) that we can step in to help an 8th grader who needs a surrogate parent, or a baby in the nursery who is upset, or a high school student struggling with something, or a young couple with problems, or a college student far from home. That requires a willingness to step out and love without expecting a return; to open the door, to seek that inter-connectedness. Jesus said that if we love only those who love us back, what good is that? Making ourselves available to others, sometimes on THEIR schedule, is tough love, indeed. Then again… maybe that’s at least part of what “church” is all about.

Great question. Of course, that’s a problem that cuts all the way through a church that is committed to intergenerational relationships. It isn’t just a problem of one class. We cannot avoid putting parents with children just because not all families come together.

Two approaches: (1) encourage those parents who don’t normally attend to come for the special event; and (2) let those kids join in with another family. As you said, not ideal. But in the church we are learning that we are parents and siblings and uncles and aunts and cousins to one another in this extended family. I’ve seen absolutely amazing things happen as people became “like” a parent or uncle/aunt in the Christian community.

Thanks for sharing that from your perspective, though. That’s a VERY important perspective.

The largest growing sector of our population, and the one we least minister to is the child raised by single parents. We have a whole generation of these kids in our midst. They don’t say much, but they are at least questioning what having both parents would mean to them,. More often, they are hurt, confused and yes, resentful of not being attended to by the church. But then, their parents, more often than not, were not ministered to either as single parents.

If your parent(s) do not attend church, maybe they could be convinced to accompany you to the class - that no pressure about staying for other services, but would they attend the class with you and for you? I pray they would respond to such an invitation from their child.

I like the idea of the class, much like I enjoyed the Generation-to-Generation classes we used to have where I live. Thankfully, though, they finally cut that out here. I say that because I was a kid who sat through some of those classes having to “borrow” someone else’s parents. Not fun.

Just curious.