Feeling at Home at Church

I read an article this week titled, "12 Reasons Millennials are OVER Church" written by Sam Eaton which did something really awesome: the author explained a problem and then offered various solutions to that issue. One of the issues that the author addressed was that people do not feel included in their Church or they do not feel like they fit in with other people. Here is what is written,

There is this life-changing movie all humans must see, regardless of gender. The film is of course the 2004 classic “Mean Girls”.

In the film, the most popular girl in school forgets to wear pink on a Wednesday (a cardinal sin), to which Gretchen Weiners screams, “YOU CAN’T SIT WITH US!”

Today, my mom said to me “church has always felt exclusive and ‘cliquey,’ like high school.” With sadness in her voice she continued, “and I’ve never been good at that game so I stopped playing.”

The truth is, I share her experience. As do thousands of others.

Until the church finds a way to be radically kinder and more compassionate than the world at large, we tell outsiders they’re better off on their own. And the truth is, many times they are.

From the survey that I sent out at the very beginning of my time at Dublin, I know that there are many people who do not feel that they totally fit in or that they are welcomed into this community with open arms. What I want to do here is go through a couple of the solutions that Sam offers to this problem and discuss how I see those happening at Dublin. Of course, I do not want this to be one sided. Please read and comment your thoughts, or send me an email about what you think.

1. Create authentic communities with a shared purpose centered around service.

This is easier said than done. In an ideal world, everyone would come to Youth Group  because they are excited to be there and they want to be involved because it makes them happy. I know that not everyone is there yet, and that is partially because we need to build up the community and have a shared purpose. This was a bit of the purpose around the decoration of the black board in the youth room. The next steps for me, would be to take our focus for the year and apply this to a service that we feel passionate about. This is something we are going to be doing at the next youth group in November.

2. Create and train a team of CONNECT people whose purpose is to seek out the outliers on Sunday mornings or during other events. Explicitly teach people these skills as they do not come naturally to most of the population.

I think that this would be a great thing to do with our senior and junior youth. It would be awesome to have the senior youth be mentors for the junior youth, where we can make sure that everyone it getting connected and feeling like they are welcomed into the community. Perhaps this is a team that we can build in November as well so that those youth who are members of this team can work together to build the connections with the junior youth. Let me know if this is something you would be interested in.

Let me know your thoughts in the comments down below. I would love to know what both parents and youth think about these ideas, and if you take a look at the article by Sam, what you think about that as well.