So recently I have been hit hard. I have always been the person that even though I attend the same church every Sunday I still attend other things at other churches. For example my church never really had a ministry focused on people in their twenties. So me and my friends went out and found a good college age group at another church. We attended that group for over a year now, and finally there is something beginning at my home church. With that now starting I was almost leery of it, we've tried to get things like this and they have bombed. After a couple months of doing this new thing at my home church I've already fallen in love with it. However due to some circumstances its had to change a little. It's become more of as my church calls it "life groups" and as other churches would call it small groups. Regardless of what you call it, it is supposed to be a place of not only learning and growing but a time of accountability. Having been a part of the college group at my local mega-church for over a year has really shown me personally something, it's hard to open up to a small group and be held accountable when your small group changes from week to week. Well my home church already knows that, so what they've decided to do is limit our life groups to only people that attend our church. That sadly does eliminate some people from being able to attend the life groups, but it makes more sense once I explain what hit me. You need to be fully invested at YOUR church. Being at several different churches doesn't work, let me explain. Every church has the same basic doctrine, and the same basic goals. However the range at which churches go about achieving those goals can be at times widely different. One of the basic goals that transcends churches is that the youth must be molded to be the leaders of tomorrow. While most all churches agree with this there are a lot of different ways that churches go about it. Now I'm not saying that one church is more right in the way they go about it, but I am saying that different churches might conflict with each other when combined. Here is my example… My girlfriend and I have been dating for almost seven years now, granted we have had our ups and downs our big blow out fights and our super cutesy moments. We have talked about marriage a little here and there for a while now but for the most part its always been about, when God wants it, it will happen. For almost the last year now the marriage thing has not only become a problem but its become a cause to some big blow out fights. And after praying on it for a while and trying to figure it all out it finally hit both of us. It finally clicked, with this whole new ministry at our church, my girlfriend has left the college group we have been at for over a year. She left it a little over a week ago, and everything since then has just become abundantly clear. We've talked through a lot over this past week. During these talks we've discovered that a big portion of our problems were coming from what she was getting at the college group we attended at a different church. She almost felt so pushed to move forward in her relationship that for a time it became a problem. Being that I am a pretty typical guy I never really even noticed a push for relationships in our college group, and that's where the tension came from. I'll explain it like this, the local church is a family, the pastor and the elders are the parents, guiding and helping the church family grow. Now think to when you're at home and your parents or someone asks you to do something, maybe its clean your room or do the dishes or even just take out the trash. How easily do we just brush it off and do it on our own time? I know that personally its SSOOO easy to just brush it off because they've been telling me to do this stuff my whole life. However now imagine yourself at your friends house, and your friends mom asks you to help do something. How often do you find yourself on your feet in an instant helping her? Its because we haven't been told by her to do things our whole life so it really means something when she asks a favor. This translates perfectly to the church family, in our own family things are pushed a lot harder and more consistently because we are almost less receptive to it being as we "grew up with it." However where me and my girlfriend found our problem is that our college group was like being at that friends house, where being asked once really meant something. But now that she's fully committed to her own family, her own church things have gotten so much better between us, and its only been a week or so.
The lesson with all of this is that we need to be fully invested in our family, in our church. Because when we spend to much time at our friends house it starts to almost warp us into what they don't even intend for us to be. You never see a hunk of clay on a potters wheel with two people sitting across from each other trying to make a pot. You see one person molding that pot. Two heads are better then one but four hands trying to mold clay just becomes a mess unless they're working together.
8/35
