When we tell our children and teenagers that the reason to come to church is to have "fellowship" or "community" we are seriously shortchanging their capacity to understand God's love and the nature of gathering for worship.
In the Episcopal Church, it's been my experience that we use "fellowship" as a catch-all reasoning and justification for putting on just about any event we do.
COME BOWLING! IT'S A GREAT OPPORTUNITY FOR FUN AND FELLOWSHIP.
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| A flyer handed out at public schools by the Child Evangelism Fellowship |
How many times have you read a bulletin announcement with words like this? How many times have you explained to your children why they should go to youth group? And we all know that "community" gets translated to "fun hang out time with my friends."
The message is clear - church and church activities exist for your pleasure. The problem is that the minute your child stops having fun, or has an awkward moment with the weird kid - it is no longer at their pleasure. They don't want to to come to church any more because it interferes with other times to "have fun and be with my friends" - and since we're not telling them that church is worth any more than that, why should it rank any higher than soccer, or horseback riding, or video games? Or homework. I've heard many time about how teens can't come to youth group because they have too much homework. What is youth group to the future of their child's welfare and their chances of getting into college? We do a pretty bad job of communicating that church is more important than that.
Let's go deeper than this. Yes, relationships are the cornerstone experience in which we experience Christ. But let's make sure that those relationships are good relationships. Not manically giddy, not fake and timid, and definitely not separated by cliques and clubs. Let's make sure that we're communicating that being a Christian, that following Jesus is hard but that it's worth it. Instead of being afraid of sounding like our bible-thumping cousins in other denominations (I'm talking to the Episcopalians, now) let's talk open and honestly about sin, and grace, and love, and joy, and truth. Let's take back those words to have them mean that they were supposed to all along.
