The Religion Club and the Public School

The average local religion club operates much like a public school. Like the public school, it approaches life from two specific aspects: academic and social.

The major gatherings of most clubs revolve around teaching. We devise various natural schemes to make our academic offerings more effective. First, we hire the best scholar/presenter we can get to handle our public lectures. These lectures are oriented around instructing adults. Because this is of limited effectiveness with younger people, we then move to demographically segregate them into age-specific subgroups, much as a school is divided into grades. Infants and toddlers are warehoused and entertained by paid baby-sitters to free their families from the burden of their care during classes. All the eight-year-olds are lumped together and presented with age-appropriate instructional material. In teaching adolescents, the main theme is to keep them liking the religion club and liking God, so we present them with as adolescent an atmosphere as possible. The post-high-school single people are grouped together – and kept separate from the married people, if the numbers allow. This is primarily for social and mate-hunting purposes.

But while this method does provide the most efficient, rational means of effectively getting academic information into the heads of people, those who grow up in the club spend their formative years with others just like themselves. Everyone in little Johnny’s class is just like Johnny: same age, same experiences, same coursework, same teacher. Everyone in teenager Susan’s group is just like her: same interests, same questions, same adolescent pride and self-doubt. This system works all the way up to the Senior Saints Class, where everyone shares similar historical points of reference, similar age-related issues, similar interests, prejudices, and fears.

Like the public school, the local religion club also works hard to provide social connections for its members. But since membership and attendance are voluntary, far more effort is made to “give the people what they want” in terms of social activities, in order to attract and retain members. Activities are generally selected on the basis of, “If we do this, more people will want to come.”
Our social activities also revolve around demographic divisions. We have youth activities, men’s meetings, women’s retreats, and children’s camps. Club activities that involve the entire family are seldom a priority.

But the body of Christ is really not built like this at all. It is like a family. God does not bring people into the kingdom in chronological order. He brings in young and old and puts them in the same extended family. We liberally use the term “family” when we describe our local churches, but what would we look like if we really operated as a family?

More to come...