Ask Your Students

We too have recently shifted our focus on Sunday mornings to a small group format. Initially we did this due to the size of the room we had on Sunday morning. It was too small for our growing group. So we split up into year in school and are now meeting throughout the church during our second service. This was met with some resistance at first but that quickly melted. The freshman benefited immediately as they were no longer afraid to speak in front of the older students. The seniors likewise really enjoyed being able to discuss things at a deeper, more intimate and cognitive level. The other benefit is increased visibility to the rest of the church. Before the adults in the church weren’t very likely to even enter the youthwing but now they can’t help but see the kids involved in bible studies, community life, practicing the Lectio Divina, and working at growing in their faith.

Now, the struggles we are having are:

1.) developing and recruiting enough leaders to maintain and promote scalability.

2.) maintaining a sense of (larger) group unity as we are now fractured during our prime time with the students.

I’m looking forward to hearing the benefits and challenges others are experiencing as well. We too offer alternative opportunities to students but they are too busy to take on another commitment so we have decided to make the most out of our time with them on Sunday mornings. So far, this seems to be just what our kids wanted and needed.

We’ve recently done the same thing. We taken some of Mark Yaconelli’s ideas about being “called” to serve youth but have also sought out the students input in who (which adults) they would like to get to know better. It’s sometimes overwhelming (in an affirming way) to let them know that young people look up to them and want to invite them into their lives.

As far as maintaining unity goes, one of the things we do is focus on the same general areas of scripture in each of our groups and then follow up on Facebook by asking the students to comment on how God has moved them throughout the week in response to our time together on Sunday morning. This coupled with a large group gathering on another and multiple “downtime” activities (just hanging out) helps us maintain a greater sense of unity.

That being said, we still struggle with unity. We have long way to go. We serve many schools in the area and we’re located right on the socio-economic border so we tend to have kids cluster with like minded students. We’ve kicked around affinity groups to lean into the natural relationships students have but are afraid of what that might do to the level of unity we already have.

Thanks for the input Kara. I too would love to hear what others have to say.