Why So Many Churches?

Preteens ask this question--often. Why are there so many different churches? I read a great lesson yesterday that our very gifted Amy Weaver is editing about this very question. It was in the preteen Grapple curriculum. The anchor experience (designed to create cognitive dissonance in preteens and make them think about the question) had kids clumping together based on their favorite TV show. Then they had to find people who agreed with them about their favorite character from that show. The questions afterward did a great job of helping kids see that while people can agree on some things, they can disagree on others--perhaps that aren't key essentials to the faith. And that's okay. Then the kids get in teams and grapple with this issue by digging into the Bible. (And the takeaway is that while we may have disagreements about worship styles and/or other things, God calls us to unity as the body of Christ throughout the world.) I'm telling you...if you haven't yet checked out Grapple for your preteens, you need to. We're hearing from preteen teachers and ministers that their classes are doubling and tripling because preteens are loving it. And even better than that, preteens are grappling with faith issues and owning their faith like never before. Check it out at group.com/grapple today!

Comments

[Lisa Burney]

Hi Chris -
welcome back from Vacation!

Our preteens are doing Grapple lessons every Sunday afternoon. Our kids enjoy Grappling with the weekly Bible study topic. Their favorite part is choosing how they will report what they have learned. The other leaders and I are always blown away by the improv skits they come up with. So much so that we expanded our Bible Study from 1.5hrs to a full 2hrs. so they had time to play more of the games and really enjoy creating and sharing their Grapple time reports.

Keep those Grapple lessons coming! We are huge fans!

[Henry Zonio]

Great idea on helping preteens grapple with that issue.

I do have one comment, and don't mean to be disparaging... while I do like the Grapple curriculum, I think its success might be isolated to "church kids." I say this because most churched kids haven't been allowed to grapple with the questions being asked... also many of the questions are questions churched kids would ask.

At our church, at least half of the kids in that age group come from non evangelical backgrounds and don't have many of the hang ups about these questions as do kids with evangelical culture backgrounds...

The kids here are OK with the grappling... they need help actually engaging life in real and practical ways... I'm checking out the Hope Lives kit and hoping that this is a start.

[Chris Yount Jones]

Henry,
That's a good question about whether the kids' questions are just for churched kids or not.

I just pulled up the scope and sequence (http://group.com/ptgrapple/GrapplePreteen2yrScopeSequence.pdf) and was reminded that the questions for each quarter fall into three categories: relationships, faith, and choices. You're right that the faith ones might be more for churched kids at times, but the other two categories (8 lessons each quarter) are universal to all kids (why do my parents always say no? why do some people have more friends? why do so many people boss me around?).

In all the categories, the other thing that we intentionally do in the large group time of Grapple is to create cognitive dissonance or wondering before we go into Grapple Team Time. So, when done well, the grappling question (even faith ones) is resonating with all kids and they're asking, "Yeah, what if Jesus is the biggest loser?" (That's a great lesson that plays off of the writing that Jesus never owned a home, went to college, traveled far, etc--all things that kids think would make him a big loser.) So they have an experience that makes them wonder about the grappling question, and then the leader says, "Let's grapple with that" and they do Bible study.

As you know, there's no such thing as a perfect curriculum. So I'm not trying to say it's perfect. I'm just so sold on it!

I hope Hope Lives works out great for your preteens!
Chris

[Larry Shallenberger]

I'll share my failure story with Grapple. I think the curriculum ROCKS. But I change -led it wrong and had to pull it back.

My mistakes for anyone to learn from...

1)Critical mistake one: I installed it during the church relocation. Couldn't get buzz since there was a bigger buzz a-foot.

2) Critical mistake two: I chose the wrong teacher. Diane is one of my BEST teachers. But she isn't Internet savvy. It's not part of her generational make up. She had no motivation to drive children to the website.

SOLUTION: You really need to recruit a web-savvy teacher who gets learning shift that's taking place.

3) I didn't get the parents educated and enthused. And, this was related to my installing the curriculum at thew wrong time-- but the parents didn't understand why they needed to get their children online. A core of our parents are very protective of their children and are late adopters with any online technology. If I had a do-over, I would have sold Grapple as a training ground for responsible Internet use...training that came with a church volunteer mentor.

We're coming back to Grapple in a few years. I'm sold that it's the right next step in the evolution of curriculum. But I led the change poorly.

[Henry Zonio]

I do like the curriculum, but it just hasn't really worked with our kids... They really weren't too interested in going to the site even with all the incentives we tried. I understand also the dissonance it tries to create. I just found that weren't challenged by it because as a church we already constantly make people in all areas think that way.

Maybe that was our challenge. We already have our way of helping all ages grapple with issues in that way so the curriculum was not an enhancement of what we are doing but "just another thing" to add to what we already do.

I'm not saying it's a bad curriculum. I'm just saying that I realized that we already to that and were simply adding to what we do rather than enhancing.

Thanks Chris for grappling with me :)

[Chris Yount Jones]

Thanks, Henry!

It sounds like you have an amazing church that's creating skilled thinkers who own their faith!

Just like you!

[Lisa Burney]

Larry's insights ring true with me!

I was very excited about Grapple and wanted to start in the Fall, but took an extra 4 months to sell the parents, the staff and some key leaders to the program and the website. We had parent meetings, leader's meetings and kids' meetings. I hand-picked a team of leaders and selfishly added myself to that team. (I wanted to be hands on and do a lot of inservice training so issues and problems could be addressed immediately.)
We finally kicked off in January. The website use has been hampered by the lack of wi-fi at church. We struggled with a way to train the kids on the MyGrapple site. We found our parents interested but not so knowledgeable of BLOGS, etc. so the kids have been out there on their own.
I'm glad to say, our AV team, who had been resistant to wi-fi at church, finally realized the potential of MyGrapple and installed wi-fi last week. (Have a few Grapple parents on AV team really helped us!)

I can't wait to bring in the laptops and do some in class MyGrapple website training!