10/7/18 Empathizing with today's youth, and an unplanned conversation!

Happy Tuesday parents! 

This past Sunday we spent our Sunday school time together talking about empathizing with today's young people. We all know there is nothing new under the sun, and all the issues that students today face have been faced before. The problem with that though, is we tend to assume the conditions under which these things happen are the same - and they aren't. Students today live in a technology saturated, oversexed, selfish world in ways that even I didn't 8 years ago. Broken families are becoming the norm, a friendship is measured by likes and streaks, and role models are more often found in the media than the nuclear family. So instead of bemoaning our differences, we encouraged all generations to try and be more understanding of one another. To "sit on the curb of one another's lives and listen." This might be weird or awkward at first, but I truly believe it's the first step towards a truly unified church. 

IMPACT was a bit of a doozie. I had a student text me a bunch of questions regarding out Sunday school class and thought it might be interesting to talk about it for a little while before we jumped into our lesson. Boy was I surprised. It seems like a majority of our students are feeling like Sundays are not for them. They feel like they are specimen under a microscope, feel pressure to accurately represent a whole generation, and worry that the questions do more to divide than unite. While it was really good to hear all of that, ​I certainly did not expect to spend our entire 45 minutes on that, so our new teaching method will have to wait one more week! 

On the opposite side of the spectrum, we have heard nothing but praise from the other people attending Sunday school, so we are going to press on! 

Thanks again for stopping by! Have a great week!