Tomorrow morning is Promotion Sunday at our church. We're changing things up quite a bit with our Sunday morning high school program. New curriculum...smaller group sizes....gender-specific groups. We're also cutting out a large-group opening we were doing with all the high school students. We're doing a similar deal still but it will be Freshmen/Sophomores with their own and Juniors/Seniors with their own.

I think we've worked through most of these changes fairly well with our leadership team. I do have some students though that I know may give me a hard time about some of it...specifically the gender-specific thing. I've heard through some of our leaders that one student said something like "We have to interact with guys at school so why change it at church away from that?" My response sounds like something like this, "It's an hour...not your entire life." On top of that there's a few actual serious reasons why we're making this change:

• Gender makes for an easy dividing line in creating smaller groups.
• Same-gender groups allow for better discussion of "delicate" topics.
• Same-gender groups allow for better ministry "outside program time" (i.e. taking a student to Starbucks).
• Same-gender groups allow certain students to interact more with the rest of the group when they hadn't before because of embarrassment, thinking they're too cool, etc.

I realize these types of groups aren't the best for every ministry, but they're the right move for us right now. Last thought, if you think about it, pray for more leaders in our ministry. I know every youth ministry needs more leaders. But we have a pretty serious shortage in high school at the moment and are looking for some quality people to invest in students' lives.

This entry was posted by Mike Lovato, on Saturday, July 01, 2006. You can leave your response.