Find Your People – Week 4

I can still picture which part of the building was “ours.”

The youth group had its own space. Its own carpet. Its own wall paint. Its own signage.

Big church had the sanctuary. We had the room with the beanbags and the ping pong table and the posters nobody in big church would have hung on a wall.

And honestly we loved it. It felt like ours. It felt safe.

“Find your people” was the messaging, even if it was never said out loud. Join the group where you belong.

Nobody meant anything sinister by it. They meant well. Teenagers need a space to be known without being watched by every adult in the building.

That’s not wrong.

But somehow we forgot that the youth room was supposed to be temporary. So a lot of us never actually left that framework behind.

We just found new rooms to match every stage of life that has come after.

a good idea that never had an exit

Age, stage, and shared-interests ministry started as a real solution to a real problem.

You cannot disciple a six-year-old and a sixty-year-old with the same lesson at the same pace. Fair enough.

People tend to want to be in community with those who they believe are similar to them. They more easily connect to certain people because they like the same things. Or they find it easier to spend time together with those who are in the same stage of life.

Kids need their own room. Teenagers need their own space to ask questions without an adult they barely know listening in. Men and women likely both need a space to share about their life experiences.

That’s not some sort of heresy. That’s wisdom.

But the problems come later, if nobody helps people discover a way out of the separate rooms.

Children’s Church eventually became “big church for kids,” complete with its own band and its own production.

Youth Group became its own contained world, sometimes literally physically separate from the rest of the building.

Then college ministry and young adult ministries became popular – twenty-somethings-only spaces that let you avoid ever sitting across from someone who wasn’t also a twenty-something.

Then came “young marrieds.” Then “new parents.” Of course we also built senior adult ministries at the other end, in case anyone over sixty-five wanted their own “space” too.

We built churches with rooms for every stage of life and every shared-interest group we could.

And the room that was supposed to bring it all together, stopped making that a priority.

“find your people” became the whole strategy

Here’s where it gets tough, because “find your people” sounds so healthy.

It sounds like community. It sounds like the opposite of the isolated, anonymous mega-church everyone worries about.

But find your people, as we built it, usually meant find people exactly like you. Same age. Same stage. Same taste in music. Same struggles, roughly.

A small group is a wonderful thing when it’s a doorway into the wider body. It’s a different thing entirely when it’s the only room you ever fully enter as yourself.

Did we tell people to find their people and then never show them how to also find everybody else?

A church can have thriving small groups in every demographic slice imaginable and still be a place where a widow in her seventies and a college student have never once spoken, let alone prayed together.

Where a single mom in her thirties has no idea what a couple married fifty years actually learned along the way, because that couple is in the “senior adults” and she’s with the “young families,” and those two people never find a way to meet.

We ultimately haven’t built spiritual families. We created space for very well-organized sets of acquaintances who happen to share a parking lot once or twice a week.

what gets lost when people don’t mix

Scripture doesn’t ever imagine the Church the way most today have organized it.

Titus tells older women to teach younger women. That assumes they’re at least in the same room.

Paul writes to whole churches – not youth ministries, not senior adult ministries – as a single body where the eye needs the hand and the foot needs the knee, precisely because they are different and both necessary.

We have built a body with the parts sorted into separate areas and then wondered why nobody feels attached to anything bigger than their area.

The sixteen-year-old never gets discipled by the sixty-year-old who has actually buried a spouse, weathered a job loss, doubted God and stayed faithful.

The sixty-year-old never gets reminded what raw, un-self-conscious faith looked like before decades of caution set in.

Both lose something the other one has to offer.

Have we mistaken comfort for community?
Have we let “people like me” quietly replace “the body of Christ”?
Have we built a church where you can belong to a small group for a decade and never actually be known by anyone outside your own social circle?

what it would actually take to mix us back together

Naming the dilemma isn’t the same as fixing it.

To change what has happened would mean building real structures for the ages to mix on purpose, not just once a year for optics. A mentorship pairing built into the new-member process, an older couple assigned alongside every young family, a senior adult teaching a class the youth group actually attends together with them, a group of teenagers leading worship consistently or praying with adults who think they have everything figured out.

It also means most of our small groups have to stop being sorted by age and stage entirely. Not all of them – there is still a place for a room of people in the same season. But a church needs most of its gatherings to be where a twenty-two-year-old and a seventy-two-year-old are able to learn how to do life together, on purpose and not by accident.

It means the stage must reflect this too.

If every voice on stage is of similar age, dressed the same way, looking the same, talking to the same demographic, then the sorting isn’t just happening in the small groups. It’s being modeled from the front.

And it would mean asking new members a different question on their way in: not what stage of life are you in, but who in this church is nothing like you and how do we get you in a room with them.

a hallway is not a home

I’m not arguing to completely shut down the youth room, or the children’s church, or the small group full of people your own age who happen to understand your specific season of life.

Those rooms did something good for me. They can do something good for other people too.

I’m arguing that the hallway between these stages of life was never supposed to be the destination.

At some point, “find your people” has to widen out into something bigger and less comfortable: find your whole family.

The ones who don’t share your music taste, your generation, your stage of life, or half your opinions. And belong to them anyway, because that was always supposed to be the whole point.

The hallways going between rooms was fine for a season. But it was never supposed to be our spiritual home.

This post is a part of the “Big Church, Same Games” series. The next post is “Youth Sunday.”