Cliques

Tonight I talked about cliques in youth fellowship. A clique is an informal and restricted social group formed by people who share common interests or patterns of behaviour or in other words a group of people who know each other well and are into the same things.

There are so many social groups around it's hard to keep up. You have spides, chavs, skaters, hoods, goths, emos, surfers, nerds, cool people, even Christian and non-christian? People want to join these group because there is a deep longing to belong in them. The thing everybody seems to want is to be socially accepted by their peers and they will do anything to achieve this. People will change the way they look, what music they listen to, who they hang out with just to impress their mates, but I get the feeling there are things that they keep in the closet in fear of rebuke.

Everybody likes to hang out with their friends, and in reality who really goes and hangs out with people they don't know? It's too uncomfortable. Most people don't even realise they're cliquey as they probably just view it as hanging with friends, but to others who have yet to find a group or are new to a group, they find it isolating. I am reminded of the days when I went to CU in school. So often my friends said they didn't like CU because they felt unwelcome and judged by the cliques there, despite huge efforts to change this impression, but how can you? People will hang out with their friends!

Jesus faced cliques in His day too. He had huge opposition from the Pharisees. Another example is the story of the good samaritan. A Jew left robbed and desolate was helped by a man part of a social group that just could not tolerate the jews. Could you see that happening today? The problem is everybody thinks their way of life is the only way, and their ideals and styles are better than everyone elses.

In a survey done in youth group, it was seen that everybody at one stage had felt isolated by people, and on the flipside they had also deliberately isolated other people because of fear of what others may think. Galatians 6:1-3 Describes how we should treat people. If someone is struggling in their faith, we should help them lovingly and not patronisingly. We should help each other with our problems without superiority.

We need to be loving of everybody in our churches, so that when people who come in can see Christ through our community despite race or social group and want to be a part of that. Each one of us should be able to feel like they can be totally themselves in the church without worrying about being judged or cast aside