After 19 months of random ramblings on my other blog, I think I finally have a theme and a purpose for blogging -- young adult Sunday School.
I lead the young adult Sunday School class at the Odon Church of the Nazarene in Odon, Indiana. Actually, I'm not supposed to call it "Sunday School" because that's an old-fashioned program associated with children. We are officially an "adult Bible fellowship group" or just a "small group". However, since we meet on Sunday mornings at 9:30 am and generally use official Nazarene Sunday School curriculum, I'm calling it Sunday School here. Maybe if I myself were truly a young adult, I would care about the name. But as it turns out, I am more concerned about other things.
We do study the Bible and enjoy adult fellowship, by the way.
My blogging experience to date has taught me several things:
1. Search engines pick up blogs quite easily.
2. People will follow a link to a blog even when it is obviously not the most relevant hit found by a search engine.
3. A surprising number of people end up at a blog site. In just over a year, since attaching a counter to my other blog, there have been over 4,000 hits on it. That's a small number compared to blogs that actually say something, but a satisfying flow of readers as far as I'm concerned. Many have come off the search engines while looking for something else. Others followed links pointing to my blog. A few came looking specifically for me.
So anyway, it seems like maybe it's time to have a blog that says something, that has a purpose. I could rename my other blog, but I might still want to post random ramblings, so I think I'll keep it. Thus, this is a new blog with the following goals:
1. To provide informal commentary on our weekly Sunday School lessons. Currently, we're using the official WordAction adult curriculum from the Nazarene Publishing House.
2. To explore subjects related in some way to the weekly topics (either before or after the Sunday we study them together) in written form.
3. To invite others to participate by leaving comments.
4. To invite those who are interested and close enough to join us on Sunday morning.
As best as those who study such things can determine, only 20% of all blogs are still active after a year. I've beat the odds on one blog. We'll see how this one goes.
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2 comments:
Great idea for a blog. But what a tough subject. My son (21 years old) is desperately seeking a place of fellowship for the age group that you are working with.
We go to a good sized Nazarene church in the Houston area and they have very little for him. In fact, he goes to our old church (a very large Baptist church) because there at least is some fellowship there. And he is spiritually in tune to discern the theological issues involved in attending there.
I wish you all the best as you launch your blog.
~kevin
Thanks for the comments, Kevin. It is definitely a challenging age group for the Church of the Nazarene. The key seems to be to convince the few young adults who haven't wandered off that they have a vital role to play in the future of the church, that we are a better church when they choose to put up with us. I think it requires much grace and tolerance on their part - along with a love for the concept of family - for discerning young adults to stay in a typical Nazarene church.
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