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“Tony – will you still be there if his marriage ends? Will your church still be there if his marriage ends? Or are you only there for couples who stay together?”

Tony says “Adios and AME, I think we are in agreement that the church is in large part its people, and that therefore we have an obligation to act accordingly toward the needs of others. AME, he is my friend, and yes I will be there for him.”

It is one thing for Tony to sit at a computer and write words about how he imagines things to be/about what HE would do.

Ame wants to know about Tony’s church.

Reality is altogether different.

I went to Tony’s church. My marriage came apart. I can tell you that in this particular church they have no idea how to handle a legitimate divorce. I was not welcome. And as long as that is the case, they will not LEARN how to “be there for those” whose marriages fall apart. You have to learn some things by doing them. And from what I hear in that church, I dare say, it probably has not been done. The sad reality is that churches create the culture they want and then nurture the ones they want to keep and starve the ones they don’t want.

I was not the only one. Close to the same time period, in the same church, another woman, who chose to divorce her husband for his adultery was told to leave the church so that they would not have to excommunicate her. You see, some men place so great an emphasis on words, so that if the adulterer gets up in church and “repents to the church in words” (but the wife doesn’t know if it is yet real–and ONLY she knows what has gone on for years) that these men decide FOR the wife if she may divorce her adulterous husband!! What we don’t seem to understand here is the NATURE of adultery/lying. It doesn’t just go away with a simple apology. It is not like discovering that you accidentally stepped on your spouses toes. Adultery and the lying that goes with that lifestyle runs deep. If it does change, it is a long process not to be ignored, like, “Oh, he apologized, thank God! It is all over with now, we can go back sports and recreation.”

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(I’ll be copying this to the other thread that this discussion is on, so you can answer me there, if you choose.)

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Churches used to have “cry rooms” for just that reason. (A few still do.)

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About church nurseries. I semi-agree with you.

I kept my babies & toddlers with me. But I was blessed with pretty quite & good-natured babies. Sometimes a baby gets in a loud crying jag cuz they’re hungry or over-tired or whatnot, at which time a nursery is a blessing. Our nursery has a speaker which “pipes in” the sermon.

(I do not in the least mind “baby babbling” noises, though some parents get nervous when their little one is making noises.)

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Is this a gift or something that God expects of his children?

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Here’s my own current situation: I stopped teaching Sunday school a couple years ago to be ready to take in foster kids, and had kids for several weeks last year. It looks like I may not have future foster kids (I’m looking at renting out the bedroom instead), so technically I could go back to teaching Sunday school. But, though I’ve taught a good part of my adult life (since 13) and even written a book about it, I don’t particularly want to teach right now. I’m not interested in being on the “worship team” and don’t have the superb gifts of cooking and decoration that half the women of my church have, so I leave them to work on church dinners.

Technically every adult member of my church is supposed to take turns in the nursery, but I’ve begged off for several reasons, the biggest ones being: (1) I don’t believe in a church having a nursery, and if I ever have children of nursery age, they’ll be with me in the service and (2) I work from my home and don’t see people much, and I need to be part of the public worship of God.

I do attend prayer meeting, and only a small group of us does, so I sort of consider myself as part of the church’s “prayer team.” In addition, I help out sporadically, doing things like helping make cards for someone who’s sick when the women get together to make cards, helping two or three days when the church has VBS, etc. But mostly I see my “ministry” as being less official. One of my spiritual gifts is encouragement, for instance, and I don’t see that as a “public” gift, but as a private one–sending cards or e-mails to hurting people, hugging and listening, encouraging the children and young people as they find their own niche, etc.

Anyone have any thoughts about when “ministry” came to mean “an official position” like Sunday school teacher or choir member, and whether it’s valid to say not all members will have such positions–and not all members need to have such positions to be active parts of the body?

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