If you need further proof that these women don't make for good friends anyway, go back and read the posts that crop up periodically by people asking for permission to dump their friends for one reason or another. You are better than this and you deserve friends who recognize that! Keep these woman at a distance and maintain your other healthier relationships. It always seems that people like this are unkind to others because they are unhappy about some part of their life, and making others feel bad gives them some sense of mistaken power. You don't want to be around this negative energy and have their immaturity affect the way you live your life. If I were in your shoes, I would be polite and say hi, but not extend anything more. They will benefit from that time of developing deeper relationships more than they will from any talk I have ever given or silly stage game we play.Anonymous wrote:I know it's hard because these moms are in your neighborhood, but do you really want these type of people as your friends? I think this type of woman has clearly not outgrown the 15 year old teenage girl mentality. I found it well worth the sacrifice to use valuable program time for opportunities for students to get to know each other on a deeper level. It wasn’t long before a lot of our students who would have never hung out together in the past, were taking day-trips to the beach together. As these friendships deepened at church, so did their friendships outside of church.

It was amazing to watch as these shallow and fragmented relationships began to evolve as we saw the forming of many unlikely friendships. Of course, we can’t force students to open up, but we can show them what it looks like, and that is sometimes all it takes. These activities could had continued to remain just as superficial as the pre-youth group small talk, if our leaders hadn’t been intentional about using these activities to share beyond the surface level answers and push back on students when they tried to blow off an important question. Neither of these activities would have yielded much growth if our youth leaders hadn’t modeled honesty, transparency and openness from the very beginning. There was a time of Q and A after, where their peers could ask deep and meaningful follow-up questions about their hobbies, experiences and whether or not they wad or fold their toilet paper. They could bring pictures, props, show a power-point, whatever they want to share with us. We began a segment called “Getting to Know You”, where each week one student would get to share for 10 minutes about their life.

Upon seeing the progress being made from our time of introductions, we decided to take this idea one step further. However, we quickly realized that it was going to take much more intentionality on our part if we wanted to see these very different groups of teenagers to evolve into a diverse and familial community. Myself and the other leaders worked hard at trying to integrate the different social groups, encouraging interaction between the different groups and reaching out to those on the outside. It felt less like a family and more like a scene out of the movie, Mean Girls. They almost instinctively and immediately formed cliques that rarely interacted with other cliques. However, I soon realized that even when students showed up consistently to youth group, they rarely interacted with anyone outside of their immediate group of friends.

I naively believed that if I could get students to show up to enough youth events, they would start to build the kind of community where everyone would feel loved and included. When I first started out in youth ministry I desperately wanted the students in our church all to feel like they were part of a bigger family.

Clicky or cliquey