As John Maxwell once emphasized, “Change is inevitable.  Growth is optional.”  With the march of time, individuals change, families change, and every level of life changes in some way.  In today’s world, add to that inevitability an antipathy towards tradition and an attraction to the novel and you have a strong force for change. Change in and of itself is neither good nor bad.  The moral value of a change arises from what is changed to what it is changed.  A prior bad can be changed to a good when pain is relieved and health is restored.  A prior good can be changed into a bad when one’s happiness is shattered by a loved one’s death.  Society inevitably changes over time, but not inevitably for the better.  The generalizations in part one of this essay apply to how the reasons for gathering have changed in families and other settings today.  Part two looks at further societal trends and their impacts on the gathering of families as well as for friends, co-workers, and churches. 

              While generalizations in this essay do not apply universally across our culture, they do reflect some of the more common patterns and trends within the culture.  Anyone will find it difficult to argue against the reality of these changes in our society over preceding decades.  While there are a variety of reasons for gathering and a variety of settings, for the most part today we have all been influenced by society’s trends as well as technological advances (these advances may be addressed in future essays).  While in one sense we are more connected than ever, in another sense we may feel more disconnected than before.  We can share more information with more people but can feel more separated, even marginalized from others. 

               With this in mind, an evaluation of the changes in how we gather must be measured by something other than just being different than before.  We must measure it by a higher standard which does not change in its principles.  We must consider God’s call to how we gather and compare it to today’s gathering.  Having in the last essay looked at how we gathered in the past, we look now at the description of how we gather today.  In the essay following part two of this one, we consider God’s principles for “true” gathering. 

              In the most basic setting of gathering, the family, familial ties still bind although in today’s society, they are somewhat weakened by various factors including geographical mobility, children’s extracurricular activities, and general age segregation.  The ease of geographic mobility, the fact that anyone can move significant distances away from other family members inevitably influences the tightness of such bonds.  While the familial expectation to remain geographically nearby is not entirely extinct, the desire for successive generations to make a name for themselves in a new location seems more prominent.  As adult children move themselves away, they may retain deeply heartfelt connections with the family members of their early life, yet their own children will not have the same opportunity to develop closeness to grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins when living hours away.  Deeper layers of shared memories cannot accumulate when physical interactions only occur with holidays.  Over one or more generations, familial bonds can weaken in this age of easy mobility where life and employment opportunities pull families apart.

              Combining this with the fact that children spend more and more time either at school or some extracurricular activity, early familial bonds do not connect as deeply for many families.  Under these circumstances, as children age, they spend more and more time with peers rather than family.  The opportunities to interact with extended family like grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins diminishes as more and more time is spent in practicing and preparing for the competitions which come with the activities.  Even when the extended family gathers to watch such sports and other extracurricular events, the focus is more on the child and the event.  While the presence of family at a child’s events do nurture a child’s sense of being loved, the events can overtake the bonding.  Unless a family chooses to participate in the child’s practice of the activity, the child may become overly influenced by their peers sharing in that activity. These activities are not inherently bad but must be consciously balanced with the development of the child’s role in the family.  Allowing the child to become the centerpiece of the family through excessive focus on the child’s extracurricular activities can be detrimental to deepening of family bonds and to the development of the child’s future view of their own family.

              The separation of age groups along activities can continue as children grow, departing home for college life.  Each stage of life can become focused on one’s age group give or take a couple of years.  In such an age separated society, values become shaped more by peers at times, than by family and its family traditions.  Teens focus on their own age group sometimes to the detriment or neglect of younger siblings.  Even at the other end of life, retirees begin to gather around other retirees in retirement communities. This reflects the generational separation that is deepening in our age segregated society. 

               With these interactions between the ease of mobility, the growing influence of the extracurricular lives of children, and the tendencies towards age segregation, the strength of family cohesion may diminish.  When time together is minimized for one reason or another, in the short term or the long term, familial bonds cannot develop as deeply and as strongly.  While gathering may still happen at holidays, the “gathering” into one family may not actually occur unless effort is applied to do so.  In part 2 of this essay, examples of other societal forces pushing against family cohesion are discussed further as well as the effects of those same forces on other types of gathering. 

Next in the series… Part Two of The Changing Reasons We Gather Today.