Click Clique Click

I was all ready to write a tight post on how cliques are really a good thing and then I had to go look up what clique meant. I know, stupid move! It's a lot easier to write about things if they mean what you want them to mean and not what they really mean. Of course, if you subscribe to a linguistic theory that words really only mean what a given society says they mean then I could say I'm my own society and therefore words mean whatever I want them to mean. Actually, I think I'll do that for "clique" right now.

It seems that especially in church settings we focus on everyone interacting with everyone else. We don't want people hunkering down with their nice cozy group of peeps and pretending the rest of the world doesn't exist. True. But, I don't think cliques are all bad (and my definition of clique is a group of people that click, but don't purposefully exclude others from entering into their group). The reality of life is that some people click and others don't. We can all be friendly and get to know each other a little bit, but you just can't know everyone at a deep level. So it makes sense that people would spend the majority of their time with a handful of people and that this would best suit their spiritual and emotional growth.

The key to this is that others will enter the group who will fit well with an existing clique. Therefore cliques need to be welcoming of new people and find out where they fit best. This is what will really make a person feel as though they fit. I've seen this happen a couple times recently in The Reclamation. People who didn't really feel like they fit found a small group, a clique if you will (or even if you won't), of people who they fit with. They haven't pushed away the rest of the group because of it, but they've come to associate themselves with the entire group more clearly.

So here's to cliques!