Several years ago I taught a Sunday School class of couples in their thirties. Among the regular attendees were two couples, one from India and the other second-generation Chinese. One Sunday we combined our class with an older couples class because the lesson was on old age. After the class a member of the older class came up to me and started talking about how good it was to have "foreigners" in our class today and how they contributed to the discussion. I smiled in response but later thought to myself, Why did he single out one identifying characteristic and focus on that for his conversation? Was he surprised that they could hold their own in the discussion, considering that they were not Anglos? Were the color of their skin and their facial features all he could recognize about them?

Prejudicial people look for differences between people. They focus discussion and conversation on these unique features. More than five hundred years ago John Donne gave a singular expression to this idea that all of us are part of a unity, the human race. He wrote, "No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less . . . ; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind." We are all in this together, in the streets of Kosovo, the rural villages of the Australian outback, the great cities of the United States, or the countryside of Missouri or Ohio. The Hakka of China, the Chechen of southern Russia, the Somali of northeast Africa, the Sudanese of Indonesia are all part of our life together.

AdultApplication: Think about this. How do stereotypes of people get in the way of knowing adults as people? In your church what stereotypes fit in easily? What stereotypes would quickly be excluded?

Adult education in the church is an enigma, a seeming contradiction. Why? Hazel Rodgers, late veteran Adult Sunday School leader, listed several statements that describe reasons churches do not take up the adult challenge. Think about your church. Record your response to each of these statements. Where does your church need to improve its provision and priority on ministry with adults?

Churches typically ignore the adult population.

Churches largely disregard the biblical focus on adults.

Churches generally write off the adult population.

Churches usually have no strategy for reaching adults.

Churches routinely fail to update their adult organizations.

Churches ordinarily believe that adult evangelism is only a secondary matter.

Churches manifestly cannot expect adults to respond to them while these negative attitudes prevail.
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