Avoiding Cliques
by Meredith Shepherd / ga04022007
 

When I served as a leader of the Activity Days we had a unity activity.  Prior to our meeting, we typed up slips of paper and put some adhesive on the back. Round one had phrases like:

Ignore me
Disagree with my ideas
I'm invisible
Treat me like I don't belong
Leave me out of the discussion
Every time I talk change the subject
When I talk, laugh at my ideas
etc.

Without letting the girls see their own slip of paper we taped the phrases to each of their foreheads.

We had them sit in a circle and handed one girl $5,000 in fake money
and told her she was in charge of getting everyone in the group to
help her plan a vacation. She was to take ideas from the group and she
had only 3 minutes to get everyone to reach a consensus.  We told the
girls to contribute their opinions but to also follow the instructions on each persons forehead.

Naturally they could not agree and everyone felt dissatisfied.  We asked them to try and guess what was written on their foreheads.

We then repeated the experiment and this time placed kind instructions:

Include me
Compliment me
Make me feel included
Ask my opinion
treat me like I am a Child of God
treat me like you want to be treated
etc.

Then I gave them the same or even a different scenario.  The result was a positive outcome. I asked them again to guess their label.  We discussed how the first one felt.  Then we discussed how different the second experiment worked. Talked about the labels we place on others.

Introduced the importance of including everyone - of loving each other - and living Christ's example. I included different scriptures and had the girls scripture chase and mark them (maybe the label of Samaritan, in Christ's time it was bad and people walked out of their way to avoid going through Samaria... but now we associate it with someone who does good) I am a firm believer that we should teach from the scriptures as often as possible.

We talked about unity and the girls opened up about experiences at school and how church should be a safe place where you can be yourself and be accepted.