Some little friends of mine are in love with the movie “High school musical”. Apparently, it is the younger generation’s equivalent to my generation’s “Grease”, but has a better message.

High school is such a strange time in life. There are always the cool kids that somehow define what is “cool”. They are the kids who tend to set the trends. For those of us not in the cool kids club, we think we must be missing out. We want to be cool, but for whatever reason we don’t quite make the cut. In high school, I was friends with all the cool kids, but I wasn’t really in the group. I would hear of parties or sleepovers (after the fact) and wish that I would have been invited. I wasn’t deprived of friends or even parties, but there was always this “core” group of cool kids that I somehow felt on the fringes of. Maybe I never quite fit in because I hadn’t been there as long or maybe just because I had a different perspective. For whatever the reasons, thankfully, in my senior year, I found my own core group of friends. The four of us packed more memory into those few months than most probably had in years.

Trying to get niched into a church can feel a bit like high school. You can make friends and still not feel connected to the “core group”. The closer you get to the core the more you learn of its culture-what books to read, what music to listen to, how to raise your children, what to eat, etc. etc. As I sit on the fringes, I’m having to use my filter and ask the questions, “Why exactly?” and “What do I feel about_____?”. I guess it would be easier to just accept this culture without question, but I’ve learned a lot since high school.

College opened my eyes to a bigger world, that was more diverse and beautiful than I had ever imagined. In high school there seemed to be this underlying message that there was the right/cool way and then the not-so-right way. In college, the very definition of cool was challenged. All of a sudden there wasn’t just one cool club, but there were several, and they were all different! It’s as if all the awkwardness felt in high school was not only acceptable, but it was celebrated.

Back to the movie “High school musical”, the moral of the story is basically to accept people as they are-both the cool and the not-so-cool. Hollywood can easily write in the lesson, but for most of us it takes life experience to really “get” it. So why does church have a cool club? Isn’t it the very place that people are supposed to be accepted as they are and not judged? Oh yeah! Because church is full of people. Most church going folks wouldn’t probably admit that there is a cool club, but if you are on the fringes you have a different perspective.

Maybe we should play the movie “High School musical” on Sunday morning. It would be a reminder that there is more than one perspective or way of doing things, and just because it’s different, doesn’t make it wrong.