{"id":2626,"date":"2016-03-16T04:01:00","date_gmt":"2016-03-16T09:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ryangaffney.com\/wordpress\/?p=2626"},"modified":"2016-03-16T04:01:00","modified_gmt":"2016-03-16T09:01:00","slug":"anybody-know-of-a-bible-study-where-we-actually-study-the-bible","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/fearofwhales\/2016\/03\/anybody-know-of-a-bible-study-where-we-actually-study-the-bible.html","title":{"rendered":"Small Groups and Gender Segregation"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I wrote <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ryangaffney.com\/wordpress\/2016\/03\/09\/anybody-know-of-&hellip;-study-the-bible\/\">last week<\/a> about a difficulty I have finding bible studies that study the Bible in a sea of group meetings that study other things they feel are more interesting or more important. I want to follow up on that with a related idea.    <\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.ryangaffney.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/sein.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" title=\"sein\" style=\"border-top: 0px;border-right: 0px;background-image: none;border-bottom: 0px;float: left;padding-top: 0px;padding-left: 0px;border-left: 0px;padding-right: 0px\" border=\"0\" alt=\"sein\" src=\"https:\/\/www.ryangaffney.com\/wordpress\/2016\/03\/sein_thumb.jpg\" width=\"201\" align=\"left\" height=\"209\" \/><\/a>What is up with all the separated men\u2019s groups and women\u2019s groups?<\/p>\n<p>What exactly are we afraid of happening with unmarried people in a room together?<\/p>\n<p>It made a certain amount of sense to separate the girls and boys when I was 9 and girls were yucky, or when I was 14 and girls my age were adults already. But I am seeing nary a coed study group at many churches straight through to death.   <\/p>\n<p>If there is a mixed group it\u2019s for married couples. Still, men go to the Men\u2019s Breakfast, women go to their Beth Moore class. Why?!?    <\/p>\n<p>Well I\u2019ll tell you why actually. It\u2019s because of this same stupid trend of fearing and avoiding the Bible and talking about something else instead. Men\u2019s groups end up talking about Lust and Porn the whole time. Women\u2019s groups probably end up talking about Submission and \u201cBiblical Womanhood\u201d and such crap. Married groups talk about how to have a good Christian marriage. And that is the practical extent of our Christian education.<a href=\"http:\/\/www.ryangaffney.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/Mens-Bible-Study.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" title=\"Mens-Bible-Study\" style=\"border-top: 0px;border-right: 0px;background-image: none;border-bottom: 0px;float: right;padding-top: 0px;padding-left: 0px;border-left: 0px;padding-right: 0px\" border=\"0\" alt=\"Mens-Bible-Study\" src=\"https:\/\/www.ryangaffney.com\/wordpress\/2016\/03\/Mens-Bible-Study_thumb.jpg\" width=\"244\" align=\"right\" height=\"164\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>There is no way that in an authentic inductive study of the book of Judges you need to get vulnerable about your masturbation habits. That simply will never ever come up. And if an emergent issue does arrive, you know how to pull someone aside.    <\/p>\n<p>There are 66 books in scripture. 1 Corinthians 6 is one chapter. If you need to split for that week. Or the 1 Timothy 2 week or the Ephesians 5. Fine. I\u2019d submit that there is much to be gained even in those chapters from having both voices, but I\u2019ll grant that sometimes people need to feel extra safe. Still, I see no reason for that to be the topic every week. EVER. It shouldn&#8217;t even be one week every year.<\/p>\n<p>           Let\u2019s quit pretending like the central issues of Christian discipleship are gender specific.\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I wrote last week about a difficulty I have finding bible studies that study the Bible in a sea of group meetings that study other things they feel are more interesting or more important. I want to follow up on that with a related idea. What is up with all the separated men\u2019s groups and&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":391,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2626","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Small Groups and Gender Segregation - A Fear of Whales<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/fearofwhales\/2016\/03\/anybody-know-of-a-bible-study-where-we-actually-study-the-bible.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Small Groups and Gender Segregation - A Fear of Whales\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I wrote last week about a difficulty I have finding bible studies that study the Bible in a sea of group meetings that study other things they feel are more interesting or more important. 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I want to follow up on that with a related idea. What is up with all the separated men\u2019s groups and&hellip;","og_url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/fearofwhales\/2016\/03\/anybody-know-of-a-bible-study-where-we-actually-study-the-bible.html","og_site_name":"A Fear of Whales","article_published_time":"2016-03-16T09:01:00+00:00","og_image":[{"url":"http:\/\/www.ryangaffney.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/sein_thumb.jpg"}],"author":"rgaffney","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/fearofwhales\/2016\/03\/anybody-know-of-a-bible-study-where-we-actually-study-the-bible.html","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/fearofwhales\/2016\/03\/anybody-know-of-a-bible-study-where-we-actually-study-the-bible.html","name":"Small Groups and Gender Segregation - A Fear of Whales","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/fearofwhales\/#website"},"primaryImageOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/fearofwhales\/2016\/03\/anybody-know-of-a-bible-study-where-we-actually-study-the-bible.html#primaryimage"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/fearofwhales\/2016\/03\/anybody-know-of-a-bible-study-where-we-actually-study-the-bible.html#primaryimage"},"thumbnailUrl":"http:\/\/www.ryangaffney.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/sein_thumb.jpg","datePublished":"2016-03-16T09:01:00+00:00","dateModified":"2016-03-16T09:01:00+00:00","author":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/fearofwhales\/#\/schema\/person\/d1517242690f3eb7970adfa3b8e1a567"},"breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/fearofwhales\/2016\/03\/anybody-know-of-a-bible-study-where-we-actually-study-the-bible.html#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/fearofwhales\/2016\/03\/anybody-know-of-a-bible-study-where-we-actually-study-the-bible.html"]}]},{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/fearofwhales\/2016\/03\/anybody-know-of-a-bible-study-where-we-actually-study-the-bible.html#primaryimage","url":"http:\/\/www.ryangaffney.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/sein_thumb.jpg","contentUrl":"http:\/\/www.ryangaffney.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/sein_thumb.jpg"},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/fearofwhales\/2016\/03\/anybody-know-of-a-bible-study-where-we-actually-study-the-bible.html#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/fearofwhales"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Small Groups and Gender Segregation"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/fearofwhales\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/fearofwhales\/","name":"A Fear of Whales","description":"Beliefnet Voices - Ryan Gaffney","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/fearofwhales\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/fearofwhales\/#\/schema\/person\/d1517242690f3eb7970adfa3b8e1a567","name":"rgaffney","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/fearofwhales\/author\/rgaffney"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/fearofwhales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2626","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/fearofwhales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/fearofwhales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/fearofwhales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/391"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/fearofwhales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2626"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/fearofwhales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2626\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/fearofwhales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2626"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/fearofwhales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2626"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/fearofwhales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2626"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}