ADULTS AT GRACE

Adult ministry at Grace Chapel in Bedminster, New Jersey: women, men, and 50 and older.

This is not a stage of life you age into. It is peer discipleship, so a mother of toddlers and a grandmother are both Women of Grace, and a father of teenagers is Grace Men. Each group meets through the year to study, to pray, and to get to know each other properly.

Study, prayer and company, at any age or stage.

Men of every age, sharpening each other.

For the mile marker where a lot starts changing.

Women of Grace is for women at any age or stage, and it exists to deepen a personal relationship to Christ and to one another through discipleship, community, and real study of the Bible. There is no age bracket. A mother of toddlers, a woman a few years from retirement, and a grandmother are all in the same room.

The year is built around study and around company, deliberately kept as two different things, because a woman who wants to work through a passage and a woman who mostly needs a table to sit at are both welcome and are not always the same person. Women Uniquely Matched is for married women whose husbands do not share their faith, a situation that is common and rarely named out loud, and it meets both to study how to be a closer partner to your spouse and simply for fellowship.

Grace Men is for men of every age, and it takes its brief from Titus 2, where the older men are asked to be temperate, worthy of respect, self controlled and sound in faith, and the younger men are asked to learn it from them. That is the whole shape of it: two generations in one room, neither one finished.

It is the least programmed of the three. If you want to know what is running now, David Guarino is the man to ask.

re-vision 50+ is a community of Christ followers who are 50 and older, and it is built for the stretch when a lot changes at once: retirement, an empty house, downsizing, a move, or caring for a parent. The group treats that as a mile marker worth revisioning rather than a slow wind down.

The conviction underneath it is that Christians grow best in community, which is why this is a group of people rather than a programme. Special events run through the year.