Church-Sponsored Date Night

Steal their children for the night

Wait, you mean we are supposed to give the kids back???? Gee, now you tell me, after I already started building that BBQ pit in my back yard.

Being more serious now, that’s pretty cool that church is doing that for people. I know when I was growing up, my parents put a lot of work into their churches. It would have been nice if they would have been rewarded with something like this.

I do hope that they also do something similar for single parents to give them a break. Buy them dinner or a movie or something like for them and a friend/date/etc. They could probably use a break too.

It’s a nice gesture, but the church is basically just refunding back a very small portion of its donated money to its own members. A moral gesture would have been giving away those dinner vouchers to the local poor.

This is nice, but I can’t help thinking of the flipside; all the good Christian girls who will have to give up their Friday night to some church function. See I went to church as a teenager, and when you are a Mormon girl they think nothing of coercing you into babysitting other people’s children for free, sometimes for date night (not that they paid for them to go to dinner, that’s cool). They especially liked to do this on Valentine’s which serves the double purpose of giving nice married couples a night out and keeping single teens from having sex. Once for a fund raiser I even catered a fancy dinner party while my fellow person-with-girly-parts-who-must-therefore-be-good-with-children watched everyone’s kids, but at least someone paid for our labor there. I was also once a singing telegram for a church fund raiser, but that’s off topic.

Step 1: Donate money to church
Step 2: Church, in a roundabout way, gives a small portion back to you.

I really don’t think atheist orgs need to do this because we all have the intelligence to cut out the middle man and just go out on a date on our own.

Churches are so good at building community. Too bad about the code of thought and conduct!

Miko, I’ll take a “devil’s advocate” stance here and say that married folks with kids often find it very hard to have unhurried social time (let alone unhurried romantic time) as an adult couple; they’re too busy being breadwinners, homemakers, and parents.

To say that the money would be going to a subset of the congregation that “most likely didn’t need it” and that this would upset single/childless members makes no sense to me, since it is precisely the single/childless members who typically are less in need of this kind of perk.

Granted, anyone can enjoy a subsidized meal, but child care is of no use to anyone without kids, and that is worth a fair bit of money in its own right. In fact, as I see it, child care is the main “prize”; the dinner gift certificate is just an added bit of glitz to stimulate the “romantic date” aspect.

~David D.G.

Yeah, I expected the usual snarky comments here. Atheists are quick to point out that the divorce rate among Christians is just as high as the general public, but when a church tries to do something to strengthen the marriages of people in their church, they are being manipulative and exploiting people, or at the very least being unfair.

This is the church putting its money where its mouth is, trying to build up something they think is important. To try to find something wrong with it only makes you look desperate. It’s as though you can’t admit that anything Christians do can possibly have merit, or it might give them credibility. At least Hement gets it.

Hmmm… I do see the benefits of doing this form of organized “act of kindness.”

My only problem is the fact that it’s organized.

Sabayon makes a good point:

all the good Christian girls who will have to give up their Friday night to some church function.

When anything with good intentions becomes an organized effort, there will always be some people who feel obligated to participate when they don’t necessarily want to. And the ones who do the least amount of work end up doing the most amount of criticizing and/or complaining.

I don’t have a better alternative, however. I’m just making an observation. Perhaps there’s no way around it.

Sabayon wrote:

Oh come on people, most churches sponsor things for singles too, but I think David is right, the main benefit is the childcare.

Thanks for the nod! :^D

I’m sure that one can find ulterior motives that can be applied to such a setup if one wants to — but there’s certainly no need for them. And doing such an organized event as an organized event reinforces the sense of community in the church, which is not in itself necessarily a bad thing; in fact, it’s one of the few things I liked about going to church, and I occasionally miss it.

I think the people providing that childcare are probably being guilted into it….

Not necessarily. I spent considerable time at two different churches in which there were similar events, and there was never any shortage of truly eager volunteers for babysitting (especially girls ranging from junior high school students to college graduates, several of whom either genuinely enjoyed taking care of children or were giving an Oscar-worthy performance to that effect — and if nothing else, it was an interesting shared experience among them that further bonded them).

~David D.G.

They probably did get the vouchers compted though, as someone pointed out 30$ isn’t enough for a meal for two and it is good advertising.

The last 10 times I was taken out to eat, meal for two would have fit comfortably within $25 (incl 20% tip). Where did I go? Mekong (great Thai food, mediocre service), Cedars of Lebanon (great middle-east food, great service), Shanghai (good Vietnamese food, good service ), The Other Place (great Greek food, good service). Most of you have never heard of these places, but the point is they (mostly) aren’t commoditized chain restaurants.
I guess restaurant eating outside of Utah must be more expensive – and this must have happened in the last 6 months – or maybe people are silly and think two people need two entrees, which usually results in enough leftovers to feed two more people, unless one goes to a French restaurant.

Two things:

why do we want to emulate churches? If we like what they are doing so much, why not just join? I don’t get it.

I think Hemant’s point is that churches offer some perks that are hard to come by as an atheist. I left the church because I couldn’t stand the message. However, I miss some of the community aspects of church, especially as they relate to my kids. Camp Quest is a thousand miles away and costs $500 per kid while church camp is nearby and costs $150 per kid. My husband played bass with the church praise band. My oldest son helped out with the younger kids at VBS, and both kids participated in the Bible Bowl. Having grown up as a missionary in South America, I looked forward to taking them on a mission trip to Mexico so they could get a sense of what life is like outside this country. My husband and I were part of a Sunday school group for couples that focused on marriage skills. You get the picture.

Ultimately, those perks weren’t worth the price of constant guilt and being told what to think, and, what’s worse, having my kids brainwashed the same way I was. It would just be nice if it were a little easier to get some of these benefits outside the church. Being out here in the atheist world sometimes feels very lonely, even to an anti-social type like myself.

To say that the money would be going to a subset of the congregation that “most likely didn’t need it” and that this would upset single/childless members makes no sense to me, since it is precisely the single/childless members who typically are less in need of this kind of perk.

David is dead-on. For at least ten years, my husband and I were rarely able to get a minute to ourselves. When the church sponsored a “Parents’ Night Out” (which was rare, and generally done as a youth-group fund-raiser), we gladly paid for it. Frequently, we did nothing more than go to the grocery store together without the kids. If we’d gotten a restaurant gift certificate, we’d probably have gone out to eat, but that would have been secondary.

All that to say, I find it hard to ascribe an ulterior motive to this. The only moral flaw I can think of is that they probably excluded single and gay parents. But, hey, it’s a Christian church. What did you expect?