Social clubs are not doing enough to cultivate community among each other. I can only speak for women’s clubs, but one of the biggest things women say when looking for a club to pledge is they want to find community. I want to say to current pledges and those considering pledging, that you can find and create community in any club. It doesn’t have to be the club that looks most like you right now or the ones you have the most friends in because you are going to grow and change as you go through college. Club is a good place to meet new people who are different than you and learn to love them the way God loves us.
As great as that is, the idea of club still makes some people feel uneasy. Club can get messy and complicate relationships. The rushing process has flaws. The pledging process has flaws. All clubs have flaws. Why? Because we’re human and we make mistakes. We take good things like community and unintentionally make them complicated. So, whatever your view of clubs is please don’t let them be solely based on the flaws only. However, as a result of this flawed nature, we are left with a rushing process that seems insincere and club rivalries that go far beyond the intramural field. Don’t get me wrong, almost everyone has friends in some other club besides their own, but stereotypes and general hostility are common too.
Club rivalries can be fun and can boost morale within club, but members need to understand when it is appropriate and how far is too far. We need to see other people for who they are and not make an assumption about them or comment to them because of the letters they are wearing on a shirt. When we let expressions or arguments get out of hand and separate us, we are missing the point of club. Pride for our clubs is not an excuse for not edifying one another. Club shouldn’t be the place where we get our value and our identities from. If we use it as a platform to bring others down and let it negatively affect how we feel about ourselves and others, we are giving it more power in our life than it deserves. Women’s clubs can start breaking stereotypes and mending relationships between each other by cultivating biblical community within their own clubs and then finding ways to seek that with other clubs. Clubs look inward at the community you are cultivating with your sisters and improve it. Clubs look outward at the community you are cultivating with members of other clubs and improve it. Women’s clubs can benefit from community with each other. Not everything we do is a secret or a competition. The things that each sisterhood does to better one another should be shared and celebrated with their sisters in other clubs too.
