Agree, that's my experience so far too. However, the basics like
the 4 noble truths and the eightfold pathway are common to all. We,
as buddhists, should try to brush up up our knowledge and personal
cultivation on that. And most importantly, we need to learn more,
so that we can give lots of real-life examples to others on how to
apply them. Hold lively discussions on how to react and behave for
certain moral dilemmas with respects to real-life situations of
applying basic Buddhist concepts. I personally feel that
venerables, for most of the time, do not understand the
difficulties faced by laymen buddhists, even though before they
were ordained, they were like us too.
Secondly, there is only one God in christianity. No matter which
church you're from; what denominations are you, etc, end of the day
you pray to only one God.
Apparently, this makes it appealing for the public (young and
old) as they are able to understand and practise their faith more
easily.
The many dharma doors caters to the many inclinations and aptitudes
of the masses, but yet somehow the unintended side-effect is that
we are unable to really unite in our thinking and approaches in
spreading the dharma to the public.
Thirdly, to create a cell group or a network of cell group will
take up a lot of time and money. Monetary speaking, it has no
return. Besides been well versed in the doctrines, cell leaders has
to attend at least some kind of basic counselling skills, to
counsel to members who are troubled; time management skills in
small group settings (ie. moderate the dialogues in the cell group,
not to exceed time etc); oral communications (one may know the
Dhamma but may not necessary talk well, know of some venerables,
good in speech, bad in writing and vice-versa), etc. So I think in
any organisations, seeing that there is no immediate monetary
return, they would have probably drop the idea.
I will say churches are more far-sighted, 'youth is the pillar of
the future', we often hear this and the churches are working hard
in reaching out to the youth. Not forgetting that churches has
regular tidings (some churches no longer make it a mandatory
practice), so they will have certain financial basics to fund
cell-management activities.
This boils down to attracting talented yet committed young
people to come to contribute to the organisations involved. The
whole chain of reaching out to new members, training group leaders
and future young venerables, is the most important thing for all
Buddhists to take note of and discuss seriously and eventually come
to a common agreement on a list of possible effective and practical
solutions to the issue.
