Teen Girl Squad

I seriously need to get caught up on writing about my lessons. Bethany says that the blog thing is a nice forum for writing about something because you only need a little discipline at a time. She's right...but you still need some discipline.

So, on Wednesday, I taught Teen Girl Squad. Summer, a recruiter from Ohio Valley University, was passing through, and I invited her to come to our class. I'm glad the girls got to talk with her. Some of them are thinking way too much about college, and missing out on what little fun high school has to offer, but more are thinking too little--not sure that it's worth going. Summer's a good recruiter, though, and by the time they finished talking to her a few of them were starting to say, "I'm still not sure I want to do more school, but I'm excited thinking about it."

A number of the girls are very young, of course, and college shouldn't be filling their thoughts just yet. A few of them, though, really ought to be thinking about it. Amanda told Summer, "I'm not sure I'm going to go to college, but if I do, it will probably be Freid-Hardman. My mom went there, and she really liked it."
"You might not like a school just because your mom did," Summer said. "You and your mom are different people. Of course, you might like it, but going to a school just because your mom went there isn't a good idea." That can be a harsh thing to say to a fifteen-year-old, but Amanda needed to hear it. Later in the evening, Amanda came up to me all excited because a family from church is going to some sort of singing event at Harding University (a lot of our kids end up there) and they said she could come with them to visit the campus.

Although I was glad that Summer was there, she made me a bit nervous. I'm not used to teaching with other adults (besides JC) present, particularly not ones who were raised in the church and then went to a Christian university. Sometimes, in answer to the girls' questions, I have to admit ignorance (often, to things that I know most of the adults in my church should know) and have them help me look things up. Other times, I play devil's advocate, which I think is a good way of teaching them, but I'm never sure how other adults will take it. I think we all did ok, though.

We talked about baptism--where in the Bible it says to get baptized, why (especially, why immersion in water rather than, say, jumping naked through a bonfire or something?), and when. Only a handful of these girls--the youngest ones--are unbaptized. We devoted a lot of time to a discussion about how you know it's time. That's a hard question, actually. We baptize adults in our church because every example in the Bible is of an adult hearing, believing, and needing baptism rather fast. No babies are baptized in the New Testament accounts. The difficult thing is that only Jesus, who was baptized at around thirty years old, grew up knowing the Gospel message, right? Everyone else in the New Testament hears it as an adult. We don't have any examples about growing up in the church (nor, for that matter, being a parent in the church). The arguments for an "age of accountability" are pretty vague. We decided, as a group, that it must have something to do with developing an understanding of sin, and an understanding of empathy. We talked a lot about how children sometimes behave badly, but adults sin, and there's a difference.

I have to say, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Amanda, whom I've often thought of as very sheltered, knows a great deal more about the other types of Christianity than most of the other girls do. She goes to a Christian high school in town, where most of the students, from what I can gather, are Baptists or something. She's in a pretty serious minority, being Church of Christ. Because of this, she is very aware of the aspects of our practice that make us different from others--she doesn't know the historical origin of the differences, but she knows the scriputural reasoning backwards and forwards. She's also very aware of what other churches do. The rest of the girls hadn't even heard of the sprinkling vs. immersion debate (although we have at least one sermon each year on it--but maybe they just didn't follow that). Many of them were unaware that other churches baptize babies. Amanda knew about all of that.

We have a campaign coming up (it's called "We Care," which makes me giggle, since there was a daycare center in my hometown called "Wee Care.") to invite new people into our church. Apparently they've done this other places and added sixty or more people to each of those churches. What that means is that we are going to have a lot of people coming in who maybe grew up in a different church, lapsed, and now they'll be coming to us with many different religious backgrounds and understandings..and we have to be able to explain ourselves to them. We expect that some of them will have or be teenagers, so I really need to work on preparing my girls for the kinds of questions they'll be asked. Of course, one trouble is that some of those questions have terribly unsatisfactory answers--places where scripture says one thing in one place, but implies another in a different passage (example: Paul asks women to keep silent during worship and not have authority over men...Which means that, in our church, women don't lead prayer, read Scripture aloud, serve Communion, etc....but Paul also says that women should keep their heads covered or have long hair when they are praying and prophesying in public, which implies that they are expected to do these things. Uhm...?). I'm not sure how to handle these things, or how much I have to prepare my students to face them, but it's time to start thinking about them. So we start with the ones that have a really strong Scriputural basis, like our take on baptism. Maybe I'll figure something out from there?

Lesson 21: A Question of Perception

Last Sunday's class was so good, there was hardly anything to write about. We had only half of our students there, and they were the ones who are a little quicker on the uptake and a bit calmer over all than the others. I missed the other two, but it was nice to have a breather, in some ways. It was too bad that they weren't there-- I think that Amanda would have enjoyed the activity, and David would have liked the poem.

Ah, yes. The poem. I started class by reading the poem by GA Studdart Kennedy that I posted previously. Specifically, I had hoped that David would be there because I thought he'd enjoy the fantasy elements of the poem--he plays lots of Worlds of Warcraft and gets into the Tolkein thing (books or movies, I'm not sure which. Maybe both?). The kids didn't share many thoughts about the poem, but that's ok. I hate when teachers, in the words of Billy Collins, "tie the poem to a chair with rope / and torture a confession out of it." Joshua had a funny comment about the poem--he said, "Why were they talking about kissing?"
"It's in the fairy tales that he wrote about. The prince wakes Sleeping Beauty with a kiss. Same thing for Snow White. It's a magic kiss."
"Still, that's disgusting." I'm very happy to learn that, although our nine- and ten-year-old girls are all giggly over Zac Ephron, apparently boys still believe in cooties. Does this "Kids Getting Older Younger" marketing concept (see also: Bratz dolls, toddler-sized jeans with fake thong showing, and those awful CDs of children singing trashy pop songs (what are those called? "KidzBop" or something?)) applies only to girls. If so...I'm glad the boys are spared, but why do girls have to be shoved into this kind of thing? I really haven't thought much about this before. I don't know if my students play, ever. I know the boys play sports, but just imaginative games? I don't know. They all play video games, but of course that's not what I mean either. I don't get much of an impression that they do. Amanda brought a doll to class once, but she seemed sort of ashamed of it, hiding it from the others. She didn't hold it like a baby or anything, certainly. Lachlan has two older sisters, one in ninth grade, one in seventh, so maybe she feels like she needs to keep up with the bigger girls. Maybe what I should be concerned about is the oppositite of the worry Kennedy expresses in his poem. He declares that without Jesus, no imaginary magical land of transformation could ever have existed. Maybe we need that fairyland to understand the miraculous, as well. So how do I help them find that? This problem just keeps getting bigger and more complicated.

Anyway, about our lesson. We read about King David's young life. Both Lachlan and Josh are strong readers, and they like to be called on. Josh actually complained when I gave him only one verse at one point. I had to promise him a longer one later. In an effort to push them more about the reading comprehension thing, I've begun asking them questions about what they read. They answer verbally way better than they do in a written paraphrase, but still, they sometimes have no idea what they just read. Liz, from I Speak of Dreams, writes that these kids were probably taught to read using a "whole language" method, and therefore, they probably are devoting a huge amount of brain resources to summoning up the words, and don't have much left over for deciphering the meaning. It's an interesting argument. None of them ever try to sound anything out. I'm not as militantly anti-Whole Language as Liz is, but I think it's good to be able to take words apart, break them down, and figure out what they mean, and a guess at how they are said. Otherwise, how do you ever learn new words?

We're trying to practice the comprehension thing, and I might start helping them sound out words, as well. I worry about putting them on the spot like that--instead of just supplying the word and moving on, asking them to sound it out slowly...I don't know, I'll have to think about it.

The thing we focused on most about King David was that no one saw him as he truly was, except God. His dad saw him as the family baby, Saul and Goliath both saw him as a little boy--but Saul's servant describes him as "a great warrior and a man of valour." Confusing, yes?

We helped the kids make a chart of all the people David encounters in the section we read (which covered his annointing through the Goliath incident). Under each person, we wrote what they thought of David. In the last column, we listed what God saw in David--God being the only one who could see him truly. This was an interesting exercise, reading comprehension that didn't feel like reading comprehension. We also talked a lot about the people in our own lives who don't see us the way we see ourselves (because they are kids, the primary example here was parental misconceptions). They were definitely able to relate to David's plight, as the youngest kid whose dad thought he was good for nothing but tending the sheep.

I guess that "David and Goliath" must be one of Josh's favorite stories, because when we finally got to that point, he cheered. The kids like it when, after a long meandering through stories they haven't heard before, we land again on familiar ground. I wonder if they feel like they see these stories differently, coming into them with more background. As David's family and acquaintances saw him differently depending on their own experience with him, do my students see familiar stories in a new light, having more understanding of what happened around them? Did our lesson about Passover make them see The Prince of Egypt differently?

I hope so. If not, I'm wasting my time and theirs.

This week, we're going to give the newsflash view of David's relationship with, and eventual falling-out from, Saul's family...Might be interesting to actually make a little newspaper thing with some blanks for them to fill in on their own....

Discuss

The Protestant movement was a literacy revolution: True or false?


And if it was a literacy revolution, why are we losing that focus on literacy in the modern church? Or are we?

We like you too....

On Wednesday evening, as we were going into the church, Amanda and Lachlan ran up to us. "Is Miss Ginny here tonight?" Amanda asked.
"Yes,"I said.
They both started jumping up and down and clapping. You might recall that JC and I took over for "Miss Ginny" last week, since she was out of town.
"We like you guys, too," I said.
Lachlan, bless her, is a very well-bred child. She stopped jumping around long enough to say, "Oh, we like your class. But we like her class too, and we missed her last week."

My feelings were kind of hurt, although I get it, and I ended up thinking about the incident through most of the ladies' Bible study. Our preacher's wife was sitting next to me, and she turned to me after class and asked me what was on my mind. I told her what had happened, and then I told her the kinds of classes JC and I are doing, and how upset we were when we discovered that our kids, for all that they loved Jesus, couldn't find the Gospels in their Bibles and didn't understand that Jesus was the Son of God. "You'll get a lot of support for what you're doing," she said. "We need those kids to really understand."

She helped me feel a little better.....

I guess it's like when I was a kid and I thought it was horribly unfair that we didn't have any TV to speak of (one channel, grainy). Now that I'm an adult, I feel like I should thank my parents for refusing to buy a satellite dish (WV's state flower). I don't have TV now (or, we have a TV, it just doesn't get any incoming signal. We use it for watching DVDs), and I have no intention of having one when we have children. You don't know what it is you need, when you're a kid. The packaged curriculum has coloring sheets and coloring sheets make you happy.

Multiple Intelligences

At work, we've been doing some stuff involving preparing materials for use in the public schools......

Among these assignments has been one involving discovering ways to use the Multiple Intelligences strategy to teach foreign languages.

That got me thinking..how can we use MI in Sunday school?

And then I had a silly thought, which was to use mathematical/logical intelligence by creating a graph of the body counts of various Biblical generals.

And then I had another thought, which was that that thought wasn't all that silly, really, and that some of our kids, particularly David, who seems interested in numbers, would dig it.

Who are we?

I've become a little distressed lately at the growing realization that the children I'm teaching don't understand that Christianity is a decision, that there are options and choices to make. They are Christians by default. They don't know anything about the other religions in the world, and therefore, they don't know what it means, by comparison, to be Christian. We've been working on this by giving them some understanding of Judaism at least, but I think they don't understand that there are still Jews in the world, not just in the Old Testament. They don't seem to get that there are people in the world who aren't Christians, despite the repeated exhortations in the general Sunday school curriculum to "talk to your friends about Jesus."

There's also no understanding of who we, as the Churches of Christ, are. All my Methodist friends know about John Wesley. They've read his writings. They know what he was thinking when he founded the Methodist church. My Lutheran friends sing hymns written by Luther.

In the average congregation of the Churches of Christ, I don't think many people even know what it means to be Campbellite. Actually, I don't know much about it. I don't know what impulses there were initially that drew us apart from the Methodists and Baptists. Our preachers study this kind of thing in preacher school, but no one else gets at it. I understand and agree with the concept that we should revere the Bible above other works, and that we should regard Jesus Himself as the founder of our church...and yet...what are we missing out on? Because of our reverence for the Bible, we tend to ignore the writings of countless theologians and scholars between Jesus and us. However, we think that Cynthia Heald and Max Lucado have something good to say to us. Why can we read the Bible through the guidance of those figures, but not through the guidance of David Lipscomb or ... See? I've actually been trying to educate myself lately, and I still am only able to name two church founders, one of whom has a university named after him.

There is basically no readable history of the Churches of Christ, that I can discover. If you know of one, please tell me. I also imagine that there wouldn't be much market for one, if such a thing were to be written. It would violate our fiction of an unbroken lineage straight back to the Cross...which is not a fiction, in a spiritual sense, but definitely is one in a historical sense. We miss out on so many great writers...why aren't we doing Bible studies guided by Luther or Thomas Aquinas? I don't get it.

Our denial of a historical context also deprives us of our traditions. We've maintained the tradition of a cappela singing, but lost the tradition of pacifism. We know that our auditoriums generally don't have windows, but I don't know why...

Last night, I was trying to do some research on the Churches of Christ, and I found the amazing liturgical poetry of G. A. Studdert Kennedy, whose chapbook, The Unutterable Beauty, is online. One of his poems brought tears to my eyes--it was so beautiful! I got angry for a moment, thinking, WHY is this not part of our tradition? WHY have I never even heard of this guy before? JC was reading over my shoulder, and he said, "Hey, you know...we're teachers."

Oh yeah.

Now, we don't have the time in our class to cover comparitive religion. Maybe if the kids ever get the whole trinity thing, or sin/salvation concepts, or even a decent grasp of Old Law/New Law, we can try to go there.

We don't really even have the time (or in my case, the knowledge) to cover church history. Plus, I don't think 4th graders would care.

I'm not sure we have the time for talking about famous members of the Church of Christ..I'm not sure many of them would have heard of our A-list (James Garfield (I used to live next to his house!), Pat Sajak, Weird Al Yankovic, and uhm....Kenneth Starr).

But we do have the time for one small thing, a poem isn't much time at all. Here it is, for your enjoyment. I wish I had read it months ago.

IF JESUS NEVER LIVED

G. A. Studdart Kennedy

SUPPOSE it is not true,
And Jesus never lived,
But only grew,
Like Aphrodite, from the foam
Of fancy--
From the sea
Of pure imagining, that frets
Within the soul eternally.
Suppose the Word was not made flesh,
But just another dream,
Which dwelt amongst us, only
As a gleam
Of glory from the land,
Where sand
Is gold, and golden sand
Shines bright beside the sapphire sea.
Where up is down,
And down is up,
And mortals mount on wings,
To sup
From golden goblets
With young stars
The nectar of eternity;
Where trees have souls, And lilies arms
To fold us in,
And charms
To soothe our sorrows into peace.
Where cease,
And sink to silence
Of content,

The sad complainings
Man has sent
To heaven's high throne
All down the years,
Where bitter tears
Are turned to diamonds for the crown of God.
Suppose He never trod
This earth nor saw the sun,
Nor looked up to the skies,
That sinless one,
All spotless clean,
Untainted by man's curse,
The might have been,
The ghost of good undone.
Suppose the gospel story lies,
What then? Why, then
There are no fairies
Any more For men,
The shore
Of fairyland is dry,
Unlapped by any sea.
All fancies die,
If Jesus never lived,
For living fancies need to be
The symbols of a Truth.
He is the door
By which we enter in
To wonderland.
By Christ's strong sooth
Set free from sin,
Poor Cinderella weds her Prince,
As we long since
Were taught and may believe,
For God is found of those who seek,
Exalts the humble and the meek,

And puts the mighty from their seats,
In Christ.
Her tryst,
If Jesus never lived,
Is still unkept;
By those dead ashes where she wept
For Paradise,
She weeps on still,
And moans upon her fate;
The pumpkins still are pumpkins,
And the mice still mice;
Still by the cold and empty grate
She sits in rags and tears;
Through all the years--the empty years,
No fairy comes--nor ever will
If Jesus never lived.
In Christ's pure light,
Fair Snowy-White
Can lift the coffin-lid,
And leave her tomb,
And vanquish all the gloom
Of death.
Because He lives
And gives
To Sleeping Beauty
One long kiss,
She opens her blue eyes and wakes,
Forsakes
Her sleep and shines for ever,
Beautiful in bliss.
There is no chance of childhood,
But for this
One Child of God, who knew
That childhood's sweetest dreams come true,
And was their Truth.
Lord Jesus, live for me,

Open my eyes to see
Thy face,
So by Thy Grace
Shall all the world be peopled
By bright forms.
The wind of many voices,
In its storms,
Shall speak of Giant powers,
The many-coloured flowers
Shall hold their lips up for a kiss.
Still in the deep
Shall mermaids sleep,
And dryads from the oak tree
Stretch white hands,
While through the leaves,
Small faces peep
And laugh in elfin revelry,
Binding with silken bands
My spirit to the glades.
So shall my soul swing free
Of this small world,
And dance with daffodilly maids,
Amid the bluebells in the sun.
O live for me, Thou sinless one,
Cleanse Thou for me
The earth and sea,
Sweep all the clouds from off
The sky,
For fancies never, never die
If only Jesus lives.

Strength in numbers?

JC and I had a discussion yesterday about the people at our office. In his department, when asked if they could work on the weekend to get an important job done, out of six people, five said that they could work on Saturday, but had church for several hours on Sunday. My thesis was that our company, possibly because of its Mennonite roots, possibly because it's just odd, has more religious young people (20-30 year olds) than is normal. JC feels that, actually, our generation is more religious than that before or after it. Of course, he also makes the claim that generations should be considered in brackets of only a few years, instead of the brackets on typical polls, which tend to range from seven to twenty years. While I agree that the poll sampling is overly broad, I disagree that our "generation," even as he defines it (which, I think, means that he thinks of himself and his younger sisters as being in separate generations) is any more religious than any other. My assertion was that we tend to hang out with people who are (a) smart, (b) kind, and (c) strong in a faith tradition. Why? Because those people are friendly and dependable. I think this skews our sampling.

I've been trying to do some research on it, and according to the best data I can come up with, church attendance in the US is somewhere around 26% (although it's often reported as 40%, most statisticians have compared these numbers with church attendance records and concluded that a lot of people are lying about going to church).

The Pew Research Center's report on "Generation Next" (who comes up with these names?) reports that 1 in 5 of people ages 18-25 report as agnostic or atheist. Of people ages 26 and older, only 11% do. The interesting attendant piece of data they gave here was that, in the late 1980s, 11% of 18-25 year olds were non-religious, compared to 8% of those 26 and older. That kind of data is interesting to me, because it compares people in the same stage in their lives. The result? To my eye, it says that we're getting less religious. However, as JC points out, 18-22 is very very different from 23-27, in terms of what's going on in your life. Church might not be important to you when you're in college, but when you get married, start having kids, and discover crises bigger than, uhm, someone hacking your MySpace, maybe people do turn to religion. I don't know. Thoughts? Data? Anything?

I actually wrote to the Pew Research Center to see if I could get raw data for that survey.