Monday, June 2, 2014

Things Change over time

Ten years ago, when we started Summer Soccer at Trinity Lime Rock, it seemed like the notion of letting the kids play soccer on summer Sunday mornings instead of going to Sunday School -- or instead of just staying home or hanging out elsewhere -- was pretty revolutionary.

In retrospect, it was, and, unfortunately, in most parish churches it still is.

However, the nine year old girl whose question about what the kids were supposed to do in the summer after Sunday School stopped for the summer, and suggested soccer as an alternative, is now a brand new mom, and a new half-generation of kids is in her place.
Here are some of the current crop as they appeared last Sunday.  This crew, plus and minus a few, decided a couple of years ago that the program needed to involve sports other than soccer, and thus it became Summer Sports.  But, interestingly enough, the kids also got a whole lot more interested in doing "church stuff" -- the things that kids are not supposed to be interested in doing these days.  

It took me a while to catch on to the changing interests -- even though I was pretty involved in all the activities the kids had added to sports (and regular Sunday School) -- as being something that needed to engender a change in the way we do things.  I found myself, in a small way, becoming one of those "because we've always done it this way" people that everyone who embraces change detests.

Ultimately, since I'm now the verger and thus really cannot run a summer program for kids at the same time, the decision process moved to other hands.  

Although I've been silent here for a while, I anticipate that "Church + Kids + Sports" will be appearing on a more frequent basis now.  While I suppose I'll comment on the subject of the title occasionally, more frequently you are going to be seeing thoughts about how kicking the envelope pretty hard in terms of the traditional relationship between young people and a parish church can be effectively turned on its ear to the benefit of the parish and the kids.

So synecdoche -- the figure of speech wherein a part is substituted for the whole -- will be the order of the day.  "Church + Kids + Sports" will be about disruption of the obsolete and failed norms of the relationship of kids to church.  And maybe doing church a little differently in a whole variety of ways.  Let's see what happens.....

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