Subscribe via email

Grab our RSS Feed

Time Out for Laughter

by Bill Dusty

*
The sound of children laughing was a welcome respite for a community all too familiar with despair as a youth Christian group (traveling from, I believe, outside of Boston, MA) visited the South End of Springfield to entertain kids in the “Hollywood” section of that poor neighborhood.

Teenage “youth ministries” are scattered across the nation, and their members travel far and wide to entertain, bring hope and talk about God. Their audiences, however, are not always so admiring of their work. With news headlines and television shows often painting a bad picture of such organizations, secular folks – particularly progressives – often hold such religious groups and their charitable activities in disdain, with some referring to their work as “brain washing.”

Really, though, I think we’ve heard enough about teachers and college professors preaching their own social and political beliefs to their students to understand that everyone has a hand in attempting to condition the minds of young people. And while our public schools and universities are teaching kids how to put on condoms and organize demonstrations, religious groups such as these youth ministries are helping to give kids their childhood back by asking them to love their families and find creative ways to have fun.

*

The group’s host teaches kids to “use very ordinary things to do very extraordinary things.” (See photo, top of story, where youth ministry members assemble a band with only sticks and trash cans for instruments.)

Youth ministry members get themselves stuck to a chair – after already being told by children in the audience: “Don’t touch the chair!”

The underlying theme was, of course, religious.

Across the street, a vacant lot now sits where once two decrepit apartment buildings stood.

*

Below is a short video of the festivities…

* *

Posted by Bill Dusty on Aug 28th, 2008 and filed under Bill Dusty, Contributors, Society, Springfield. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.