Agenda-less fellowship. It’s a phrase that’s been stuck in my head recently. I’m not sure whether it’s from God or not. But I’m feeling a sense that I’m supposed to stand up for it. I’ve read a lot of books about church health which say that the way to be successful as a church is to develop a clear sense of purpose and cut every program from your church that doesn’t support that purpose. But I’m not sure that squares with the way that we see Jesus interacting with people.
Jesus went to peoples’ houses to eat and drink with sinners. Certainly as our savior, He has an agenda. He wants us to be delivered from sin. And yet part of how Jesus gets people to repent of their sins is by not having an agenda. It’s a paradox. That’s certainly what happened with Zacchaeus. All Jesus had to do was invite Himself over for lunch. Zacchaeus offered to make things right with the people He had ripped off without any lecture or Socratic questioning from Jesus. It was His agenda-less presence that compelled Zacchaeus’ response.
Then I think about Mary and Martha. Martha had a purpose and a set of goals she was trying to accomplish in pulling her house together. Mary decided to be purposeless and waste time sitting with Jesus. Of course, in truth, she did have a purpose. Her purpose was hospitality. But that’s what I mean by agenda-less fellowship really. It’s fellowship in which fellowship is the only agenda.
When I went to the Missio Alliance conference, one of the things that missional church leaders advised was to be agenda-less with non-Christians. I heard a guy talk about how his ministry in a particular neighborhood was to host regular cookouts and block parties at which there was no preaching, no manipulation, no pitch for people to come to his church. They were open about the fact that their hospitality was derived in their Christian faith, but other than sharing that fact, it was agenda-less fellowship.
One of the things about the suburban world where I live is that it’s very purposeful. This is especially the case when we are raising children. We want them to be in the right activities to have the right experiences that help them develop their gifts so they can be successful. So we run ourselves ragged covering all the bases. In such a purposeful world, you make decisions about which activity you’re going to prioritize based on the degree to which it achieves a measurable goal. I suspect that sitting in a pew for an hour on Sunday morning doesn’t make the cut because it doesn’t seem concretely purposeful enough. Doing a mission project accomplishes something, but worshiping God? It seems like a luxury that we don’t have time for.
One way to respond to the purposefulness of suburbia is to become a “purpose-driven” church. To preach on topics that are relevant to practical life questions about parenting, money management, lawn care, and so forth. It may be an indication that I’m in the wrong career field, but as a preacher, I’m not attracted to practical sermon topics. I want to dive into the mysteries of God and hopefully communicate them in such a way that others can delight in them as well.
In any case, to be purposeful as a church concerns more than the preaching. The advice of Thom Rainer’s Simple Church (a book with which I agree in a lot of ways) is to determine a coherent way of articulating your purpose as a church and look at all the programs your church is supporting to see which ones to keep and which ones to cut. Is it about discipleship, evangelism, or service to the world? If it’s not, then it’s sucking energy that should be invested elsewhere.
What this means of course is that agenda-less fellowship would get axed: the annual traditions that have no utilitarian reason for existing apart from the fact that they’re traditions, getting together with people to hang out but not talking about what needs to be talked about so that we can gain knowledge, grow spiritually, and serve people in the community.
In any case, I’ve decided to go the opposite direction from “purpose-driven” in a ministry task that lies before me. We are going through a transition in our youth program, and I have agreed to shepherd it on an interim basis over the summer until we hire a new youth director. What I want to offer the kids in our church who live most of their lives very purposefully is a summer of agenda-less fellowship.
We already have three missions trips organized and two weeks of vacation Bible school run by youth volunteers, but what I see us desperately needing is straight up play time. We have been talking about whitewater rafting, pool parties, amusement parks, laser tag, camping, and movies, all the kinds of things that in the past I would sneer at “shallow” youth groups for doing when they should be spending every waking moment doing missions and Bible study.
I would argue that engaging in this kind of agenda-less fellowship can actually be understood as a spiritual discipline because it’s a sabbath from a life saturated with purpose and measurable goals. It will actually be hard for me to do this. I’m not sure that I’ll be successful. I’m a very utilitarian person with how I spend my time. I’m nervous about whether the kids will want to hang out with me because I’m not very funny or cool. But there’s one thing I am confident about even though we won’t be saving the world or memorizing books in the Bible: Jesus will show up because we’re sinners and He likes to eat and drink with sinners.
Mercy not Sacrifice 
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Thank you for sharing your thoughts on agenda-less fellowship – been moving this way myself…and I think your youth will be loved well this summer with you at the interim helm!! Blessings on your play time!! I would like to add that some quiet times with your youth as well might be good for their souls, relationships, belonging and connection for even play can have agenda’s – goal being that they have a ‘good time’ 😉 but you were probably already thinking along these lines – play as a connecting point to their hearts!
I am reminded of Ecclesiastes where there are seasons under the sun – and since we live under the sun I guess we all have seasons(!) but even more than this I think each day has seasons, as well as relationships, work task, ministry, etc. I think we (i) tend to fail when we (i) say definitively “this is the season I am in” while all the while I believe God is looking for us to have 1. play 2. rest/Sabbath (different than play time) and 3. work in our lives, everyday! One area in our lives may be in rest mode while another may need the sweat of work – I think the key to living is living in the word that is proceeding from His mouth at the time – this is the model of Jesus – I am sure all the eating and drinking with people was a sort of “work” for Him and He Sabbath-ed with God on the side of the mtn
🙂 as well as got alone with his band of men to have some play time!
Love your blog – always makes me think and re-think!
Thanks for the encouragement Nathalie! Blessings on your ministry.
I totally understand where you’re coming from, sir. And I think some people are missing the point. At my church, everything has an agenda. Even our potlucks have an agenda. The very idea of breaking bread for the sake of breaking bread is anathema. “It’s all about the Gospel,” the leadership says, and then they promptly forget that the Gospel is also relational, not just philosophical, practical or theological.
Just the other day, my Sunday school class went to play volleyball with singles at a local apartment complex… just to “earn the right to witness.” The fellowship was secondary to the sales pitch. In other words, the people themselves — and the fun — ultimately didn’t matter, because they weren’t what we came for. We came for the spiel.
These sorts of tactics — and yes, I think that’s the right word — often reduce evangelism to something manipulative and shallow. Is it not enough sometimes simply to be present, without conditions or expectations? I believe it is, and I also believe those times of agenda-less solidarity can be the most transformative experiences imaginable.
Anyway, thanks, Morgan, for the wonderful post. Your blog is an incredible blessing.
I’ve definitely had that utilitarian, manipulative mindset in my head a lot over the years.
What a great perspective. In working (volunteer) with kids for 30+ years I always have tried to remember what the first group I helped with told me when I asked them what I did right and wrong during my time as a youth pastor: you loved us and pointed us to Jesus but you were way to interested in how we looked rather than who we were. I was cut to the quick. In my experience rich/poor, white/black, gay/straight, whatever division we dream up, kids want someone to know who they are, care that they showed up, ask them questions, share your failures and ask their help, check on them when they don’t show up, hang out non purposefully with them, laugh with them, and all of this based on the “love of Christ which controls us”. Playing rock/paper/scissors with 4 Jr Hi-ers (white and “other” ) last week while laughing like maniacs was a huge open door. I think Jesus did a lot of laughing, goofing off, etc., and that is one way He showed His love. Didn’t have them marching all the time, He lived with them so they could SEE Him. Thanks for your posts. Very refreshing. I am one of those evil Neo-Reformists (a 4.5 Calvanist, 5 makes you too arrogant) but am so thankful for Brothers like you who love Jesus and are making Him Known!
I’ll take a humble neo-Calvinist any day over a snobby Arminian. Thanks for your encouragement!
Agenda-less fellowship is exactly what is needed in this context. The idea that only certain kinds of suffering and poverty are valid and deserving of compassion, creates division, reinforces destructive stereotypes, shrinks our horizons, and hardens our hearts. No matter the socioeconomic context, the epidemic of depression, cutting, and suicides that is sweeping through our suburban high schools has as much claim to our compassion as any other suffering. How is showing them what they need to fill up that emptiness less of a mission then working with inner city youth? Building trust is the first step to reframing attitudes.
Thanks!
Morgan, I’m going to respond at length, for so much is theologically at stake, and based on what you say, you have an audience on the internet.
I gave feedback on a particular text you wrote, which is now floating around on the internet, independent of anything else you’ve written, thus making it a theological iteration which can be read, interpreted, engaged, and critiqued on its own accord. That’s what I did, and as a trained practical theologian, that’s part of my job. In fact, testing the credibility and commensurability of public iterations of “Christian witness” is the job of every ordinary Christian; this is what it means to do theological reflection and inquiry.
I grew up in a poor-working class background which still forms my basic self-identity, and sensitizes me to class-biased, class-privileged forms of theology and ministry. Obviously I’m not male-privileged, and therefore can more easily spot male-privileged forms of theology than men who are blinded by their own privileged position in society. There’s all kinds of unseen classism in youth ministry literature, whether books or blogs. Consider, for example, that if a group of poor black teenagers stood around on the street corner in the “hood” all summer aiming for nothing more than enjoying one another’s “agenda-less fellowship,” they’d be called lazy and shiftless, and viewed with suspicion.
I’ve taught in a seminary for 32 years, and have been involved in grassroots justice groups, such as faith-based community organizing in solidarity with working-class blacks, Hispanics, and immigrants. For the past several years I’ve been researching youth ministry engaged in by low-income youth of color on the margins.
When persons from a social location distinctively different from mine give feedback based on their own particular perspective, I try to learn from it, rather than mock it as “parody” or dismiss and deflect it as mere ‘caricature.” If you think you’ve already “arrived,” then you’ll be a colonialist presence when you go to the margins.
I took black students with me this semester to meetings of our faith-based community organizing group which includes blacks, Hispanics, and whites. I’ve been a member of this group for years, and always valued it because it’s cross-race, cross-class, cross-gender, cross-ethnic culture, cross-denomination, cross-faith. This is where I experience brilliant glimmers of the Reign of God—more fully than when in traditional “church.” All along, we’ve thought that we’re practicing the full inclusion and full equality of everyone. After several meetings, the black students said that although they saw diversity, they experienced the group as saturated with an ethos of white privilege which felt suffocating. I refrained from the temptation to respond as you did with the attitude of “yes, but you don’t really see or understand the full picture.” Now, it’s part of my aim to really listen, and try to see what they’re seeing.
Today, middle- to upper-middle class white-privileged Christians have banished the biblical word “justice” and substituted the softer notion of “mission” (how often does that word appear in scripture?) defined as “service” and “extravagant generosity,” as on your church’s website. Poor blacks and poor Hispanics are tired of merely being the recipients of generosity and service delivery—no matter how “extravagant.” Consider the social location of those who’ve coined the dominant discourse being used today; they’re male-privileged, white-privileged, upper-middle-class privileged Eurocentric writers.
Poor people of color want and deserve justice, and it’s never too early to start equipping white-privileged children and youth with the capacities, arts, and skills requisite to discerning, analyzing, and reducing injustice in institutions and public policies and practices, including critical reflection on their own white privilege (and this shouldn’t be construed, as some comments posted here imply, as merely an exercise in inculcating “white guilt,” which of course is a way to mock the concept). Blacks don’t experience white privilege as a joek. You seem to imply that engaging in missional or liberative praxis is devoid of fun and fellowship or moments of simply “being” together in the presence of God and divine grace; I disagree. That’s not been my experience. Yes, straight up time for recreation and rest is theologically and spiritually needed—but there’s utterly no need to cast the matter in terms of a wild pendulum swing. This isn’t a matter of either/or; it’s a matter of integration and balance.
If an entire summer of agenda-less fun and expensive entertainment is the best or only antidote to the high-pressure, achievement-oriented competitive cultural ethos—then we’re in sad, sad shape as a church, and lack theological imagination. The best theological antidote is immersion in the means of grace, where God is seen as the primary actor, and we’re the recipients. The means of grace include works of piety and works of mercy and justice. You say that if teenagers “see church as the place they go to do their mandatory service hours for school, the ideological framework remains intact.” Do you really mean to say that time at expensive amusement parks is the way to break the “ideological framework”? How about let’s critique raising a generation of voracious consumers—including the voracious consumption of expensive entertainment. What’s theologically needed is for us to shift from the service paradigm seen as a way to pad one’s resume for college or merely fulfill a school requirement, to participating in works of justice/mercy as a theological means of grace, and a way to encounter the living presence of Jesus Christ.
As I read and interpret scripture, authentic fellowship in the Spirit grows out of joining up with God’s own liberating and redemptive praxis in and through Jesus Christ for the sake of the world and its flourishing. When congregations and youth groups put agenda-less fellowship at the center, then pernicious things start to happen. We look for people whose cultural interests and discretionary level of income is similar to ours so that we can do the same kinds of entertainment together.
But what would be more fun (and counter-cultural), for example, than youth and adults (from cross-class and cross-race groups or congregations) climbing on a bus together and going to their state capital to argue for Medicaid expansion, or passage of immigration reform, or some other issue they’re passionate about—and stopping for Kolaches or greasy burgers along the way, and learning and singing each other favorite songs?
Do you plan to make it transparent to young people, parents, and the rest of the congregation as to why you’re leading them down the path of a summer of agenda-less fun, fellowship, and entertainment? Do you plan to critically and theologically reflect on these matters with the young people themselves, so they’ll understand what’s going on? If not, then the summer will have merely been one more exercise in the tacit glorification and reproduction of upper-middle class white privilege. And the youth will walk away “normalizing” their privilege, rather than being critically aware of it. And this is precisely what I’ve seen going on for decades in the upper crust suburban congregations where youth pastors have become chaplains to white privilege, spending their summers basking in agenda-less fun and fellowship with young people, and fooling themselves into thinking they’ve done something counter-cultural and theologically significant.
Suzanne I wasn’t mocking you. It’s just that I’ve said all the things you’re saying about justice vs. missions, etc. Being on the receiving end of that has given me a better perspective on how presumptuous other people probably experience me to be.
I don’t have relationships with these kids. Until I have relationships the kinds of conversations you’re talking about are not going to be productive. I did engage in this kind of agenda-less fellowship with kids from the hood when I was their youth pastor. We played soccer and went to the pulga to eat tortas for months before there was enough relationship built for us to take on other things. I don’t feel guilty about playing soccer instead of being completely utilitarian about our use of time. It simply isn’t a class-related issue.
I really try to be an introspective, privilege-sensitive person, and I’m trying to hear you out. But I think you’re overreaching here and furthermore I think it’s fair to question whether you’re getting some self-justifying mileage out of judging me. White progressives are often guilty of using the brown people in their lives tokenistically as a way of defining themselves against “those other white people.” At least I know I’ve done that before. My general rule is that if someone cites their work with brown people as a supporting point in a political argument, then the brown people are serving a tokenistic function for them.
Years ago my mother said something to me that I will NEVER forget…I was up to my neck in ‘ministry’ and so focuses on making every minute ‘count’ and be purposeful. On day she looked at me and said, ” You are so busy that there is no room for life to happen.” At the time, I thought she was a complete idiot. She clearly did not understand that this life wants us to life is to be purposeful and he doesn’t want us to waste it on trivial things (like sleep, and friendship and laughter). It took years for me to see how wise she was in what she told me. I want to live life and let relationships grow as we just share life. I want to get out of the way and let Jesus show up.
Nice your momma gave good advice!
I was recently thinking about this whole “achievement-oriented culture.” I started getting worried that the time I spent, say, hanging out with someone, didn’t have a purpose.
I’m thinking: I just spent time with someone who I look up to and I don’t know if I had a “take-away lesson.” I think I just wasted my time and their time…
Then I came back to reality to understand that not every conversation is going to be a life-changing conversation. I get really worried about always building the Kingdom and I freak out if my coffee date didn’t have an obvious and immediate impact.
I don’t want to stop tying to do Kingdom work, but I also don’t want to continue worrying my head off by striving all the time.
So… Agenda-less fellowship. I like it.
That’s what goes on in my head ALL the time!
We don’t do any good because it is our duty. It wasn’t hard for Jesus to feed the thousands, or do a miracle. He didn’t do it out of white middle class guilt. (First of all, he wasn’t white or middle class.)
In other words, the transformation of the world is not what we do to assuage our guilt, whether it be the suburban guilt for being born in the middle class instead of poverty, or some assumed inherited guilt such as original sin.
The transformation only works when our view of the world is a response to our recognition of the wonderful love God has for us. Real transformation is built only on the knowledge that God loves you. This makes you feel incredibly good, and when you feel this kind of good it is easy to see what needs to be done.
Don’t you love the transformation of the apostles?; the cowardly lions of the gospel, who, once they got the spirit, “Counted themselves blessed for being able to suffer for the name.”
I am a passionate prison minister. Why? Not because scripture orders me there. I am comforted by that affirmation of the work, but it is almost anecdotal by comparison to the power of the Holy Spirit in action through me.
A few weeks ago, at a monthly re-union with the condemned men one of the inmates said to me, “You know, Greg, we see Christ in you.” And I was just about to say the same thing to him.
The road to heaven is heavenly all the way.
Frankly, I find it much harder to love the wealthy and financially secure conservative pew-mates who join me each Sunday at worship than I do the inmates. The prisoners have one great advantage over those who are (so-called) privileged white folk. Prisoners know they are not the answer. They are already broken. Christ is really good news to them.
And so I know the real challenge is to love the person who is spiritually blind to the need for radical transformation. You might even say the real challenge is to love yourself. God loves even us middle class white boys.
I am convinced that both things must be done and at the same time. They are the same. One by one work, on the closed-minded and on the condemned, always pushing social change, and pointing to the radically different way of Jesus.
Tell the truth everywhere, even in the suburbs.
” So the best thing you can do for suburban kids is to help them shake off the idea that they’re doing everything they need to do for the world by getting good grades and participating in 4 extra-curricular activities.”
AMEN! As a parent in suburbia there is an enormous amount of pressure to fund your kids 4 extra-curricular activities. (And no I don’t have a huge income to do it. I live in a suburb because I can’t afford to live close to where I work)
Yup. The economics of suburban competitive parenting is starting to hit us. Our oldest is in first grade. I want the kids in our church not to see Jesus as just another item on their works-righteousness checklist. I’m hoping that if we take some time to have purposeless fun then we can build some relationships and create the context for organic discipleship.
It was only after I posted the comments above that I checked into the author’s setting of ministry—Burke United Methodist Church in Burke, Virginia. My intuition that the author was writing from within a context of unacknowledged class-privilege and white privilege was borne out. I compared the demographics of Burke, VA with the demographics of Albuquerque, NM where I visited a Latino youth group last summer. According to the 2010 census, the median income for a household in Albuquerque was $38,272, and the median income for a family was $46,979—whereas in Burke, VA, the median income for a household in Burke was $113,034, and the median income for a family was $125,905. Wow; what a contrast.
It’s no sheer happenstance or coincidence that the core commitment and concern of the youth group in Albuquerque is “justice,” whereas the core concern of youth and children’s ministry in Burke UMC is charity, service projects, service delivery, short-term mission trips. These are two contrasting orientations, shaped by social location. Class-privileged and white-privileged people have little motivation to seek deep change in the system; they can afford to content themselves with addressing the symptoms of injustice. They continue to self-deceptively believe they are bringing transformation to the world through their charity and service projects, when in fact groups who are disadvantaged by present systemic arrangements know what a false ideology this is.
Wow you’re a caricature of myself! It’s hard to see my own rhetorical tactics being used against me. Are you doing this in parody to make fun of me? Read my blog and you’ll see that I talk the same way you talk. Type in “suburbia” or “ideology” or “privilege” as search terms on my blog. I complain about all the same things you complain about. I think the reason that God put me in suburbia was to force me to learn how to love suburbanites.
I used to be a youth pastor in the hood in Durham, NC where I got to be the super-cool progressive white guy who didn’t hang out with any of my own kind. It was the most meaningful experience of my life. Now I’m in exile in suburgatory and I’m trying to figure out what to do about it.
The achievement-oriented culture of suburbia is one of the most important foundations of self-justification for bourgeois privilege. So the best thing you can do for suburban kids is to help them shake off the idea that they’re doing everything they need to do for the world by getting good grades and participating in 4 extra-curricular activities. Part of that means having fun even if it means that they’re spending money that other kids don’t have. If they see church as the place they go to do their mandatory service hours for school, the ideological framework remains intact. The utlitarian, achievement-oriented culture needs to be smashed first; then we can start to ask deeper questions. Once I’ve built relationships of trust, then we can go into DC and get to know people who live in different circumstances and learn from them.
This piece of writing disappointingly comes across as unaware of the impact of “social location” on its assumptions about youth ministry. Not only does it reflect class-privilege and white-privilege, it also seems rather insensitive when it comes to groups which can’t afford to be “agenda-less” for the summer (as though having an “agenda” is something to be shunned in the first place). Jesus had an “agenda” of helping poor oppressed villagers organize and resist Empire.
Many youth of color have to piece together jobs this summer, not because they want discretionary spending money, but rather because they need to help contribute to family income that puts bread on the table, and helps pay rent and the utility bills. Moreover, let’s look at that passage about “Sabbath” (Ex. 20:8-11). There are actually two commandments, one is to work, and one is to rest. “For six days you shall labor.” If we think it’s “spiritual” to help teenagers rest, then why wouldn’t it be just as “spiritual” to help teenagers from low-income families find meaningful work that pays a living wage? Perhaps it’s “spiritual” to help low-income groups conduct a living wage campaign. To work, and to rest—both are biblical commandments. Only the already-privileged who have access to work can afford to concentrate on resting—and being “agenda-less.” Those who are disadvantaged, such as inner-city youth of color, have to concentrate on finding meaningful work.
It’s not helpful to over-associate encountering Jesus with simply sitting agenda-less at the feet of Jesus. After all, it was Jesus who said that when we visit people in prison, for example, we’re encountering him as fully as when Mary was simply sitting at his feet. John Wesley defined “works of justice and mercy” as theological and spiritual means of grace. Such works are spiritually on a par with meditating on scripture and praying and fasting. When we embrace the poor and work with them in solidarity to reduce poverty, we are encountering Jesus, and experiencing Divine grace.
Also, in this piece, mission is linked to a “trip.” That’s another class-privileged notion in the article. Last summer I visited groups of low-income youth of color in Bronx, New York; Albuquerque, NM; Oakland, CA; and South Central LA; they were being trained in faith-based community organizing. The notion that mission is a “trip” is strange (if not laughable) to these young people. These groups are devoted to the “agenda” of resisting Empire and transforming their own neighborhoods. They were learning how to share their own personal stories and to see how those individual stories are connected to a larger collective socio-political narrative; they were learning how to translate personal pain into public political action for the common good. In the context of learning how to organize their power collectively, and put public pressure on Powers that Be (such as School Boards that disinvest in schools in the poorer parts of a city), they were developing deep spiritual, emotional, and relational bonds with one another.
All in all, I’m tired of seeing false wedges put between “relational” ministry with youth on the one hand, and youth ministry developed around reaching certain “goals”. It’s hardly anti-Gospel or anti-spiritual to have the goal of reducing the high-school dropout rate among black and Hispanic youth. Faith-based organizing begins with deep listening and formation of intense relationships of care and concern, but then situates these relationships within a larger framework of collaborative praxis.
I experience an almost daily routine of dismay in reading material that reflects middle- to upper-middle class privilege, male privilege, and white privilege. In the very least, authors can state upfront what their own social location is, and acknowledge that their perspective is in no way universally relevant.
I’m not sure I like the idea of being “agenda-less”, nor am I certain that it can be implemented. I love working through Geoff Wainwright’s description of what humanity is made for – administering creation, being socially constituted, and being in relationship with God. If we truly believe in a restoration of the imago dei, our agenda should be to participate in the life of God. Our agenda is re-imagining (or re-imaging – creativity reworking) social space and creation care in ways that invite people into that space without requiring anything but their presence. It’s still agenda, but the relationship and mirth are ultimate not penultimate as goals. It’s the story of Hosea and Jesus…
“It’s still agenda, but the relationship and mirth are ultimate not penultimate as goals.” I can agree with that. I think when I say agenda-less, I’m meaning that fellowship is not something that’s done begrudgingly for the sake of a loftier purpose than communion itself.
For me, the indirect glow of grace is most often appreciated when those agenda-less gatherings are centralized in our church. I am a Scouting Ministries Specialist in the Methodist Church, and while Scouting provides an agenda, it is agenda-less when it comes to the spiritual. Fellowship and comradeship are the golden rewards of Scouting, not merit badges and rank advancement. Those tools are the games we organize to create a capacity for service. We promise each week “to help other people at all times.” And that is as close to following Jesus as you can get.
Imagine if we promised that as a church each week!
We are chartered by a Methodist Church, but the majority of the boys across the country who join Scout Troops at Methodist churches are actually un-churched. We leaders consciously attempt to live lives of service to the boys and to the world through Scouting, and we are confident that our undeclared example is the strongest preaching we can do.
It was that way for me when I was a boy and that is why I am confident and committed to this methodology.
God created us to play. Fair play and fellowship are great gateways to the heart, where God is always found. You just don’t always realize it until later. And then it’s too late, you are blessed, and you know it, and you can’t deny that God is with you.
I’m an Eagle Scout. It was a program that blessed me richly.