St. Matthew's burgeoned in the baby boom of the 1960s. Our Sunday school boasted of six hundred children; our girls' program was the largest in Canada. Today our midweek programs have collapsed, and the Sunday school echoes to the voices of 30 children. Our community has grown old.
As the pastor of this congregation, my concern has been to create if possible a viable program for children and youth in spite of community changes. I have been blessed with a board of management that has faced up to the changes by asking, "Can these bones live?"
The board undertook the first step: It revitalized the minister. My wife and I were sent to Robert Schuller's Institute for Successful Church Leadership, in Gar den Grove, California, in January, 1979. There we were inspired to think of all the possibilities the Lord lays before us: "When He closes one door He opens another." By far the most dynamic thought we brought home with us was "Find a hurt and heal it; find a need and fill it."
We shared our enthusiasm with our youth programming committee. Immediately we began exploring opportunities other churches and groups were not touching. We found, of course, that in a modern city such as Calgary, very little was not being covered. We have a superb Parks and Recreation program run by the city. It provides hockey rinks, swimming pools, instruction in craft skills, and the like for a very nominal fee. Just an hour and a half away, at Banff National Park, is some of the finest skiing in the world. The school board provides night classes for adults, and the YMCA/YWCA offer still more diversions for children. Add to this private opportunities in music, ballet, figure skating, et cetera, and the church is hard-pressed to keep up. The average child lacks the time for more midweek activities.
Breakthrough
A casual remark by a working mother provided the key. She said, "I really don't know how I will cope when the summer holidays come. I cannot afford a full-time sitter."
July and August are vacation months for Calgary schools. Working parents rarely get more than two weeks off to spend with their families. This mother knew her childrens' time had to be organized. Private camping is part of the solution for those with sufficient money; in her case it was too expensive. Parks and Recreation offered some help, but pools are out on cool, wet days, and children weary of too many trips to the zoo. This cry for help was real. Surely the church could help fill the children's time.
We agreed to give it a try. Our needs were obvious: a theme, some leadership, and some front money. We resolved them in reverse order.
We applied for and obtained a grant from the Experimental Projects Fund of our denomination. We also received help from the South West Calgary Kiwanis, who liked our ultimate theme.
Leadership? Well, finding leaders would be easy we would write to five theological seminaries. In due time two informed us that they had found no interest. The other three did not even acknowledge our correspondence. We discussed our problem at a prayer meeting, and up came a new possibility submit the job description to the University of Calgary Manpower Office.
Some expressed reservations, fearing that we might get a job-hungry student who was basically antagonistic to the church. How wrong we were! The real problem was selection. Only persons happy with the church applied. Anglicans (Episcopalians Stateside), Pentecostals, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Roman Catholics, and United came forward. In the first year, with very short notice, we had to process seven applications. By the third year twenty-two aspired to work with us.
Two problems down, one to go we needed a theme. I literally dreamed ours up at 3:00 A.M. We utilized the National Unity theme, "Our Canada, A Summer of Understanding," and re-created in the church hall, week by week, the various zones of Canada: Maritimes, Quebec, the Central Region, Prairies, and West Coast. We made each week a separate unit, to allow for family holidays without affecting continuity.
To bind things together we carried a core theme through every week, "Spirit, Culture, and Service." Under each topic we could tell of early missionaries and modern denominational differences, of cultural differences in work and leisure, and of ways people helped one another grow and survive in a new land.
Local church leaders came to our aid. We met native Indians, Chinese and Japanese teachers, Ukrainian egg painters, and French Canadian cooks. Our community was alive with resources.
When we told the story of Father Brebeuf's martyrdom at Midland, Ontario, there was not a dry eye in the group. When we bused out to the Lacombe Centre and saw the heart of the long-dead missionary still preserved in a jar of formaldehyde we realized how much he was loved by the Huron Indians. And when we told of the Methodist missionary James Evans and his Christian canoeists winning a furtrade run from Norway House to York Factory against the non-Christian Courier deBois, the children were amazed. They had not realized that a Sabbath rest, upon which Evans insisted, was such an asset over a one month period.
In the second year we developed programs about the ethnic groups in Alberta; and in the third year we developed the theme of our continental neighbors, the U.S.A., Mexico, and Central America. In year four we repeated the cycle.
At St. Matthew's we discovered that summertime is a virgin mission field. In the first year we had 322 individual registrations; by year three we were over five hundred. Our neighborhood has not changed; we still lack children in our winter program. But now we have a summer constituency from across the city.
If your congregation has not explored the possibilities of summer programming, think of our discovery and give it a try.