I made this post as an empty draft over three weeks ago, during which time God connected with me more and better than ever before in my life, and my relationship with him is now incredible compared to what it was. One of the reasons for this that I have figured out is that to explain what needs to be in this blog post and maybe some of the others, I need to fully get that first and be right brained enough and spiritual enough to know what I was talking about. What’s going to be in this post is every thing and method that I have learned in various experiences, research and right brained reflective thought throughout my life that can be used to connect to people and teach people things and plant seeds in them and help them grow. The purpose of these experiences in my life, my research and that thought was and is towards my idea for an organization that grows and shapes youth. It will do so in ways that, while not including the gospel itself due to the ‘market’ it will be in and my feeling of Gods plan for its role, will be at its core, foundation and duty to grow them spiritually and in character and in thought, in ways that follow the practices and thinking of Christian lifestyle, and the bible and gospel will be present and available for study.
While my left brain would call these ‘tools’ for any organization promoting anything like Christianity, the way you would think of them if you are using them correctly is the whole brain idea of a ‘method’ of creating a group and experience with the ideal right brained ‘nature’. If you want to change someone, grow someone, plant seeds of something in someone you must be nothing but personal and connect with them and over time have ‘iron sharpen iron’. Left brained thinking is necessary for planning how to do that early enough in advance that you can switch your mentality back to being more right brained.
I have been in three groups in my life where I am grateful that the methods of connecting and growing with people are and have been present; my Boy Scout Troop which I am no longer a Scout in as of coming to Grove City, the campus club DRIVE which everyone should join as it is the greatest group of Human Beings among the Christian Student Body at the greatest College on God’s Green Earth at this point of time, and the Outing Club whose crazy adventures thus far have been on par with those of my Boy Scout Troop in being an instrument of Gods work in your life if you have opened up to his influence / building your character if you have not.
My Boy Scout Troop was what I needed as a kid to get my life more together and have my morals, character and who I am grow. That would have been even greater but for the worldly focus on shenanigans and completing a checklist of requirements and strict control from adults in the Troop. The craziness and fun drew me in to my Troop and set me on the path of growing. Here at Grove City, I have the greatest friendships I have ever had with every member of DRIVE and that has brought Christianity into my mind and life far more than it ever was before, and recently some adventures with the great people in the Outing Club have brought back the great fun I had with my Boy Scout Troop while still being open spiritually to God’s presence and influence.
What I love about these groups and why they are so great is the big thing you are around in these groups that is not earning merit badges or practicing DRIVE dramas or working at the cabin; connection. Connection to your friends and connection to God’s influence through what’s going on or your friends’ impact on you is the chief, the primary, the main if not the only reason that any group is good for its members. The moment that I figured out how my organization was going to have the impact that it will is when I realized this. For example, far too many Eagle Scouts look back on their time in Boy Scouts and say something like ‘years of hard work and learning built my character and led to me earning this award.’ I thought something like that for a while, but since I’ve been able to think more and more right brained and I can go on a rant about walking in to the first meeting at age 11 and having my anxiety kick in about talking to people and they have me stand in the middle of the group all formally and ask me what I would do in a zombie apocalypse and me and everyone laughing breaks the ice and I start connection to the group and everyone is having fun the whole meeting and on all the campouts and I’m there all stressed that there is work involved because of how dysfunctional of a Human I was at the time and the years are going by with these moments of deep reflection during these campouts and I’m growing like the role models in the Troop and I’m becoming less dysfunctional and work is becoming fun and then the first time I felt called to do something God tells me the final part of how Boy Scout Troop 944 will grow me is the experience of putting the character traits I have out in the world by working to earn Eagle and out of passion and calling and sense of what I should do I put a lot of sweat, a lot of tears and a little blood forward towards that and into custom designing and building five picnic tables for a school for autistic children that wants an outdoor classroom and I earn Eagle and it ain’t no award or medal or badge or some little thing to pin on and show off, its who I am now and what I did to get here.
Whenever you are told something instead of shown it, and plenty of youth have been told about the gospel again and again and again, you rarely get or appreciate what someone is trying to convey to you because that method superficially ignores the nature of what they are trying to convey. When you want someone to think a certain way, to value something like Christianity, or you just want to influence who they are then hitting them with a hose of words is just going to push them back and not affect them on the inside. And love, gratitude towards God, good character and the ideal relationship with Jesus Christ our Savior is not something that can be put into a hose of words and sprayed onto people. Any thin, surface effect you manage to impart with that method dries up before they get home. And the broken, the spiritually lost and those who don’t believe in Christ rarely voluntarily subject themselves to that hose at all.
If we are all God’s children and we all grow together then not being one with the people you are trying to grow will disconnect yourself from the nature of what our relationship with God should be. If we are preaching the power, control and plans of God to anyone then we cannot force or control the spirituality of those we try to grow, doing so in God’s place. If the nature of what you are trying to make them understand is God’s love, is a personal relationship with Jesus, is the truth and merits of following what God commands of us then you create an environment where you show them love for others, where they can see Gods work, where they experience the merits of Christian lifestyle all without the word Christianity needing to come out of your mouth to not make them leave, and they will grow themselves into a foundation for God to build their faith out of and God will make them immerse themselves in him. The facilitation of that is not you being an absolute leader, guiding and shaping them like a parent would, the facilitation is one of them, a friend above none of them acting as a teacher and role model to introduce that mentality and thinking and example to them and make the space one where that influence is present, and there being an opportunity for each of them to volunteer themselves into a Christian space open to more of God’s influence when God decides each of them is ready.
Ever since I asked God for help towards my idea for my organization, I can envision exactly what my organization is going to be like. The organization will provide knowledge and spaces and the catalysts for growth in all aspects of a persons life but the main core, the key that makes any of it do anything, makes people join and stay and that we will be known for is the community, the family of friends that each Troop will be. The story of the average Scout will be something like this; they will grow up as a small kid hearing about their older siblings incredible time in our organization and they’ll sneak into their room to put on their uniform because they think it looks cool and they want to parade around the house because they cant wait to join their siblings and have fun. They turn 4 years old and join our organizations version of Cub Scouts, pre-scouting from a young age until 10-11. They do what Boy Scout Troops do now but with their parents with them and with the Scouts from their local Troop, maybe even their siblings leading and helping and mentoring them. Years are going by as they are homeschooled or are in a public or private Elementary school, or in the type of Private school I am going to found as a version of our organization that can compete with the Public Education System, but these kids are encountering people at school or in their neighborhood that hate Christianity. All the happiness you naturally have at that age slowly goes down as they reach the end of Elementary school because of worldly influences, and finally they are old enough to join a Troop. They walk in the door for their first meeting, anxious that their parents aren’t there but excited. The Scout in charge of the Troop walks over to them and does this great thing from my Boy Scout Troop, he breaks the ice with them by walking over with a stick with a rubber glove on the end, says hi to them as he shakes their hand with the glove and talks to them with a giant smile on his face until the meeting starts. While this is happening everyone is coming in, and the new Scout can just see behind the Scout in charge everyone being this crazy, rowdy group of people that’s jumping over each other and telling jokes and being absolutely hilarious. They start the meeting, their sibling or siblings introduce them and everyone breaks into smaller groups based on age and gender and the Scout in charge spends all of the meeting talking to the group of newest people, teaching them things and getting them to go on the upcoming campout while exuding this personality that just strikes everyone as incredibly kind and smart and overall great, which will continue for their entire first year in the troop. Their first campout they go out to the middle of nowhere backpacking and feel anxious about how little gear the Troop brings, and they feel sore as can be after the backpacking, but then they arrive at where they’re going to camp and the atmosphere of the group turns reverent and they all immediately gather firewood and build a fire, and everyone is singing songs of their choice around the fire as the cook is in the middle making dinner and singing with everyone, and the new Scout is just looking around at how beautiful the scenery is and how incredible this group is as mess kits are being passed in a circle to the cook and passed back around the circle for everyone to eat and people are still singing through dinner as several Scouts bow their heads in silent prayer and everyone’s hysterical listening to everyone still singing with food in their mouths and it makes the song sound worse and they’re all getting more hysterical and eventually dinners over and they start just talking and hanging out around the fire until everyone individually goes to bed. Two weeks later the whole Troop is raising money by not selling cookies or anything, but doing yard work in their community and everyone’s telling jokes and the attitude makes the work fun, and two weeks later is another campout or backpacking trip.
This experience in the Troop continues and over the years the Scout grows enough and is old enough to join the leadership of the Troop, the only ‘patrol’ or small group within the Troop that’s mixed gender and this Scout is all exited and nervous that their crush is in it. They have leadership meetings and backpacking trips they go on on their own and this Scout is stuck by the prevalence of most all the leadership mentioning God in everyday conversation and praying verbally, but no bible is present and the people there who aren’t doing that are still hanging out and enjoying themselves. It’s a space where individual relationships with God are visible and clear, but not pushed or even encouraged onto anyone. The Scout stays in leadership because they need to do so for their next rank and/or they have fun in it, etc. and over time they start to realize the only difference between the values and feelings and thoughts and spirituality they have and those of the leadership members is the names put onto them and how open about them they are. They start becoming interested in either becoming Christian or being more Christian, seeing the fun and happiness in the group led by those ideas and viewing it as the cool, secret thing that their friends, etc. are doing. They start seeing the difference in happiness, achievement in our organization, and character of their friends in the Troop that live more sinfully (as they have to be allowed to do to a reasonable extent so that those that need God in their life aren’t kicked out of our organization) and that of the Christians leading and serving and being kind to and helping everyone else in the Troop. They start growing more Christian and opening up to God and Jesus more, and their lives become showing the merits of Christianity to their friends and serving those around them while being shielded from fear of mockery. The leadership becomes like a family for them, and they join them in visiting and mentoring youth in our organization’s version of Cub Scouts. Time passes, and the Scout in charge of the Troop at that time turns 18 and goes off to College, and this Scout feels called to serve even more and the leadership elects them the next Scout in charge. They then get a book in the mail, from our organization’s version of the OA in Boy Scouts. It’s a guidebook for Scouts in charge of their Troop, with their Troop number on it and signed by every previous Scout in charge of their Troop. They read it and it talks about founding a Troop by recruiting friends from your local youth group who are interested in our organization, it talks about growing more Christian through the experiences we give instructions for how to make happen and it has a log of all the founding leadership members experiences, and the experiences of all the Scouts in charge of their Troop since then. The Scout turns to the entry dated to when they joined the Troop, and they read about how that Scout in charge saw great potential in them and saw an incredible life ahead of them, and they look up at the ceiling, start crying and pray thanks to God as possibly the first real prayer of their life. They show up to the next meeting early after getting an email a new kid is going to be there, they use the key to the equipment shed for the first time and they pull out a stick with a rubber glove on the end of it. They walk into the room where they meet, see some kid standing there all anxious and they greet him and shake his hand. The kids got an older brother in the Troop and he keeps glancing past the Scout in Charge to look at the people in the Troop having fun, and he’s feeling calm and happy because of what he’s looking at and the massive smile on the Scout in Charge’s face during the whole conversation.
Any group that has value has self-evident value that needs to be explained to no one. Troops in my organization are going to be looked at by Single mothers who know their kids need a male influence, and they are going to see character and activities and leadership so masculine that it would be seen as radically too much by the current national HQ of Boy Scouts. Christians parents who homeschool their kids are going to look at us and see all the values, character and results that they strive for but in a form that their rebellious kids would flock to thinking its different and just a place to have fun. Veterans, for example Navy Veterans who see the types of horrible character in modern society, promoted by the Girl Scouts national HQ and that the Boy Scouts national HQ is slowly moving towards, are going to look on tv, see ads for our organization that show Scouts in charge of their Troop exchanging power in a ceremony where they stand next to each other with the Scoutmaster in between, the old Scout in charge carries the American Flag over, turns it to the Scoutmaster who grabs it and turns it to the new Scout in charge who grabs it, and these Veterans are going to know exactly what type of people we want our Scouts’ character to be like. Our organization is going to grow and change people by convincing them to do it to themselves. Were going to have no badges, no pins and no awards because it’s not what they’ve done, its who they are, and their friends and role models made that happen directly towards them, humbly and un-thanked. Were not building advertisements for our organization, were building the best people any act of man can make when God is controlling every step of that. Were going to be what Boy Scouts used to be and then build our Scouts in every way now possible with modern knowledge, and were going to do so so cheaply that when we expand into private schools we give the entire public education system a run for its money. When the teachers are volunteers that eliminates the vast majority of the expenses, and my experience with limited frugality in my Boy Scout Troop, my ideas about methods of self-sufficiency of buildings with regards to heating, electricity, water, and greenhouses on the roof for food, combined with my expectation of how successful each Troops fundraising for themselves to cover their budget and then our organization will be, I believe we can have the first Private Schools that are free to attend. And with the methods of growing people spiritually or in any way that our organization is going to use, they are going to be quite the private schools.