Free Methodism Post #3

"Nothing you do for children is ever wasted. " --Garrison Keillor


So that you don’t get the impression that everything I think about Free Methodists is negative, a third post in needed.


If Free Methodists embrace the sins of gluttony and legalism a little quicker than others, then on the positive side I’ll say that if they love anything more than food or rules (or, okay, Sunday afternoon sports on tv) it’s their children.


We shunned the notion of idolatry, of being thought too fancy for our britches, and so in most churches you wouldn’t have seen men or women wearing any jewelry up through the 1960’s, and you wouldn’t see men even wearing neckties. Apparently, though, it was okay for kids to be allowed the freedom of adornment; and so was born the Wednesday evening program: CYC.


CYC stood for Christian Youth Crusade. I say ‘stood for’ rather than ‘stands for’ because you’d be hard pressed to find any local churches that use this program for their Wednesday night activities, but you can think of it as a sort of Methodist answer to the Boy Scouts.


At the beginning of the school year the program would start up at the beginning of September with kids graduating to a new class and meeting a new group of teachers, usually the same people who were forced to put up with teaching us Sunday School and Vacation Bible School -- in other words, the 20% doing the 80% of the work.


Each kid would receive a handbook of sorts, much like I imagine Boy Scouts receive from their troop leaders, only instead of instructions for earning badges for fire building or first aid, we had other goals.


First through third graders got the chance to earn patches, four per grade, with an extra patch at the end of third grade you could add if you’d worked hard and earned all the other patches. By “working hard”, I mean having a parent who harped on you week after week to help out around the house washing dishes, cleaning your room, reading your Bible, etc. By “earned all the patches”, I mean having the same parent harping on you each Wednesday to bring your Bible, CYC handbook, sash, scarf and plastic tube that held the scarf together to Church to get credit for what you’d completed that week.


This was all, remember, for first through third graders.


If I’m making this sound like something I resented, I need to tell you that to a boy of seven or eight, the whole idea was absolutely glorious. We’d gather as a group of maybe fifteen or so on Wednesday nights, and when you started that first year in first grade, you got to see the second and third graders, those who’d ‘gone on before you’, so to speak, standing there reciting the things we recited every week, so tall and looking so ‘with it’ wearing their red sashes and sky-blue scarves. Something to strive toward.


The catch in all this, though, was that a kid of six really isn’t quite ready for the idea of working in small pieces for a larger goal, and so while we’d get so excited in September to see all our friends again and see all those taller second and third graders wearing their sashes with all the patches already sewn on, the idea that those patches were something we were supposed to work toward -- every week -- was a foreign concept.


We’d all start out pretty good, doing a couple of chores a week. To earn each patch, you had a checklist of three or four things you could choose from to complete a section, which in turn was part of a larger section to be completed. And when you strung together a couple dozen completed tasks, bingo! You’d have earned the patch.


Over the course of the year, though, the actual effort could be charted as a sort of expanding curve, with tiny amounts of effort being exerted in September through say, March, when suddenly it would become clear that we only had a few weeks left to fill in all the blanks in our handbooks. And so it would be time to really buckle down. By ‘buckle down’ I mean begin to stress out about how little you’d actually accomplished early on in the year, but not actually exert any extra effort into doing anything about it (see related articles: Merriam-Webster, “procrastinate”; Brittanica, “First Grade Thought Process.”)


But then it was like the two weeks before Christmas, one of those time periods when you REALLY knew you had to be good, boy, or you were in for a world of disappointment. So you transformed into the perfect child. Dishes were washed without a parent asking; floors swept; carpets vacuumed; you were even nice to your little brother for a few weeks.


All of this by third grade. Fourth through sixth was worse.


Because the pressure was increased exponentially by fourth grade. The older kids didn’t earn three-inch wide patches; they earned 1 inch pins, and my, my, you could cram a lot of those tiny pieces of metal on the brand new royal blue sash they gave you in fourth grade. If I’d felt pressure in early elementary to have my sash filled in by the end of the school year, it was nothing compared to what these upper level required of us.


Bible memorization; Bible reading; all the other stuff we’d had to do for first through third grades; on and on and on, a whole litany of things to work toward, and certainly not the kind of stuff you could cram into the last 2 weeks of the school year. The ante was even upped with one particular pin that involved Bible reading; the more you read, the more pins you could earn, and every church had one kid who’d read through the Old and New Testaments like 9 times during the school year, and would look like he was wearing a suit of armor at the end-of-year ceremony where we’d all be awarded the pins we’d worked for that year.


We’d all gather on that last Wednesday night with our teachers, waiting to be called up in groups in front of the whole church, to be awarded the pins. This was where Free Methodists showed their true capacity for cruelty, because every church also had a dozen or so kids whose parents didn’t attend regularly. So they were kind of on their own to remember all of this stuff by themselves, and they never did, of course, they were the kids that had earned maybe three out of the twelve pins (TWELVE, for crying out loud, that’s what they expected us to earn; what are you people, NAZIS???) and you always felt a little embarrassed for them with the large, gaping spaces on their sashes where you knew pins SHOULD have been.



So all of this accepted form of adornment, the sashes weighted with the metal pins of victory, draped over our shoulders like Versace clothing on a mannequin, to show all the world what Free Methodist kids were capable of.



So I'm trying to think what applicable system or structure we should be trying for MY kids.



Maybe rings? Or bracelets?



Tattoos just seem a little much...