A Week at Laurelville with The Navigators

After the intensity, hopes, and disappointment flowing around MennoCon2017, the natural and obvious next move, as a way to come down from that peak, is to spend a week with preadolescent campers.  That’s right, I flew back to Boston, then drove 14 hours to Laurelville just in time for the pre-camp staff meeting led by the amazing Sam Stucky, at which we prepared for a week of Navigators Camp for 10-12 year-olds at Laurelville Retreat Center

Then it was off to the races for a week of fun and 10 worship sessions in which I was tasked with working with the parable of the Good Samaritan.  10 sessions.  Fifty 10-12 year olds. 1 passage.  It was intimidating.

But it ended up being loads of fun!  Highlights from the week included multiple appearances by professor Mansplain Biblebrain PhD., M.Div., MA, BA, BS, XYZ, PDQ, who had written multiple dissertations at the University of Lobotomy on Chicanery.  He was full of, ah, well, “full of something” as Caren would say. 

Trying to explain how Samaritans would be seen in that day and age, we participated in a new and inspiring game show called “Are These People Worth Anything?”  The contestants were Samaritans, and needless to say, they were, it turned out, not worth anything!

With lots of fun along the way, by the end of the week the kids understood that Jesus was doing something devastatingly new by telling a story in which the “worst” kind of outsider was upheld as the true lover and disciple of God.  They  talked honestly about who the Samaritans of today are and about finding ways to imagine the world with God in it, such that we might expect oppressed and marginalized people to teach us what God is like.

It was really inspiring and fun to work with everybody and to have my whole family there.  It was awesome to hear the kids’ compelling questions and witness their imaginations at work as they dug into the story.  I think we all emerged with a better sense of what God is like and the surprising kinds of stuff God tends to do.