Closing Down The Church School Circus
A Back-To-School Reflection On Oobleck, Walking On Water, And Things I'll Never Do Again
Dear Friends,
I’m notoriously interested in calendars and clocks. Time is an area of curiosity, I’m intense about managing my planner, and I have a remarkably accurate internal clock. I also maintain a variety of curious mental calendars, so right now my brain is buzzing with the feeling of the back-to-school season, despite that not really being a big part of my personal life right now. And, upon looking at this Sunday’s lectionary, which includes Jesus walking on water, my body also recalled what I did during the second week of August for many, many years: Vacation Bible School.
While I recall attending VBS for a year or two as a small child, volunteering with the program helped me discover a great deal about myself, as well as teaching me many of the practical skills I use in my professional live. But what about this second week of August thing?
I grew up in New York City, which meant early August is actually just the middle of summer vacation. School doesn’t start again until a bit into September. But our VBS always fell during that week because (a) that gave us a week off from July’s day camp season to recover and prepare and (b) it was inevitably the hottest week of the summer.
Okay, that second reason isn’t a real reason, but it did actually seem to be true. Whatever week we scheduled VBS would wind up being the week we had a heat wave, the sun beating down on the asphalt playground and the open field we used for games. At least the PreK/K rooms had air conditioning. As far as staying cool went, my age groups were on their own as we all suffocated a bit in the upper parish hall.
The heat and lawn games should have been a warning to me, then, when I proposed a particularly ambitious project in that summer between my senior year of high school and the beginning of college. All I would need was 23 pounds of cornstarch, some water, a lot of bowls, and a plastic under-the-bed storage bin. Yes, I was making an extraordinary amount of oobleck, the classic non-Newtonian fluid, all because of a story that also happens to be in this week’s lectionary: Jesus walking on water.
God & Gimmicks
I tell the story about the oobleck summer often when I talk about my personal development as a Christian formation professional, and while it’s a point of pride insofar as it demonstrates my intense commitment to trying just about anything in the name of driving home the Gospel, it’s unlikely to be something I’d do now, and not just because I’m a tired thirty-something. No, much as I loved that activity, if I had to do it again, I’d certainly do it differently. When I look back on it, I can’t deny that it feels less like meaningful formation and more like a gimmick – and we need to be more aware of that distinction when selecting or developing programs.
Recently, BuildingFaith published a piece on how to assess resources theologically (which I highly recommend), and a big part of why I wouldn’t attempt such a big, messy object lesson again is that it was theologically quite weak. Instead of focusing on the big messages of the text – about the power of faith, about how God’s presence is known to and through us – it emphasized entertainment. Running across this strange goo was certainly entertaining and likely to help children remember the ‘headline’ of the lesson, that Jesus walked on water, but there are hundreds of way to convey that piece of the puzzle. What else would they recall?
The bottom line of high-quality formation, as a growing body of work continues to emphasize, is a respect for the child and their capacity to think theologically, and that means those of us leading these programs can’t just be engaged in some overly-complicated three-ring circus meant to entertain before anything else. I didn’t need vats of glop and the noise and chaos I’d create amidst those lessons to tell the foundational stories of our faith. I do the same thing now with a quiet voice, with a few objects, with my attention and care.
How much pressure we feel to be entertainers when we are meant to be disciples will depend a lot on context, but I do think we all experience it to some extent. We’re all competing with Sunday morning sports and birthday parties, with iPads and maybe with whatever is happening at the mega-church kids club. We type stories into Pinterest and see results that seem far beyond what we can accomplish on small church budgets or with our two weekly volunteers. Those of us who occupy one of the increasingly scarce paid positions also feel the pressure of supervisors and vestry members, about the anxiety around the “de-churching” of the United States (I have some complicated feelings about this article, but I do think it’s right about a number of things). My quiet voice, our simple lessons, they don’t lend themselves to advertisement and promotion. Not like the gimmicks. Gimmicks make good social media posts.
Never Mind The Mess
I’m not going to pretend that I don’t love the oobleck so far as it connects us to the story of Jesus walking on water. I’m not even going to say I’d never use it at all. I just wouldn’t do it the same way. So what would I do?
If I wanted to make a non-Newtonian fluid in conjunction with the story of Jesus walking on water, there are a few things I’d do.
I would only make a little. And I wouldn’t make it in advance.
Part of what makes oobleck or goop or whatever you call this stuff special is that the proportions have to be perfect if you want it to perform as expected – to flow like a liquid until placed under pressure, at which point it acts like a solid. And so I would make room for our collective efforts. Is it ready yet? Have we found that strange balance? Jesus doesn’t walk on water every time we encounter him at the shore, nor do all the disciples join him in this act. I can’t simply turn up and present the perfect conditions for a supposed miracle.I would wonder with the group about what we know about water and storms and the like, and also about what we had created and experienced in experimenting with it.
When Peter is called out on to the water, and particularly in the moment when he doubts and begins to sink, he is being asked to deny everything he has known for his entire life – all the more so as a fisherman. Why should he trust that he can step out into the storm? Considering our own doubts and anxieties is a lot more important than witnessing the correspondence between hurrying across the tub of goo and pausing so that we sink.I would attend to the others present in that moment. Why did only one of them venture out? How might they have felt watching Peter walk across the water? Why was their first response to Jesus to think him a ghost?
Jesus and Peter may be the stars of this story, but as we well know, we learn a lot about the world by witnessing others when we might be on the sidelines. Observation is powerful. And the cry of ghost, well, regardless of the age of the group, that’s an important thing to grapple with. Do ghosts exist? What is the difference between a ghost in general the Holy Ghost/Spirit? How does our belief in God and in the Trinity connect with (or not translate to) our belief in other intangibles? When we leave room for doubt and confusion, rather than simply say that doubt is the same as failure (because isn’t that essentially what Peter is charged with?), we extend our relationships as a community. We say that you belong here and will be heard, even if you aren’t sure. God is big enough to hold your unbelief and your questions.
I’m sure there are other things I’d do differently, in addition to these particulars, but the heart of the thing is that sure, we can make a mess and still take the big questions seriously. And taking the big questions seriously means seeing the gaps in our metaphors and comparisons. Just because it can hold our weight doesn’t mean the sea was made of oobleck when Jesus stepped out onto it, nor does it make this chemistry experiment holy. Ultimately, oobleck has as much to do with this story and with God in its presentation to children as Christos’s 2016 installation, the Floating Piers, does in its presentation to adults.
I embrace mess and chaos and the need to adjust our work to meet children where they are, but meeting children where they are doesn’t mean gimmicks. It means, if anything, being more careful and vulnerable because the questions can be that much bigger. Gimmicks help us gloss over big questions because we are delighted and distracted, but wonder draws us closer to the great mystery.
Oh, and that big tub of oobleck? After spending the morning remixing it so that it wasn’t separated into liquidy globs, I left it to dry out as the directions told me to. The ideas was that the water would evaporate and there’d just be chunks of cornstarch that we could crack into a dumpsters. Yeah, that’s not what happened. Closed in a dark space and dirty from forty children’s feet, my big tub of cornstarch slime grew purple mold.
Purple mold. That’s reason enough never to do that again.
Peace,
Bird