Transforming Sermons: Indiana high schools and the church

Friday, January 19, 2007

Indiana high schools and the church

He's writing about small-town basketball, but what Stephen H. Webb says about individuals and communities has strong implications for the local church.

2 Comments:

Michael Russell said...: Milton:

Thanks for the link: it's a good article.

For twelve or more years I covered high school basketball in west central Indiana, including dozens of small towns that were quite rabid about basketball. The movie Hoosiers did a good job capturing the feel of those communities.

It was always an enjoyable assignment to go to some of the towns in the Wabash Valley - Shakamak, Linton, Clinton, Brazil, and even the high schools in my home town of Terre Haute. This was when there were no fewer than seven high schools in the community of 75,000 or so. Rivalries were fierce and being proud of your school was the rule. Consolidation has Mordorized the schools: they are now nothing more than cold, impersonal, factories churning out disgruntled students that either can't read or can't wait to get away from the school.

In the smaller schools and towns there was a sense of identity and character that was community-wide: the teams reflected the towns and the towns supported the teams. There was a sense of belonging that was palpable and capable of being formed only because of the smallness.

Churches, I think, have made the same stupid mistake as school boards: there are many things that larger churches are able to do, but they are not necessarily better things. As an African brother once said, "To be better off is not the same as being better." In most cases what was gained in "Christotainment" came at the cost of intimate fellowship and community. It was a bad, bad trade.

Hopefully all the big churches will splinter into tens or hundreds of smaller, neighborhood-based ones. As I said to a good friend, the senior pastor of a five thousand-plus congregation, "A large-church pastor is an oxymoron." He, too, regrets the loss of smallness.

Again, thanks for the link. I hope the time for the return of the small church is not far off. I don't think basketball will ever be the same in Indiana.; 5:10 PM, January 20, 2007
Milton Stanley said...: I didn't realize this one came so close to home with you, Mike, but I agree with pretty much everything you say here.

When I first started graduate school I began writing an M.A. thesis on school consilidation in five Middle Tennessee counties. As you say, small communities lost the heart of their identities when their schools were consolidated. I had some sense, too, of the personal toll that kind of thing had on students in the bigger schools. I attended a h.s. with around 1200 students. I loved baseball, but with a school that large, I simply didn't have the skills to make the cut.

Thank you for giving me a word for this process: "Mordorized."; 4:12 PM, January 21, 2007