The church and family

I've been going to church with my former high school athletic trainer for nearly 3 weeks now and the experience has been awesome. As I previously mentioned I am not at all a religious person. I am very science motivated and that has really steered me away from the church as I got older. I decided to focus on the black church for my service learning because of the importance it has to the community. I've read countless articles and book chapters about the importance of the church and the family it forms and I just wanted to see it for myself. I have definitely not been disappointed. I was welcomed with open arms and everyone was anxious to learn all about me and my background. I quickly told them all that I was there to really observe and see how the church works as part of the community and was greeted with a number of stories.

One of my favorite stories was from a middle aged woman who told me about how the church kept her out of trouble as a young girl. Her parents were in and out of the house and she often ran with what she called the wrong crowd. After getting in trouble for shoplifting some of the church elders staged a sort of intervention with her. They told her they were her family as well and expected better of her. They were holding her accountable for her actions and had her do volunteer hours in the soup kitchen they ran until she could understand what real struggle was. It was so fascinating to hear about how a group of people not even actually related had taken such a stock in her life. It made me think about teaching and how if more teachers held their students accountable and made them feel a part of a classroom family that maybe this gap could begin to be closed.