Why I Teach in the RE Program

The following was shared by Wil Rivers, Religious Education Committee chair (and Spirit Play teacher extraordinaire!), on Sunday, May 1.

“In the end we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand,
and we will understand only what we are taught.” Baba Dioum, Senegal

Good morning. After the service this morning you will have the chance to sign up to volunteer to teach or assist in the religious education program in the fall. I have been teaching in RE for many years and would like to share with you why.  Why I teach in the RE program has everything to do with how I see myself in relationship to my community. Let explain with a brief story.

When my family and I moved to the North Country from Knoxville, Tennessee, a city of over a quarter million people, we lived on Pleasant Street here in Canton. Life on Pleasant Street was, well, very pleasant. But what I noticed most was that for the first time in my life I was aware of living in a human-scaled community. That is to say it was small enough that I could wrap my mind around what it took for a community to work. My wife, Rebecca, and I worked as educators at one of the local colleges. Our then only daughter Sarah spent her mornings at “Kevin’s by the Railroad”. One neighbor across the street worked at the hospital, another was a volunteer fire fighter. Also on Pleasant Street, the postmaster lived just a couple houses down the block. A few years later our ministers at the time, Ann and Wade, moved to around the corner on Crescent Street. I could literally see from my doorstep the pieces of the community of which I now lived. And perhaps most importantly I could see how what I did was a part of this larger whole. I had a role to play. I was needed.

This is also how I feel about our RE program. I have a role to play. And I am needed. And the RE director, Carol Zimmerman, and the classroom coordinators make participating very easy and they are always there to help and are very appreciative. In the RE program here I enjoy that same sense of being in a human-scaled, friendly community. The young people who go down stairs while the rest of us remain in the sanctuary are the children of my friends and neighbors. I see them at my kid’s school. I talk with them at Morgan’s. They will all too soon enough be driving next to me on the road, or helping me find something on the shelves at Price Chopper. And because of this connection, this relationship, I feel a need and responsibility to get to know them better and help them learn the pieces of their world and how those pieces fit together. I love teaching them that they are already a part of this community. And that there are adults besides their parents and relatives who know them, see them, and love them. This was not my own experience growing up but it IS part of my children’s experience, which is one of the many reasons I love this church.

And it is true for me that I get back from the youth as much or more than I attempt to give. As I strive in some small way to enrich their lives, my life is enriched. As I teach, I understand, and I am moved to love, and to conserve the wholeness that I see in their faces. They are the faces of my community yesterday, today and tomorrow. Please join me this coming year in the RE program by signing up to volunteer as an assistant or teacher. I promise that you will come away from the experience with an inspiring, more complete sense of our community.