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By Lloyd Mackey
AN old song, made famous by Anne Murray, suggests that
it is “a long, long way from Sunday School to Broadway.”
For Lennard (Lenny) Schack of Kelowna, his involvement
for the past four months in a New York City Sunday school street ministry
has been a “real eye-opener.”
He has been interning with Bill Wilson’s Metro
Ministries (MM), which works with thousands of children in the Bronx,
Harlem and Brooklyn.
Schack graduated last year from Kelowna Christian
School. This past March, he went to New York for a week with his youth
group from Evangel Church.
“At the end of the week, I didn’t want to
leave,” Schack recalls.
He adds, “I didn’t know what to do with my
life after high school. I had been thinking of studying to be a dental
technician, but that did not work out. Jana, my sister, had done a MM
internship six years ago.”
Jana’s experience had been positive enough that
he figured it was worth a try. And, he says, these past few months have
been a life-changer.
Metro Ministries has a huge presence, all week long, in
some of the culturally diverse and often poverty-and-drug infested boroughs
of New York.
For Schack, a typical day involves being with a team of
half a dozen young people recruited from throughout North America. Sunday
school might be a misnomer, because he is out in the streets every day. But
street ministry tags it accurately.
“There are about 16 trucks – like moving
trucks, only their sides fold down into a stage.
“Every truck visits three sites a day. We –
the teams, or units, as our groups are called – put on an hour-long
program. We play games, sing songs, and teach about God. We use object
lessons, and act out Bible lessons. I would have three minutes to do
something, and I might choose any of these ways to tell a story.
“On Saturdays, we bus in kids from local areas to
the Metro Ministries church. We get around 5,000 to church – 1,500 to
2,000 each in three sessions.”
On Sundays, Schack and other interns take buses into
the boroughs to pick up both adults and children for church.
“I go to the Bronx. We pick up people, sit with
them in church and drive them back. It is about an hour’s drive each
way.”
While the street ministry gives the teams a taste of
life in these communities, the ‘visitation’ work immerses them
much more completely, if only for a few hours a day.
“We get to see how people live. It is an
eye-opener, that people are living in America, like this, in a very rough
area.
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“Most of the kids we visit are living in project
buildings that are government funded. They are crowded. Some homes, with
two rooms, have eight kids living there. The places are dirty. People
urinate in stairwells. The drugs use is overwhelming,” Schack says.
Asked how teaching Bible lessons from a stage helps
with social or poverty issues, Schack points out that visitation is a big
part of ministry.
Each intern in a unit has his or her own sites or
areas, to visit.
“The day before going on site – in the
Bronx, where my site is – I hand out fliers. Then, when I visit, I
get to connect with kids and parents on personal level.”
He says he senses that “they respect you, and can
see something different. The kids see violence and drug use, And they see
us at Metro Ministries.” Hopefully, he says, “they realize the
difference and that they don’t have to live as their parents or older
brothers do.”
The interns who are chosen to go to New York pay their
own airfare. But the on-the-ground costs – food, lodgings and related
costs, are covered by Metro Ministries.
Bill Wilson, the senior minister, spends much time on
the road raising money for the costs of having the interns working in the
city.
During the time Schack has been in New York, there have
been other Canadian volunteers – from Montreal, Toronto, the Fraser
Valley and Vancouver Island.
For Schack, figuring out what to do in the future is
still a bit nebulous. But he does know that whatever it will be, Sunday
school off the side of a truck will have made a big difference.
In a sense, his experience gives a different wrinkle to
Anne Murray’s song. It may be a long, long way from Kelowna to Sunday
school in the Bronx.
But the gospel communicated in Evangel Church is not
all that different from what kids hear from a street stage in the Big
Apple.
Contact: www.metroministries.com.
January 2009
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