Today's Houston Chronicle has a front-page photo of some very wet LDS youth doing a Pioneer trek through the Piney Woods (not an ideal location for a handcart trek, mind you).
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/4638687.html
The article mentions in passing that a lot of religious youth groups are doing activities over spring break, and most of these are service-oriented, such as participation in Habitat for Humanity.
It got me thinking that the primary goal of these treks is to reinforce group membership, instead of providing some kind of positive service for the world. Is it petty of me to think LDS youth would be better served if they did service instead?
Pioneer Treks and Service Spring Breaks
Re: Pioneer Treks and Service Spring Breaks
Runtu wrote:Today's Houston Chronicle has a front-page photo of some very wet LDS youth doing a Pioneer trek through the Piney Woods (not an ideal location for a handcart trek, mind you).
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/4638687.html
The article mentions in passing that a lot of religious youth groups are doing activities over spring break, and most of these are service-oriented, such as participation in Habitat for Humanity.
It got me thinking that the primary goal of these treks is to reinforce group membership, instead of providing some kind of positive service for the world. Is it petty of me to think LDS youth would be better served if they did service instead?
To me, that's a fundamental difference between the LDS church and many other churches: the target of their service. We send our youth on proselyting missions, the aim of which is to increase the membership in the church. Other churches send their youth on missions too, which may end up with people joining them, but the primary purpose of those missions is service... digging a well, building homes and schools, etc. Even when we do service (which isn't often enough), we do it for our own. We serve our widowed, we serve our elderly, we serve our infirm. We rarely serve others in the sense that others give service. When one of us serves at the soup kitchen, it's a rare thing and someone will submit the story and picture for the Ensign. When someone else serves, it's probably what they do every Saturday or Sunday morning or evening and isn't news at all.
When my sons were doing their Eagle projects, I made sure their projects did not benefit the local LDS church solely. Many of the other projects were strictly for the LDS church and I didn't think that would teach my children anything. And we've all heard the story of the ward that refused to join in a stake-wide yard sale with everything priced at a dime because "there are no poor among us". As if they couldn't help the poor elsewhere! Holy smokes! Have we lost the vision of what it means to be God's One True Church? Indeed, yes... if we ever had the vision in the first place.
Recreating the Utah pioneer treks does nothing for service. The pioneers were not exactly stellars models of service to others.
Our youth use spring break as an opportunity to make some money (we have several money making projects going in our ward that week), not service. Service is done in a hurried manner on a Mutual night. It's not like it's important! We need the longest lengths of time for money making projects, not service projects.