2053 Designing A Boy-Friendly Religious Education Program
UU Men's Network

This session started with a few minutes of various kinds of whole body movement to music at our chairs.

After outlining the premise, which is that in general boys stop coming to church school earlier than girls and are regarded as being "more trouble," a quotation was offered from a meeting of religious educators. The quote observed that churches were having trouble retaining the "bigger boys" and that "five and six year old boys were restless in church school."

What was surprising was that this quotation is from a "Unitarian Sunday School" committee from 1871.

Chethik and Stewart alternated between asking people to group themselves in threes and fours and talk amongst themselves, and then brainstorming the answers to the questions offered by the session leaders back to the group as a whole.

The first three questions the small groups were asked to consider were:

• What is turning off boys at your church?
• Why do the boys say they are not coming?
• Why do you think they are not coming?

One major point Chethik and Stewart made was that if you haven’t been asking the boys themselves why they aren’t coming, this is an excellent and important place to start. It may also be a symptom of the larger problem. Yes, the answer may start with an unhelpful "It’s boring" but you can probably get additional insights by talking to the boys about the issues specific to your particular church.

A second point was that if at all possible, the person asking the boys the questions about why they aren’t coming should be a peer (ideally a male peer) rather than an adult.

The group was then offered a second set of questions to discuss in small groups and brainstorm back to the larger group.

• What has worked to keep boys in your congregations??
• If you had unlimited resources (money, power, support, staffing) what would you do?

A list of suggestions was generated and the point was made that some of these suggestions may take only a little money and many are a function of deciding to take action. Chethik and Stewart wrapped up by referring people to the ten suggestions concerning boy friendly RE, found at: http://uumen.uua.org/ in the Spring 2002 issue of Male Call, the Unitarian Universalist Men’s Network Newsletter.

Reporter Lynn Calvin; Editor Lisa Presley; Web Designer Julie Albanese

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