My, How Times Have Changed

I am constantly amazed at how much things have changed in our world today. The biggest change, in my view, is how public schools react to “religion” in the classroom, hallways and on campus.

When I was in high school years and years and years ago, we had a Youth For Christ Club in the school.  Our football coach was our sponsor and we met every Wednesday at noon in the gym.  We usually had around 200 kids in attendance. When I look at my yearbook and read the profiles of the seniors, approximately 50 percent list Bible Club as one of their clubs.  Lest you think we had a small school with a small graduating class, over 400 graduated in the class of 1961.

I was in the Youth For Christ trio that sometimes sang in the club meetings and more importantly to me, I quizzed on the Youth For Christ quiz team.  This meant memorizing or practically memorizing whole chapters of the Bible and quizzing against other schools on Saturday night in Charleston at the Youth For Christ rallies.

These rallies gathered kids from all the schools in our area – Nitro, St. Albans, Dunbar, South Charleston and Charleston. Each Saturday night, two teams faced off and quizzed on the designated Scripture for that week.  And we had our cheering sections!  Not as many, of course, as football and basketball, but quite a few came the night our school was quizzing.

The teams’ chairs were rigged with a buzzer and/or a light which alerted the judges when you jumped up to answer the question.   Sometimes when you tried to fake out someone to get them to jump first, it backfired and you were on the spot.  If the questioner said, “Finish this verse,” and that is all he said and you jumped, you had to pick a verse from the whole book or whole chapter and just take a guess.  Of course, you missed more often than you got it right.

If you answered five questions correctly, you “quizzed out” and if you answered three questions wrong, you were out. Teams consisted of five members and the quiz consisted of 20 questions.

One quiz I will never forget was for the championship and we were quizzing on the whole Book of John.  The Quizzer said, “Finish this verse” – well, you can guess who tripped her buzzer!  I stood there and I remember shrugging and said, “A little leaven leaveneth the whole loaf.”  The judge looked shocked and said, “That’s correct.”  No one was more surprised that I was.

I was also on the All-Star team that represented Charleston YFC in the regionals in Bristol, Virginia. Our team won in Bristol and from there we went to Wynona Lake, Indiana for the Nationals.   We quizzed other All-Star teams from all over the nation.  We didn’t win, but we placed fourth in the nation.  When we returned to Charleston, we were asked to give a demonstration on T.V.

Can you imagine any school sponsoring such a club today?  Can you imagine kids willingly going to a rally to watch their team quiz on the Bible?  Can you even imagine kids today memorizing whole portions of the Bible (in King James no less)?

Yes, we also had our problems – school was not perfect, kids were not perfect, but we also had the freedom to not just carry our Bibles to school and read them, but to quiz and memorize and have fun with our Christianity.  I can still quote a great deal of scripture from those days (in King James!).  As a matter of fact, I still use King James and can’t really understand modern English Bibles!

My intense study of the Bible has been a real blessing to me in my life.  God has used my experience with Youth For Christ many times to bring a verse to my mind in difficult times.