Youth Groups Should Consider the Impact of Christianity on Communities and Cultures

 The Christian message started to be proclaimed in Jerusalem on the morning of the Jewish Feast of Shavuot in the year 33AD. Within fifty years, adherents to the message could be found in Asia, Europe and Africa. Whole communities embraced Christianity. Then they destroyed the artifacts of their pagan religions. These stories can be read in the New Testament. They are also documented by contemporary writers and historians. 

The message has continued to upend lives and cultures in the two thousand years since. One example of a culture challenged and changed is the Auca Indian Tribe of Ecuador whose members massacred a team of missionaries in 1956 only to be converted by their widows in the 1960s. The story is told here. Other modern examples of the impact of what happens when people make the Christian message their personal mission and the template for their lives are documented by the Sentinel Group through carefully researched, powerful documentary videos. Two of them are about Kentucky Communities. "It's Only Cookie Dough" is about Lynch, Kentucky. "An Appalachian Dawn" is about Manchester, Kentucky. Both of these videos are appropriate for high school youth groups and could be the catalysts for conversations about what might happen if they acted on the claims of the Christian message to bring redemption and restoration to both individuals and communities. 

The Kentucky Faith & Public History Education Project is committed to creating and disseminating resources about Christianity and about the Christian history of Kentucky in particular. Our books, our walking trail and the immersive hands-on field trip opportunities (field trips will begin later this year) are all carefully aligned with the Kentucky State Curriculum Standards for Social Studies. Unlike other textbooks about the Bible used in public schools, our resources are designed to show the impact of the Christian message on famous individuals who attributed their faith to their undeniably successful achievements. We agree that all students need to be familiar with the Bible as literature. It informs many of the metaphors in the canons of British and American literature. It allows the subjects of many Western artistic masterpieces and many important pieces of music to be understood. The Bible also has provenance as an historic text and can be used in conjunction with documents and artifacts from the ancient world to augment, query and confirm what we know about it. The Bible also claims to be a living revelation of the living God, its words living and active, penetrating as the sharpest of swords. It is the impact made on Kentucky by people whose lives were upended and transformed by this mystical message that our project tracks and traces. 

You can explore the Kentucky Faith & Public History Education Project on our website. You can keep abreast of what we are doing on Facebook, and you can follow our mischievous mascot, Scamp the Squirrel, on Twitter.