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Christian alternative to Boy Scouts
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One of the nice things about Contenders is that it can be done from home while you wait/search for another option if necessary.
I don’t know if anyone has mentioned Royal Rangers yet, but my son attends meetings at a local church that has a Rangers group. They call it a post, the leaders are commanders, and they do award badges for units they complete. It is a Christian group. This is the Royal Rangers pledge: With God’s help, I will do my best to serve God, my church, and my fellowman; to live by the Ranger Code; to make the Golden Rule my daily rule.
Here is a link to the main website in the US: http://royalrangers.com/. There is more information about who they are & how they function there. They don’t have a comprehensive directory of group locations at this time, but many Assemblies of God churches have groups, so there is a link to locate an AG church near you to see if they have one. If you are not part of a Pentecostal church, I would still look into it. The Bible studies that are done during my son’s group are very basic and there are a variety of boys from various church backgrounds in the group.
marmie, in my opinion, this is just the first step for boy scouts. i honestly believe that they will go the same direction as the GS. It’s only a matter of time, and I personally think it won’t be too long, until it does. I also think that the number will decrease so much, just like it has w/ the GS, that they will eventually combine. But, who knows. this is just conjecture on my part.
K
Scouts Canada is ‘almost’ all-inclusive. The only people excluded are athiests (and actually only athiests who fight against the requirement to believe there is something or someone higher/bigger than ourselves (even something like ‘nature’) This includes being co-ed.
Religious groups that sponsor a group are allowed to restrict the membership a bit more on a national level. So LDS (Mormon) groups, for example, are Male only (may have female leaders for cubs or 11 year old scouts.) I think religious groups could restrict it to members of their religion (all the LDS groups I’ve seen do NOT do that restriction…) I don’t know if they could do other forms of restriction – I haven’t heard anyone test it.
When I was a cub leader with the LDS group, we had quite a few kids from the neighbourhood of various religions. We opened with prayer (non religious cubs were allowed to just be quiet, or to step out of the room – their preference) There were no Sunday events (the local Klondike derby has Scouts do it on Saturday, Cubs on Sunday – but they allowed that cub pack to run on Saturday instead.) With the Scouts they don’t camp over Sunday with very very few exceptions (like a Jamboree) and don’t travel on Sunday for camps either.
We are now with a community group, so there are no prayers, although a grace song will be generally sung before meals at camps. So some stuff does occasionally happen on Sunday… But the scouting is much better in this group.
I do think that Scouts makes boys into great men (and girls into great women).
@kerby, They almost always do something outside (even if it’s just playing a little football, like when they were working on learning to tie knots), but they do a lot outside when it’s not below 20 degrees with a serious wind chill. They couldn’t go outside last week, though, so they talked about archery & practiced pulling back the bowstring on a couple of bows, identified the parts of the bow & arrow, etc.
Their usual room was being painted or something, so they met in the lobby area….imagine the surprise of the folks coming & going for Wednesday night service as they see boys aiming their bows down the corridor toward the front doors, LOL! (Like I said, they were not actually using arrows this time.)
They have a couple of camps in a group cabin during the school year and a statewide pow-wow event in the summer. The last time they camped, it was below zero the entire weekend. They did get out for about a half hour at a time to throw axes and to sled.
@suzukimom, this reminds me of how our group leader handles things with our 4-H group. They are not allowed to exclude anyone based on religious reasons, and they cannot restrict the group to just homeschoolers….so, we meet at 10:00 a.m. on Friday mornings once a month. (Goodness, I wonder who will show up for those meetings? Public school kids?) Also, she just casually mentions that all of the member families “just happen to be Christians this year” (and every year), so we all voted to begin and end with prayer. Haven’t had anyone apply who has a problem with that, either.
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