My dad’s church camp dean thing was only one expression of his propensity for youth ministry. Still just early thirtysomething himself, he felt he could communicate with teenagers, and he was right (to the extent that any adult can communicate with teenagers).
Our church in Lexington during the Sixties had had its share of young people, but we spent 1970 in East Point with an older congregation – it had teenagers, to be sure, but the church at Crawfordsville had proportionally more. There were more young families there.
Dad’s response was to create a youth ministry that was under the church but not within it. He convinced the leadership to rent an old house in downtown Crawfordsville, a couple of blocks from the city high school, and turn it into a Christian youth center.
ReachOut House took its name from the New Testament volume of The Living Bible, an Army drab-olive, user-friendly paraphrase of the actual bible. It was a comfy place, with a living room filled with bean bag chairs, psychedelic Jesus posters on the walls, a kitchen stocked for teenagers and a pool table in the basement. It served no other purpose than to be a gathering place for kids between the ages of 12 and 18.
There was an apartment upstairs, rented out to a young woman in her 20s named Lovey. This was done solely to make the house seem a home to passersby, a place where someone lived, so it wouldn’t get burgled. Lovey attended our church, at least occasionally – there wasn’t much in place for singles in their 20s – and she almost never showed her face around ReachOut House. She was gorgeous, and certainly a distraction for every teenage boy in the place, and my only other memory of her is that she sometimes performed songs during worship services with a guitar, a la Joni Mitchell. Her signature tune was as hippie as ReachOut House itself - “What Color is God’s Skin?”
ReachOut House rapidly filled up whatever free nights were left in the week. I’d go to junior high night as a member of the youth group convening there for bible study, and I’d go with Dad, guitar in hand, to play during praise chorus time when he led the high schoolers’ study night. There were always snacks and there was always pool and time enough to just hang out. Me and the other guys always kept a lustful eye out for Lovey.
I loved ReachOut House! It was infinitely better than school, where between being a PK and an unabashed nerd I had little social cred. At ReachOut House, being the PK wasn’t particularly a black cloud since Dad wasn’t around on nights I was with my peers, and I was the Guitarist on nights when he was. On both nights, everyone would hang out for a while, then sit cross-legged on the living room floor in a big circle or in bean bag chairs and sing songs and listen to whoever was leading deliver a bible study. However turgid I found the bible studies, I looked forward to both nights every week all the same.
It should go without saying that ReachOut House had that same wonderful attribute I had discovered at church camp five years earlier: beautiful teenage girls. One of them, Bambi, was not only staggeringly fetching but whip-smart; I always hoped she’d sit close enough to me to notice how awesome a guitarist I was. Also, she smelled wonderful.
Bambi’s younger sister Beth was my age and in my group, and every bit as smart. I remember getting into it with her in the fall of 1974, not at ReachOut House but at church, where we were both part of a youth activities committee. It was our job to plan some ReachOut House events, and the board had given us a little money to play with.
The church had a 16mm film projector (this was a decade before VHS tapes became a thing) and we decided to rent a movie for a ReachOut House movie night. Beth and I were assigned the task of selecting a movie.
You’d think I’d have had the brains to make the most of this opportunity to get to know a brilliant, beautiful young woman my own age much better, but I was in my early Star Trek days – all I could do was seize the chance to expand my reach for the stars. Browsing the provided catalog of 16mm prints available for us to rent, I locked onto Conquest of Space, a 1955 George Pal classic about a Mars mission gone awry.
Beth favored the far more accessible Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, a 1960 Doris Day romp featuring David Niven that would undoubtedly have been a far more popular choice with the audience we had. Beth and I argued and argued over this across several phone calls, and I wouldn’t budge. Her annoyance was palpable, and I don’t think she ever forgave me for my intransigence. [As an apologetic homage to Beth, I bought both movies on DVD many years later.]
That my behavior was inexcusable goes without saying, though the event itself went very well. All the guys my age loved the movie and all the girls hated it, but we all loved the pizza and popcorn and snacks and the novelty of our own private movie screening, there at ReachOut House. Many invited friends who had never been there before, which was part of the point.
The more distressing take-home point is that my behavior was inexplicable: here I’d had an opportunity to work closely with a peer whose considerable beauty was exceeded by her brains, and I hadn’t been self-aware enough to simply work with her and enjoy the collaboration. Sadly, my dull-wittedness would persist for years. Decades, even.
Many more ReachOut House memories linger. There was Mark, the older brother of my pal Eric. Mark was wheelchair-bound: two years into our residency at the church, he’d been in a dirt bike accident, slamming into a large tree at full speed. His skull had been split open and he’d been left paralyzed; his own father had found him unconsciousness, and he was so badly damaged that his dad didn’t recognize him.
Mark recovered, but not completely: he remained paralyzed and took to a wheelchair; he retained his full mental faculties and his sense of humor – and it was at ReachOut House that he flaunted it. He wasn’t above disrupting a serious talk or taking down a grown-up; during praise choruses once, Carolyn (a parent who was leading the songs) asked everyone, “Do you know ‘I’ve Been Redeemed’?”
Without missing a beat, Mark said, “Really? When?”7
Another youth leader was Connie, who was a particular pal of mine. She was the wife of the town orthodontist, for whom my mother worked for a while as a technician. Connie was a foot smarter than the other adults who helped out at ReachOut House, and took an interest in my burgeoning intellectual pursuits.
They concerned her, you see; she saw what my parents hadn’t yet seen, that my intellectual interests were taking me into heretical territory. There came a point at which she confiscated someone’s paperback copy of Chariot of the Gods, Eric von Däniken's popular yet unholy account of how ancient alien astronauts had visited the earth and created all the world’s religions, including our own. Knowing of my predictions with all things outer space, she was concerned that it would give me unwholesome notions.
And finally, I remember that ReachOut House was the site of my first theological debate with a peer. There was a girl in my junior high group named Lisa – red of hair, quick of wit and keen of mind – who took me on in a discussion of some churchy point about how Christians are supposed to respond to the world, pointing out (in front of everyone) that I was taking a scripture out of context and arguing from conjecture. I don’t remember what we were arguing about, but I clearly remember my own emotional conviction at the time – that she won and I lost. We ended up smoothing it over on the spot, thank goodness; but once again, I had thoughtlessly blown the chance to get to know a smart, funny girl better by parading my own arrogant point of view.
ReachOut House didn’t last long. It was a hit, as far as the kids of the church were concerned, but my father – who never met a building program he didn’t love – convinced the church elders to add a new wing of Sunday School classrooms to our little church in the wood, and it was decided the church couldn’t afford that building program and ReachOut House. In early 1974, the church let it go, which made me sad for weeks.
I don’t know what became of Lovey.
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