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Article Profiles Activities of Child Evangelism Fellowship

By Howard M. Friedman

The August issue of Harper's magazine carries a long article by by Rachel Aviv titled Like I Was Jesus: How To Bring a Nine Year Old To Christ. It explores the work of Child Evangelism Fellowship, the group that won an important Supreme Court victory in 2001 in Good News Club v. Milford Central School . The case gave CEF's after-school Bible group, the Good News Club, the right to equal access with secular groups to use of school premises after school hours. Aviv's article focuses largely on CEF's summer work in a poor neighborhood in Connecticut, where teenage missionaries bring children to Christ through a week-long Bible club conducted in a neighborhood park near their housing project. Aviv also visits a camp at which teenage missionaries are trained, among other things, in how to use the "EvangeCube"-- a plastic toy that tells the Gospel story in pictures.

Discussing the aftermath of the Supreme court's Good News Club case, Aviv reports:

Since the ruling, the Fellowship, funded by donations, has engaged in more than twenty follow-up suits against schools that refused to comply with the Milford decision. Hundreds of other cases not directly involving the Fellowship have cited the ruling, leading to a level of church-state entanglement that had been prohibited for decades. Meanwhile, the number of Good News Clubs in public schools has quietly and steadily swelled. The ministry held 1,155 after-school clubs in 2000; in 2007, there were 3,956, reaching 137,361 children. Jaimie Fales, the Fellowship?s spokesperson, says that she still hears people complaining about the good old days before "they took God out of the schools. I have to remind them, ?Hey, listen, you can have prayer in public schools! You can have the Bible in public schools! That?s just complaining. We can do it. We just got to get up and actually do it! The Supreme Court flung the doors wide open.?"

[Thanks to the article's author for sending the PDF.]

Full post as published by Religion Clause on July 16, 2009 (boomark / email).