There may be no better rite of passage for young people in America, today, than Scouting. Too many children and adolescents have too few options to be engaged in healthy ways to grow. All need support and encouragement to mature--even if that is nothing more than a peer or mentor to notice and affirm successful efforts, to accept and help correct mistakes, to advise and provide leadership as one plans to move forward. In Scouting, there is always far more underway than going camping and earning merit badges, and there are no suitable substitutes for caring, appropriate, personal interactions. Real life cannot be just a spectator sport sadly fostered by social media and online gaming; real people, realized people must be formed by involved engagement.
Even as abilities are acquired and agilities are enhanced however, young people must be coached to cautiously recognize and acknowledge that real living can be dangerous. Cultivating confidence, even the bravery that pioneering leadership requires, always entails risk that must be responsibly supervised. Further, there needs to be a language taught so that young people can find words to make meaning of their experience.
It is into some of that fertile silence that God and Country plunges. Beyond what we "know", there is... MORE! At its best, the focus isn't on indoctrination into a particular denomination or religion but an introduction into an even larger All That Is! The most whole (holiest), healthiest leaders are not recruiting evangelizers to a specific faith stance. Not "steel hands in velvet gloves" kind of people, they are door openers--and, for some, the doors into new avenues of growth haven't even, before, been noticed.
When ideas about God and Country are first introduced, each leader must accommodate the participants' stages of development. Young people are often more interested in physical activity, have shorter attention spans and can tire quickly of talking about ideas. The program is simply to model a way religion might provide a firm and level foundation for exploration, but it may foster connections and enhance the faith system of which a young person may already be a part.
Map-makers (cartographers) have always drawn the world as far as they know it to be. Beyond those bounds, they have drawn on their imaginations. Some of the earliest maps have creatures that look like frogs with wings, creatures that seemed to want to fly but keep bouncing on their bottoms. The map-makes also wrote words: "Here be (the earliest pictures of) dragons!"
God and Country can provide an introductory, beginner's map for a way to become fully human.
-Dan Weathersbee