Why Some Communities Spark and Others Don’t
What Paris, Concord, and Jenks High School Taught Me About the Strange Alchemy of Groups
One evening when I was a senior in high school, one of my best friends invited me over to her house. When I got there, Emily told me to come up to her room. She then had me sit down in a chair and take off my shoes and socks. She brought over a basin and had me stick my feet in it.
Then, using a pitcher of water and a cloth, she washed my feet.
Em told me that she had been reading the chapter in John where Jesus washes his disciples’ feet and tells them to do likewise, had simply been thinking about how cool I was, and wanted to wash my feet as a gesture of humility, service, friendship, and love.
Desiring to convey the same things, I decided to wash her feet in return.
This is one of my favorite memories, not only because it was a special moment with a good friend, but because it was archetypal of my very weird high school experience.
At the time the foot-washing happened, I certainly thought it was unexpected and out of the ordinary, but it didn’t strike me as that strange.
Em was a passionate Christian who was the president of Trojans for Christ, a club hundreds of students strong at our public high school; I was a Catholic who was thinking about joining the Church of Jesus of Christ of Latter-Day Saints; and she and I were constantly talking about God.
We weren’t the only ones having those kinds of conversations. Discussions and debates about faith pervaded the talk amongst my peers. Trojans for Christ was only one of three large Christian clubs at our school. You could often find students singing praise and worship songs in the classrooms before the start of the school day, and many carried Bibles around campus. The cool kids were also the very Christian kids.
Students were regularly trying to get their friends “saved,” or becoming saved. Students shared their faith with each other, and even with their teachers.
I was surrounded by teenagers who debated, sometimes heatedly, the nature of God and salvation. Mormons argued with Baptists about the relationship between grace and works. People debated which was the right church to join. They made different choices. We attended their respective baptisms.
We prayed together as friends. We prayed together as sports teams. We prayed together around the flagpole in front of our (again) public school.
That there was a strong current of Christianity in the air is not unusual in Oklahoma, especially thirty years ago; OK was considered the buckle of the “Bible Belt.” But the religious fervency afoot at Jenks High School in the late ‘90s was unmatched, even by the public high school Brett attended just an hour and a half away. It was like there was a little revival, a kind of mini “Great Awakening” going on during my high school years.
Since it was the only high school experience I had known, I didn’t realize how unusual the atmosphere had been until I graduated and started comparing notes with peers who’d grown up elsewhere and outside the state. Folks I met at college who hailed from back East listened to my stories about high school with especially blank stares.
Over the intervening years, I have often wondered: What exactly was going on there?
Why did something that intense arise in one particular place, at one particular moment?
