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By Joy V. Gerhart
Director of Christian education, Atonement, Wyomissing
A biblical miniature golf course in a church? How does that happen?
It all started with Pastor Luther Routté’s desire to draw golfers into the church. He thought that if some temporary driving ranges were created in our gym, we could draw avid golfers into our building in the middle of winter to warm up their driving arms. Pastor Routté contacted a local golf range to get information on making indoor driving ranges and renting golf clubs. The manager there told him about the fantastic project an art class at Brandywine High School was doing, creating a ten-hole miniature golf course in their cafeteria. The rest is history.
For three years, on the first weekend in February, Atonement rented the miniature golf figures fashioned by the talented students at Brandywine. Each year the students focused on a different theme — movies, cartoon characters, board games — and created props to decorate the holes. After three years, Brandywine decided to discontinue the project and offered to let Atonement keep some items. That’s when the recycling began.
Atonement’s fourth year of miniature golf featured a potpourri of themes. One prop (Homer Simpson sitting on his couch with Marge standing beside him) caught the imagination of one of our preteens and his mother — and became Samson (with short hair) and Delilah! Before long, other ideas were generated to recycle these figures and create Old Testament scenes.
Our senior high class looked over the figures in storage and developed ideas of what Bible stories could be depicted. With these ideas in hand, a group of catechetical students and three adult chaperones spent a fun-filled “painting sleepover” at the church, remaking cartoon and movie figures into biblical characters. Fred Flintstone became Noah, children from the Magic School Bus became Adam and Eve, Dexter (from his laboratory) became little David with a slingshot, and the “Monopoly guy” behind bars became Paul in prison.
We did not realize how time-consuming some of our ideas would be. Turning a mammoth magic school bus into Noah’s ark, complete with animals looking out of all the windows, took an enormous amount of youth-hours. But it also enabled the older elementary children to get involved in the project.
With their involvement in the project, the children felt a sense of ownership in the decorations and wanted to show off their work to their family and friends. Our preschool, which had always enjoyed looking at the golf course, delighted in walking through and hearing the Bible stories related to each hole. The senior high class even created books with the Bible story and comical quiz questions for each biblical scene.
The setting for fun and fellowship had also become an opportunity for learning!
Our second biblical miniature golf course, in 2003, focused more on the New Testament. Dexter-David became Zacchaeus in the tree, and Fred Flintstone-Noah became Jesus walking on water. The senior high was even more helpful developing ideas and the overnight work session was just as much fun. Though we received several inches of snow on Friday, Feb. 7, the whole golf weekend was successful.
Over the years we’ve reached 300-450 people a year, many of them grandparents taking their grandchildren out for a special event. Money raised from admission fees is used to offer camping scholarships for youth.
The learning and fun generated by the event is incalculable. It is Pastor Routté’s dream to have a wide range of members representing a variety of congregational interests involved in the project.
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