Talking
about the citizens of Pawnee, Indiana, Parks
and Recreation’s Ben Wyatt says at one point, “You know, it’s weird. I’ve been
to a lot of towns…usually people don’t care about anything. I mean, don’t get
me wrong, they’re weirdos, but….they’re weirdos that care” (“Time Capsule”). For
a while around the Northeastern State University campus, and to a lesser extent
the city of Tahlequah or Cherokee County generally, if “the SWAT team” were
mentioned, the speaker likely didn’t mean a squad of heavily-armed law
enforcement officers. Instead they were talking about the drama ministry of the
Baptist Collegiate Ministries, which was considered as somewhat of a loose
cannon amongst the tight-knit community of BCM outreaches. But we cared about
each other. And that was important.
I
was a loner growing up, for the most part. Not that I didn’t like people – it’s
more just that I like a small group of specific
people, and if someone is able to gain my trust in order to be called a friend,
then that trust is nearly indestructible. I had acted in middle school musicals
with our homeschool co-op and really enjoyed that, but in general, Oklahoma is
rather lacking in acting opportunities. So there was just the occasional
murder-mystery, and quoting good TV lines with my siblings. But in general,
nothing, which didn’t do much to take my mind off a disastrous freshman year of
college or the violent implosion of the sarcastic, witty and creative support
group that served as our personal Buffy-type
“Scooby Gang” for me and my friends in surviving high school.
The
project known as “Students with a Testimony” began when Samantha Hill
transferred to NSU around the spring of 2012 from Carl Albert; their branch of
the BCM had a drama ministry primarily used as a tool for evangelization, and
Sam wanted to continue that work in and around Tahlequah. She obtained the
blessing of NSU BCM directors Bob and Debbie Lipscomb, and then the project was
off and running. So she set out to round up some team members through
word-of-mouth.
“I pretty much just had to go out on a limb, finding
strangers who wanted to be a part of the BCM and say, ‘Hey, are you a Christian?
Would you like to share your testimony?’” she said during an interview for an
unpublished newspaper article in September 2013. “I was the crazy girl that
everyone saw coming and, believe me, they’d run the other way, because they
knew exactly what I was wanting to recruit them for.”
Sam tried to recruit me to immediately join the team when I
came to Tahlequah in fall 2012, but I declined, since I thought I had better
focus solely on schoolwork until I was more adapted to campus culture. Besides,
I was more involved at the time with Campus Christian Fellowship, another
ministry which has (though no one on either side wants to actually admit it) a
fierce rivalry with the BCM. She got about a dozen people to sign up, though;
and they performed a handful of shows in churches of various sizes,
interspersing testimonies and Scripture with music and comedy sketches.
Through a mix of gentle pestering by Sam throughout the year
and knowing several other people who attended the BCM regularly, together with
realizing that CCF wasn’t at all a place where I could grow spiritually, I
started going to the Monday-night worship service, and gradually discovered
that this was a good organization to be a part of. When fall 2013 started up
and the SWAT sign-ups were passed around, I figured that I ought to dive deeper
into helping out. It had been forever since I’d acted in anything, and besides,
it was a ministry opportunity. The team was made up of mostly new faces this
time around, with Haley Ritter co-leading the group with Sam for a semester.
“I actually heard about SWAT when I first met Sam and Haley,
they were telling me about it, and it seemed like a really, really cool way to
do ministry,” said Elizabeth Hodge in an interview from September 2013. “I’ve
been involved in theater most of my life, but never have done any kind of
ministry like this before. It’s a really cool way to spread the Gospel, because
you don’t have to go five thousand miles away and spend five thousand dollars.”
Once we’d gotten the sketches memorized, life quickly turned
into something of a sitcom: Friends was
blended into Full House and the
sketch comedy group Studio C, and then that combination was added to the
YouTube series Messy Mondays, as I
put it in a blog post simply titled “SWAT.” But we really did become like
family. Sam was the mom of the group, Haley the drill-sergeant aunt. And together,
they kept things running with a mix of strictness and sweetness. Jacob was the
cool older cousin, while Elizabeth, Susan and I were like siblings. Neighbors
included the spacey janitor James, four-wheeling Becca, obnoxious Scott (everyone
hated him), couple Skylar and Ja Li Si (we gave them a hard time, of course),
while Caleb and Holly were always sort of hanging out in the corner. New
additions to the cast several weeks in were TJ, serving as the fiery deadpan
snarker in addition to doing voiceovers, while Justin turned out to be a
jack-of-all-trades, doing everything from locating churches to running sound
equipment and acting.
There were a lot of coffee runs to McDonald’s when someone
had a lot on their mind –
“Random coffee runs late at night
make for a gem of a night,” Elizabeth tweeted once – and there was entertaining
improvisation out of necessity, and malapropisms galore (well-chronicled in my
video “SWAT Blooper Reel”). Road trips to and from shows were also very…interesting,
to say the least. As Elizabeth said, “The basic theme of all our road trips is,
like once we get there, you ask: ‘…But did we die?’ And that sums up everything
perfectly.” For example, there was that night we went looking for the invisible
church in Sallisaw.
Having put together a silent project to go with the
Lifehouse song “Everything” for a charity fundraiser/talent show, we were
invited to perform it at a revival at Deliverance Baptist the next week. We didn’t
usually do shows on Wednesday nights unless it was a special occasion, and this
definitely counted. Thing was, though, we’d lost several key props between
performances, since it was supposed to be a one-time thing. And several people
were late, adding to the tension. So we nervously played ping pong to pass the
time, then split up, one group racing to Wal-Mart for glass-bottled root beer,
the other group flying to Dollar Tree for play-food money. We got to Sallisaw
with a half hour to spare, more than enough time to find the church…..except
that none of us can find it on our
phones’ maps. We did find three other
churches, which all turned out to be the wrong ones. So we finally talk Jacob
into calling the pastor, where he’s given directions which sound
straightforward enough: “At Wal-Mart, turn right onto Maple and then drive a
ways, and then another right.” Maple is located, but it leads to a really
sketchy-looking neighborhood….and none of us (ten people in three vehicles) had
ever been to this city before, so we were completely lost. And by now it was
pouring down rain. Susan and I ask for directions from some terrified
construction workers at the Assembly of God, which turns out to be another dead
end. (Also, we realized once we got back in the car that she was already in
costume as Death.) We get a lead on another place it might be, which takes us
several miles out of town and past three burned-out buildings which were at one
point churches. The search has now taken an hour and fifteen minutes, all five
occupants of our car vote for giving up and finding dinner. We relay this
information back to the other two cars, and then eat and drive back home to
Tahlequah, crying in frustration yet knowing the situation was hilarious. . This
experience was recapped in far more detail in my blog post “Getting Lost.”
Weather slowed the beginning of our spring semester’s schedule,
but the execution of the performances was greatly improved, due in part to the
addition of Drew and Ashleigh as tech crew and about a quarter of the cast
dropping out. We banded together often to cover roles whenever necessary, and
strengthened connections with the other BCM ministries, as the more musical of
us joined the worship band. Organization-wide lunch hangouts were a staple of
Friday afternoons, and watch parties during Thunder games caused much screaming
and strangling of pillows. The overall atmosphere was much like working in
Pawnee’s Parks Department, and when you enjoy your coworkers, coming in every
day is awesome. Most of us spent nearly every nonclass moment in either the
BCM’s basement, living room or office. Special SWAT events included Christmas
caroling at a senior citizens’ center - three days before Thanksgiving - a
birthday party picnic, and a game night featuring intense rounds of Catchphrase
and Apples to Apples. An elderly pastor in Muskogee even gave a handful of us
marriage advice after the show one night. (”If you live long enough to say
‘Yes, dear,’ you’ll live to learn everything else.”) Pretty good advice.
After Sam and her husband moved once she graduated, the way
everyone planned the leadership transition to take place was for Susan to take
over the reins the next year, with me taking the second-in-command role which
Haley had filled. But there were a lot of family problems at home, which meant
that I had to leave for a semester in order to help out. Susan’s theater duties
kept her too stressed to run SWAT properly, so it was absorbed into the worship
band, where it limped along for the rest of the year before apparently being
shut down sometime in spring 2015. And by then transfers happened – Skylar and
I came to RSU, Elizabeth went to NSUBA, Caleb to Southwest Baptist, etc. And
life happened, too – Justin and Ashleigh fell in love almost immediately, and
their wedding will be held in a couple months. Jacob is engaged now, and Haley
got married. Ja Li Si became Miss Cherokee last year, and began dating Sam’s
brother. Graduations will begin proceeding in a couple months.
We weren’t that successful at evangelizing, but we did do
well at encouraging those who needed it – whether that was audience members,
relatives, friends or castmates – through the spiritual valleys, discouragements,
breakups, general insecurity and school panic of this life. We were a team, which doesn’t come up very often.
You don’t really get that Parks and Rec vibe
in real life very often. And when you do….that ought to be treasured. “A team
isn’t a bunch of kids out to win; a team is something you belong to. Something
you feel. Something you have to earn,” Gordon Bombay said in The Mighty Ducks. We earned that, and
you don’t let those ties fall slack. So we still keep in touch, and have
mini-reunions whenever possible. I may be allergic to college, but SWAT has
definitely been one of the highlights.
Works
Cited
Coburn, Wesley.
“Getting Lost”. Blog post. Another Lover
of the Blade. Blogger. 21 November 2013. Web. 17 January 2016.
--------------------.
“SWAT”. Blog post. Another Lover of the
Blade. Blogger. 9 November 2013. Web. 17 January 2016.
-------------------.
“SWAT Blooper Reel”. Online video clip. YouTube.
YouTube. 29 December 2014. Web. 17 January 2015.
Hill, Samantha. Personal interview.
9 September 2013.
Hodge, Elizabeth. Personal
interview. 9 September 2013.
------------------
(HodgepodgeEH). “Random coffee outings late at night make for a gem of a
night.” 7 March 2014. Tweet.
The Mighty Ducks. 1992. Dir. Stephen
Herek. Buena Vista Pictures, 1992. DVD.
“Time Capsule”. Parks and Recreation: Season Three. Writ.
Michael Schur. Dir. Michael Schur. NBCUniversal Television Distribution. 2011. DVD.
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