FeedsBranching out
Salvation Army offers unique summer programs
“We have a great summer going,” said Capt. Pat Irvine at the Plymouth Salvation Army Sunday morning.
The pews in front of her were crowded with regular parishioners and some brightly-clad youngsters— squirming children wearing the tie-died t-shirts they decorated at an earlier summer camp session.
The youngsters were there as part of a cross-promotional field trip designed to bolster attendance at the church, promote the summer camp program and provide some entertainment to a group of less fortunate children.
Their destination? Comerica Park, where the white-hot Tigers were scheduled to take on their divisional rivals, the Kansas City Royals.
“You might not think that taking people to a ball game would be ministry, but it is to us,” said Capt. Jim Irvine, who took the helm at the Plymouth Salvation Army Corps about a month ago.
“We want to bring some normalcy to these kids’ lives. How else would some of these children be able to afford to go to a ballgame?”
So, with a group of regular camp attendees and some supervising adults, Salvation Army workers collected some children from a local shelter and—with tickets donated by the Plymouth Noon Kiwanis Club—set out on their day-long adventure.
An adventure is what Irvine described as his and his wife, Pat’s, involvement with the Salvation Army. He is from Canada; his wife, the Midwest. Although Irvine is a fourth-generational attendee of Salvation Army services and a second-generation officer, he said it took a major shakeup for him to decide to follow in his father’s footsteps.
Enter Oct. 19, 1989, the day commonly known as ‘Black Monday.’
Irvine, a former engineering teacher, was in Vancouver, BC at the time working in the sales field. He remembers the day vividly because it coincides with one of his children’s birthdays and he was lamenting the fact that he couldn’t be with his family when the stock market crashed.
“I decided it was time to do something other than just make money,” he said.
Following a family discussion—Pat Irvine, a former teacher, was a stay-at-home-mom at the time who also wanted to do more—they decided to move from Canada to Chicago to take part in the officer training corps.
Irvine said there were plenty of hurdles to overcome between the culture in Toronto and the U.S.
“I discovered that, even though everyone speaks English in Toronto and the U.S., we don’t speak the same language,” he told his congregation on Sunday.
The couple have traveled since they graduated from the training course, most recently to Pontiac where they headed up a ministry vastly different than the one in Plymouth.
“It was a very tough, inner-city ministry,” Irvine said. “This is a nice, middle upper class community.”
Still the Salvation Army serves a need and he said the residents of the community are very supportive. He hopes to do more outreach events like the one on Sunday and to build up the congregation. That may require a larger public relations effort than it does in Canada—where the Salvation Army is recognized as a church first and relief organization second.“There’s no place we’ve been to that there hasn’t been some kind of need in the community,” he said. “We’ve already found that people here are willing to work together. There’s a subtle need here, but we can work together to find and meet those needs.”
And, of course, they will continue the summer camp program. There are currently about 60 youngsters enrolled in it; camp sessions take place every day at the facility, with children taking on a variety of craft projects to stretch their creativity, learn to be good citizens and more.
“I think it’s the best camp around, but of course I’m a little biased,” Pat Irvine joked.
Jody Moyer, who runs the camp program, said she always gets positive feedback from it—from the children and their parents, alike.
“I like to see people having fun every day,” she said. “That tells me we’re doing our job.”
