In Isaiah 11:6 ESV it says, “The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the young goat and the calf and the lion and the fattened calf together and a little child shall lead them.”
From a certain child’s point of view, this verse just might include that child carrying a lollypop and a little black box!
It was Communion Sunday, August 7, 2022 when then ten-year-old Karmyn Szewczyk (pronounced Sheftic) started passing out lollypops to parishioners as they came through the front door. Sometimes she even raced to the side door to make sure she didn’t miss a single soul, member Dianne Gaffney tells me with a delighted laugh.
“Wow! It was such a surprise! Every one of them had a bible verse fastened to them. It was amazing! The verses are random but they seem to speak to us personally about something we’ve been thinking about or dealing with. Almost like a fortune cookie. And she’s been doing it every month on Communion Sunday.”
“She types them out herself,” mom Kristin adds from her seat at a pew. We’re sitting in the chapel of Oak View Global Methodist Church on Oak View Drive, Waynesburg, reliving when the youngest child of this congregation found the vision to lead her church family on a new mission. The mission: to make sure kids around the world have a bible to read, written for children in their native language, and in a way that a child might understand.
Which is where the little black box comes in.
“She leaves it on the table by the front door… and people put donations in it and there are posters on the bulletin board showing where they’ve gone,” Dianne’s husband, church treasurer Richard Gaffney explains. Some of the regular Sunday tithings are pledged for the bible mission and some members mail in their donations of support.
To date, this new mission project has raised more than $9,000 from church members. Bibles have already been mailed and delivered to several countries and organizations the church has contacts with, he tells me. I look at the paper Karman shyly hands me that describes her faith, her mission and where her kids’ bibles have gone so far: “Guatemala, Iran, Ukraine, India, China, Prison Missions, Greene County CASA.”
What is her favorite Bible verse? “John 3:16.”
I notice another question her mom wrote to help her do her first interview: What is your favorite Bible story and why? She’s left it blank, so I ask her. Karmyn thinks about it, an 11-year-old seventh grader now, surrounded by her elders, all eyes on her. She hesitates, blinks, straightens her shoulders, and says “David!”
Pastor Brian Long grins. “He was a kid too, you know,” he tells her. “The armor they gave him was so heavy it he could barely stand up!”
Karmyn’s eyes sparkle, she grins back, and suddenly, a kid’s bible makes perfect sense.
I’ve already heard the story from Dianne about the meeting she held at church last June. She was the new mission leader, ready to do something different. But what? Karmyn and her mom were there, and the adults talked about what they were already doing. “Collecting for the Food Bank, Angel Tree type things for shut-ins, Super Bowl Kettle where we take donations during the Super Bowl, Blanket Sunday—our last one we sent blankets to Ukraine,” Dianne remembers. “Then I said something about doing something new and Karmyn stood up and it kind of fell out of her. Not everyone has a bible and everybody needs to have one she told us. She wanted to help kids all over the world get bibles. My husband and I have already done that a few times, just on our own, passing out bibles in front of stores, talking to people. Sometimes people would ask us to pray with them if they were going through some personal crisis. To hear her say it was amazing because it was what I was thinking, too.”
Understanding what kids think is part of the job Dianne still does part time. She uses her master’s degree in psychology to teach foster parenting classes and do therapy for kids caught up in the foster care system.
She also remembers going to Claylick Methodist Church as a kid and the family wraparound good feeling from those old country churches that closed in the 1970s as flocks dwindled and upkeep became an issue. Dianne was there to help build a new flock in 1978, too. That’s when the Morrisville United Methodist Church, now a dentist’s office, and Claylick, now a private residence by the county tennis courts, merged to become Oak View United Methodist Church. She was still attending in 2000, when the mortgage was ceremoniously burned. “It amazed me at how fast we were able to do that.”
Dianne attended other churches as her life and career unfolded but found herself drawn back to the Methodism of her childhood when the pandemic hit in 2020. Suddenly, “[n]obody was going to church. I felt myself being drawn home.”
When Dianne called her mission meeting together last June, there was a fresh crisis unfolding as Methodist churches nationwide contemplated disaffiliation from the United Methodist governing body. As Karmyn continued passing out her lollypops every Communion Sunday, her elders debated their next move. When their pastor Rev. Susan Hoover retired in June, they cast their vote to disaffiliate.
“We prayed for three months for a new pastor and during that time, we took turns leading the sermons. I’ve taught classes and preaching is teaching, isn’t it? It really brought us together like family. We worked together and we’re all so comfortable with each other now. When Pastor Brian came to us, he fit right in. The first sermon he preached was like an audition. We liked it and he signed the agreement that day. The next week he brought his family and his belongings up from Washington, WV and moved into the parish house.”
We’re still sitting in the chapel as the sun gets ready to set, laughing and talking about Waynesburg’s upcoming Christmas parade on December 2.
“When the Chamber asked us to be in the parade, we were all so excited. It was like it went viral!” Dianne says. “The church is so behind what Karmyn is doing. We’re having a float with a grandma on it in a rocker. She’ll be reading the nativity story to children and we’ll be walking beside the float, pulling little wagons and giving out children’s bibles!”