On the Frontline: It’s hockey night in Kingston!

By Debra Fieguth

A Kingston youth facing off with the Rev. Ian Martin (a volunteer).What’s a kid to do on a Friday night in a small city where options are few and money is scarce? For the past year and a half, a growing number of teens have been meeting at St. Luke’s Anglican Church in Kingston – not for a service or a Bible study, but for floor hockey.

“I just love playing the game and being with my friends at the same time,” is a typical comment from a teenage boy who burns off a lot of energy during the 90-minute games. Almost all the kids come from homes where church is a foreign concept; a lot are from broken families, and some come out of abusive pasts.

“These kids come in with so many issues around trust,” says volunteer Kirsten Evenden, who spends much of her time listening and talking, especially with the non-hockey-playing girls who attend. “They’ve had so many people slam them and put them down.”

“We’ve become a spot for them just to come and hang out on Friday night,” adds Kirsten’s husband, Cris Evenden, the church’s children and youth coordinator who runs the program. “They know they’ll be warm and they’ll be safe.”

The idea for a floor hockey outreach came about when the rector, Ian Ritchie, was getting an environmental audit of the church building done shortly after his incumbency began four years ago. The auditor, a former pastor, saw a huge, under-utilized basement hall with concrete floor and walls and said, “Wow! I would start a floor hockey league down here!”

Ritchie stored the idea in his memory bank. With an aging parish and few young people, the time wasn’t right, but the following year the church, set in a working-class neighbourhood close to downtown, hired Evenden to initiate a ministry to children and youth. Then Ritchie discovered a new parishioner had experience coaching church-based sports, including floor hockey.

Evenden did a flyer blitz of the area, and the first night half a dozen guys showed up. Since then the group has grown to about 20 most weeks, including several girls. There have been as many as 30 or 35 on peak nights.

This isn’t the first time St. Luke’s has hosted floor hockey games. The parish hall was used for floor hockey in the 1930s and 40s, and it was there that Don Cherry, who grew up at St. Luke’s and attended Sunday school there, enjoyed playing on the smooth wooden plank floor. Cherry still maintains contact with a few parishioners.

There’s more to St. Luke’s hockey history. Bill Fitsell, a well-known hockey historian who has written books about the sport, including How Hockey Happened, is a parishioner. Though now in his 80s, Fitsell, a warden at the time the outreach was proposed, enthusiastically backed the plan; he occasionally attends the games to show support, and is looked up to by the young players.

The history might not mean a lot to the teens who attend. What’s important is that for a small part of the week they do something they love in an environment where they are cared for. 

“If a church can use its facility for outreach, it’s a concrete way of showing Christ’s love to youth,” Ritchie points out. “But even apart from any spiritual message that might be eventually received – or not received – it’s inherently valuable in itself to provide a venue where teens can engage in vigorous physical exercise for an hour and a half every Friday night. It’s a time when they might otherwise be doing damage to their bodies. We provide a safe, warm, friendly, well-supervised and structured activity.”

But how does one build a bridge between what happens in the basement on Friday night and what happens in the sanctuary on Sunday morning? “We always open the night with prayer,” Evenden says. And the kids know they have to show respect in a place of worship. Some are curious enough to take a tour of the church with one of the youth leaders, or ask questions about church and faith. 

While most regulars see sport, friends and food (usually homemade cookies provided by parishioners) as the things that attract, a few want to go deeper. “It’s like a big family,” says 17-year-old Andrew, who has been coming out since the games started in October 2008. “I think floor hockey is like church because it brings people together like a family, like church.” He adds that Cris Evenden “is like the father.”

The trust that is slowly being built is leading to involvement in other areas of the kids’ lives. The Evendens have connected some with counselling or legal help, for example. “I think the biggest underlying factor with all of them is having someone to believe in them,” says Kirsten. That doesn’t mean accepting all behaviour – occasionally the game has had to be shut down because of fighting, and kids have been sent home because of drugs or excessive bad language.

A few months ago some of the teens began asking the leaders to go out for coffee after the game. “That was a really cool moment for us,” says Kirsten, because it meant they were being included in the kids’ lives. The first time it happened Ian Martin, a curate from another parish who began volunteering when the first referee moved away, wore his clerical collar. Rather than scoffing at it, the kids appreciated and respected it.

In the early days, Kirsten adds, there was “a lot of testing – testing our boundaries; what we expected from them.” Andrew, for example, “was really sceptical” at first. “He wasn’t really sure about this whole church thing.”

But he has come a long way. This year, he’s hoping to work at the Diocese of Ontario’s summer camp. If he does, it will be one more step in a healthy, meaningful direction.

Debra Fieguth is a freelance writer in Kingston, and is married to Ian Ritchie, the rector of St. Luke’s.