Lessons from The Little Rascals

[The Midweek Encounter is a ministry of Encounter Church in Kentwood, MI. These posts are a reflection on Sunday’s message, which can be heard here each week: http://myencounterchurch.org/#/hear-a-message]

As a child, The Little Rascals was one of my favorite movies. My siblings and I watched it more times than I can count and nearly had it memorized. At the beginning of the film, Spanky and his friends Alfalfa, Stymie, Porky, Buckwheat, and others form the He-Man Woman Haters Club, which pretty much exists to keep girls out of it. As the movie goes on though, we discover that Alfalfa has not only been hanging out with a girl named Darla, but even serenading her with a love song on a romantic boat ride.

When the other boys find out, they are shocked and even a little grossed out, so they hatch a plan to break up Alfalfa and Darla. Yet through a series of events, by the end of the movie the boys realize that Darla and her friends are not so bad and invite them to hang out in their clubhouse. While there are a variety of circumstances that bring about this change of heart, it all began with Alfalfa.


Though we may not make official signs, I think the Church often creates its own versions of the He-Man Woman Haters Club. It can be easy to point this out in the Church as the worldwide body of Christ, but we cannot ignore the implications for us personally. We may not make physical signs, but we make them in our thoughts, behaviors, and hearts. There are certain types of people we are just hesitant to enfold into Church life. Maybe we base it on occupation, income level, sexual orientation, age, political views, or any number of factors. After a while, we get entrenched in the mentality of there being an insider “us” factor to the Church, and an outsider “them” label for those we don’t deem worthy.

When we look at I Corinthians 11, we see that this tendency has been around for thousands of years. Paul was writing to the people of Corinth to tell them to stop treating their church gatherings like a private party of insiders, with some people treated as the “upper crust” and treated to the best seats and food and others treated as the riffraff who were relegated to the crappy seats and mediocre food. They probably didn’t make signs announcing this information, but the implications were clear--“Not Welcome.”

I don’t think any of us intentionally try to make people feel not welcome, but welcoming people is not something that happens automatically. It has to be an intentional effort on the part of others. This doesn’t mean that we don’t have close friends and people we naturally gravitate towards, but we all have a role to play in creating an environment that is friendly and hospitable to anyone who enters it.

At the end of the Little Rascals, it wasn’t just about simply allowing girls to be in their clubhouse--it was welcoming them into a community. If Alfalfa hadn’t been the first to go against the grain and realize that girls are actually pretty cool, the rest of the rascals would’ve missed out on how great things can be when everyone is invited. In the coming weeks, maybe we can all try to be a little more like Alfalfa.

[Brianna DeWitt attends Encounter Church and lives, works, and writes in Grand Rapids, MI. You can see more of her musings on her personal blog at http://awritespot.wordpress.com and on Twitter at @bwitt722.]