It’s a commonality that bridges generations, teaches physical endurance and moral fortitude and offers churches an extra opportunity to reach out to families in their communities. It’s Boy Scouts of America (BSA), and it’s been around for 100 years.
“Scouting has learned a lot in 100 years,” said Jeff Brasher, program and marketing director for BSA’s Greater Alabama Council, which encompasses 22 counties. “If you look in a Scout Handbook from 90 or 100 years ago, it teaches things like how to stop a runaway horse or a rabid dog.”
It also taught how to cook outdoors, tie knots and build campfires. “While we still cook, tie knots and build fires, youth today face different challenges with peer pressure, the Internet and other 21st-century societal changes,” Brasher noted. “The lessons we teach may change, but the underlying message is still the same.”
The message of doing a “good turn daily” began with a young English boy who refused payment from Chicago publisher William D. Boyce for his good deed. BSA history reports show the boy said, “No thank you, sir. I am a scout. I won’t take anything for helping.”
That one “good turn” was all it took for Boyce to know there was something about this “scouting” concept that just might be essential for America. After meeting with Robert Baden-Powell, who founded the scouting movement in England, he brought the idea back to the United States and founded BSA on Feb. 8, 1910.
“America has always wanted Scouting, but in difficult or trying times, people seek us out because they know we hold fast to values that last a lifetime,” Brasher said.
Over the years, BSA has helped with relief efforts, encouraged voting campaigns and conducted tree-planting projects, among other things.
During the World Wars, it stepped up to aid in food and fuel conservation projects; distribute government literature; sell liberty loan bonds; collect aluminum, wastepaper and rubber; assist emergency medical units; and serve as firewatchers, messengers and dispatch bearers.
And through it all, it has held true to its oath: “On my honor, I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country and to obey the Scout Law; to help other people at all times; to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake and morally straight.”
More than 100 million boys — and counting — have repeated and lived those words.
“I think we will take our history and continue to affect the lives of youth because they want to have fun and experience the outdoors and parents want them to be a part of an organization that will hold true,” Brasher said.
For A.J. Smith, a parent of a Boy Scout at Concord Baptist Church, Calera, and executive vice president of the Association of Baptists for Scouting, it’s about his son learning a good work ethic, making moral choices and building character.
“In the Scoutmaster’s Handbook, it says, ‘It is easier to build a boy than to repair a man.’ Scouting is about instilling character into boys so that as men, they will make ethical and moral choices over a lifetime,” Smith said. “The founder of scouting, Lord Baden-Powell, believed — and BSA still adheres to the principle — that it is impossible to instill moral virtue in someone apart from duty to God, and so belief in God continues to be a central feature of the Scout Oath and Law.”
Brasher said marking 100 years of BSA “means that we have stood true to our core values and beliefs without swaying. … By being steadfast, people know that we will [neither] change what we believe nor are our values for sale.”
For more information, visit www.scouting.org.
Share with others: