Saturday, July 11, 2009
'Dancing for God's glory'
For a group of area high schoolers, dancing is more than a sport -- it's a ministry.
John W. Adkisson | The Roanoke Times
Danielle Banks, 16, of Roanoke participates in a contemporary dance class at Acts 2 Ministry on Wednesday in downtown Roanoke. The class was led by a four teens from Cave Spring Baptist Church in Southwest Roanoke County.
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The teenage girls danced in a room where red and blue graffiti on a wall read, "It is better to prepare youth, than to repair them."
In a choreographed routine, they paced, jumped and pushed the open air as the music drifted: "When the morning comes and your mercy is renewed, there's a fire in my bones."
Dancing can be a means to praising God. That's the way Emily Robinson, a perky 17-year-old senior at Cave Spring High School, put it. She and three other professionally trained dancers grew up together at Cave Spring Baptist Church, and this week held dance classes for a dozen or so girls at Acts 2 Ministry in downtown Roanoke.
"A lot of times dance is seen as a sport, and we see it as a ministry," Robinson said. "We're dancing for God's glory."
The idea of having contemporary dance lessons is new at Acts 2, a nonprofit focused on reaching young people from inner-city Roanoke. They have after-school sessions during the academic year and camps in the summer and winter.
"This is the first time we've done something like this," said Gena Kidd, the high school director at Acts 2. "It's another way to encourage our kids to engage in something positive instead of staying at home, sleeping in, sitting around and watching TV."
Emily and her friends -- Lacy Grindstaff, 17; Katherine Holt, 17; and Robyn Lewis, 15 -- proposed the idea of the class this spring to Kidd, who is also a member of Cave Spring Baptist.
From about 1 to 4 p.m. Wednesday, the four instructors and about a dozen students, who were roughly the same age as their teachers, first stretched as a group to Christian pop songs and then split up into three rooms at the Acts 2 building at Luck Avenue and Fourth Street Southwest. Then they had a Bible study where Holt said dancing is intended to be "pleasing in appearance or effect," -- and that God is similarly graceful.
Courtnie Bellamie, a 15-year-old junior at William Fleming High School, said she liked going to the classes "because everyone is cool. ... No one has an attitude."
She said that if she had stayed home, she would have slept until midday, talked on the phone with friends and watched the Disney Channel all afternoon.
"These girls are fun and effervescent. I like that," Courtnie said. "We're learning a lot from them."
After the Bible study, the students competed against the teachers in freestyle dancing in a circle. Miley Cyrus' "Hoedown Throwdown" blared from the speakers, and everybody screamed. A girl put on a straw sombrero, and everyone in the circle danced and laughed.
