Pastor Darren: Well, my quick survey when I first got here, uh this might be saying to me that many of you don't know the story of the outsiders.
Pastor Darren: Uh I remember it was a favorite of my dad's, uh, I think because he grew up in the 50s, and so he thought, oh, these these are guys that grew up when I grew up and lived kind of how I lived, and so he was always a big fan.
Pastor Darren: So I don't know if anybody else identifies with it that way.
Pastor Darren: Uh uh just to give you a picture a little bit so you can start thinking about uh what the cast might look like.
Pastor Darren: I first, this is a picture from the movie version that happened.
Pastor Darren: Gosh, what was that?
Pastor Darren: Early 80s, I think.
Pastor Darren: Uh, and uh, those of you who know uh um movies and things like that, pretty much everybody on there became a pretty big star.
Pastor Darren: There's not a no name on that list, so it really captured a lot of people right at the beginning.
Pastor Darren: Uh, and then one more picture.
Pastor Darren: This is the cast of the crew that did the musical.
Pastor Darren: The musical is the new part and uh uh of what we're talking about, and so uh uh you can kind of get a little bit of a sense of what they look like.
Pastor Darren: Uh it is a story set in uh, I guess, the late 50s, uh, and um it was an interesting story with this main conflict at its center, and it was a class conflict that was in play.
Pastor Darren: It was largely the Greasers who were the lower-income working class crew, and then you had the socias, who were the more athletic, the sport team people, and the ones with money.
Pastor Darren: Uh have we heard that story before?
Pastor Darren: Yeah, it's kind of a classic thing, probably because we do wrestle with that particular uh dichotomy amongst our community.
Pastor Darren: Uh so as the story goes, just to give you a kind of a feel of the plot, Pony Boy is the main character.
Pastor Darren: He lives with older brothers Dairy and Soda Pop after their parents die.
Pastor Darren: So it's a bunch of the kids uh who, some of them in their 20s, some of them still in their teens, are getting by on their own.
Pastor Darren: And as I said, the Greasers clash with the socias.
Pastor Darren: Ponyboy is part of the Greasers.
Pastor Darren: So what happens tragically at the very beginning is in that conflict, a couple of the socias go and they start hassling Pony Boy and Johnny to the point at which Johnny, to protect himself, even kills one of these socias.
Pastor Darren: And so uh that becomes uh obviously a real scary moment for Johnny and Pony Boy, because they know there's already conflict, and now they have this really tragic incident.
Pastor Darren: They flee, they hide in this abandoned church in a place called J Mountain, uh, and then they kind of hide out there for a while.
Pastor Darren: And part of how they spend their time is with Pony Boy, who's actually pretty well educated, reading to Johnny, which will come into play a little bit later.
Pastor Darren: Ultimately, this church actually catches fire, and local school children are in the church at the time.
Pastor Darren: Johnny and Pony Boy go to help the kids to get out.
Pastor Darren: They become kind of heroes, except Johnny gets tragically injured in this fire and ends up in the hospital.
Pastor Darren: So, with all of that turmoil and angst, the greasers and the social things really bubbles up to the service, they have one big uh fight scene in which the Greasers win the fight scene, but their joy in winning this fight is that uh they are learning that Johnny is probably going to die from his injury.
Pastor Darren: Uh and uh from that also there are other characters.
Pastor Darren: Dally is also grief-stricken and desperate and chooses to end his life.
Pastor Darren: Uh, the heaviness of all of this just comes to pass on to them.
Pastor Darren: Uh ultimately, after Johnny dies, Pony Boy is cleared of blame in the court, reconciles with his uh brother, uh, and he ends up deciding to honor his brothers, uh Johnny and his brother Dally by writing his English class term paper about their lives, which becomes the novel itself.
Pastor Darren: So a neat little tie-in at the very end.
Pastor Darren: So there's your your your briefer on the story itself.
Pastor Darren: So, how is the stage version different than the written version?
Pastor Darren: Well, first of all, it's a musical.
Pastor Darren: So songs.
Pastor Darren: That's one of the major differences right there.
Pastor Darren: You're actually going to hear songs in the musical version.
Pastor Darren: Uh they also expanded the role of some of the women in the story, including the main woman whose name is Cherry, uh, and a little side note of fun for us in the Cowdry household.
Pastor Darren: Uh, the woman who originated that role on Broadway and still plays it is a good friend of my son Joseph and was at his wedding and everything.
Pastor Darren: So that kind of makes this show a little more special for us.
Pastor Darren: Um they also added some gender and ethnic diversity, probably to make it feel a little more real and uh certainly more contemporary.
Pastor Darren: So moving into themes, probably the strongest theme we've already mentioned is about this class struggle.
Pastor Darren: You know, the main characters obviously they sense the inevitability of this conflict.
Pastor Darren: And they're always wondering why it needs to be this way.
Pastor Darren: This is Pony Boy and this is Johnny, consistently in that space.
Pastor Darren: Why does it need to be this way?
Pastor Darren: Uh we might look at it and think, oh, well, that's kind of quaint.
Pastor Darren: That does sound like the 50s, but I might question whether or not we really have moved on from class struggle.
Pastor Darren: We might have even added other struggles to how our life moves around today.
Pastor Darren: And the question for us posed by this story is why do we set accept this competitiveness, this combativeness as inevitable?
Pastor Darren: That this is just how people are.
Pastor Darren: Groups fight with other groups.
Pastor Darren: This is the space that Paul writing in Romans chapter twelve is uh writing in.
Pastor Darren: This is where his head is.
Pastor Darren: He knows that our world can be tough, that rising above lesser influences can be challenging.
Pastor Darren: So he starts by talking about the importance of committing to the belief in God's presence and in God's love and in God's grace.
Pastor Darren: He tells us to present our bodies.
Pastor Darren: That might feel a little bit weird, especially here in 2026, but I am pretty sure he's talking about our actions, doing things for God.
Pastor Darren: We need to do the things that show God's love.
Pastor Darren: We need to be the love.
Pastor Darren: But after he talks about our bodies, then he talks about our minds.
Pastor Darren: And this might be the most well-known verse from the chapter.
Pastor Darren: Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds.
Pastor Darren: Is that one of anybody's favorites?
Pastor Darren: Yeah, there's some people who really love that one.
Pastor Darren: It really speaks to them.
Pastor Darren: I hope you're hearing the implication in it.
Pastor Darren: Do not be conformed to this world.
Pastor Darren: I try to be cautious around this kind of passage because when we start talking about how all the world is bad, I get a little nervous about that.
Pastor Darren: It is God's world, God created it.
Pastor Darren: Sometimes passages like this can make it a little too easy to write off the entire world as unredeemable, and I get nervous about that.
Pastor Darren: At the same time, we kind of do need to recognize that our world is not perfect.
Pastor Darren: In fact, it is often broken.
Pastor Darren: It's always in varying stages of straying from God's will and desire for it, back to some level of redemption, hopefully to some healing.
Pastor Darren: But the world is always in those cycles, and so to own that it is often broken is probably important.
Pastor Darren: And this is the headspace that the film and the musical, the outsiders, is in.
Pastor Darren: This place of brokenness in which all are made to feel like they can't thrive unless they're fighting with others, as if there isn't enough for all of us to thrive.
Pastor Darren: As if God didn't provide all that we need.
Pastor Darren: In the context of this story, the characters are consistently asking themselves, are we going to be conformed to this inevitable competition and competitiveness and combat?
Pastor Darren: Or might we be transformed by something better?
Pastor Darren: For we Christians, that something better is an experience grounded in our faith, but an experience of God through Christ.
Pastor Darren: This leads us to the song that we picked for today.
Pastor Darren: It's called Stay Gold.
Pastor Darren: Have any of you heard of the Robert Frost poem from 1923?
Pastor Darren: Nothing Gold Can Stay.
Pastor Darren: Oh, look at you.
Pastor Darren: Okay.
Pastor Darren: We're gonna have to have a poetry class.
Pastor Darren: All right, some of us are here.
Pastor Darren: I mean, that's Robert Frost, right?
Pastor Darren: He's one of, you know, he's top ten.
Pastor Darren: In any case, it's a this song in the musical, it's a nod to that poem, which is actually referred to in the story.
Pastor Darren: Remember, Pony Boy would read to Johnny while they were hiding in this church, uh, and uh he would read uh uh some uh Charles Dickens in the musical, but he also read from this poem.
Pastor Darren: And as Johnny later on is dying, he starts to sing this song called Stay Gold as a way of telling Pony Boy, he finally gets what the poem was all about.
Pastor Darren: It's a reminder that we need to preserve youthful innocence and goodness in a harsh world.
Pastor Darren: Johnny wants Pony Boy, despite his death, despite all of this competitive, combative stuff that's going on, he wants Pony Boy to stay gold, stay innocent, and stay good.
Pastor Darren: And I would argue that he wants him to be transformed by his faith in the good.
Pastor Darren: So this is Kyle Newkirk, Newkirk.
Pastor Darren: He had to work today, but he did kindly offer to make a uh recording for us.
SPEAKER_01: Finding beauty in the fold, it's the only way to keep from growing old I friends, stay eager when you're young, and the world is new.
SPEAKER_01: It's easy to forget when you try just to make it free like the morning light and the dawn it breaks, you see the world finding beauty in the same things.
SPEAKER_01: I have looked into a thankful father's eyes, telling me I safety daughter's eyes I do it all again beauty in the form I friend stay go back at the life I've had, I hold on to the good as I paid peace before the man, sixteen years look at all we've done, putting trade for the world.
SPEAKER_01: Can't you see that with lucky eyes?
SPEAKER_01: I have known a love that many never know, and that love lives on no matter where I go, we all will be done no matter if we need in your friend, stay gold finding beauty in the fold is the only way to keep from growing all.