A Scarborough minister’s website would aid clergy, families facing funerals for young people.

When her 17-year-old nephew died of bone cancer two years ago, the Rev. Carol Kerr was asked to give the sermon at his funeral.

“I was happy to do it,” said Kerr, pastor of the Blue Point Congregational Church in Scarborough.

However, despite being a minister for more than two decades, she had never led a funeral service for a child or teenager. So, to help craft her sermon, she turned to the Internet in hopes of finding some guidance on what to say to a church full of people anguished over the loss of someone so young. Kerr found nothing.

“There aren’t resources out there that really speak to this area,” she said. “There is a lot of stuff for funerals, but they are funerals for adults.”

That is why Kerr, who is a licensed clinical professional counselor as well as a minister, has decided to develop her own website to aid other clergy and also families planning the funeral of a child or teenager.

The site will offer suggestions for different liturgies and prayers as well as sample sermons — including the one Kerr eventually wrote for her nephew, Ryan Kerr, in which she ended up using skiing, a sport he loved, as a metaphor for life and death.

It also will have suggestions on actual physical symbols – such as toys – that can be incorporated in a funeral service to bring healing and comfort. And the site also will include advice for ministers such as how to work with grieving parents.

Unique challenge

Kerr, who has a doctorate of ministry in psychology and has a counseling practice as well as being the church’s part-time pastor, already has the name of the site: wondrousangels.com. However, the site is still under construction, and she doesn’t expect it to be completed until next spring. She’ll be working on it during her current sabbatical, which is one week per month for a year.

Still, Kerr wants to learn about others’ experiences, concerns and suggestions as she builds the website. She is urging people to e-mail her through the site with any comments or questions or if they’d like to talk to her about their experiences regarding funerals for young people.

The Rev. Jill Job Saxby, executive director of the Maine Council of Churches in Portland, welcomed the news that Kerr is creating the Web site.

“What a terrific idea,” Saxby said in an e-mail.

Saxby said she knows Kerr and believes she is an ideal person for the project.

“She is wonderfully well-qualified to provide this sort of resource to both ministers and families faced with this impossible, tragic, agonizing situation,” Saxby said.

She said she has conducted funerals for children ranging from newborns to a fifth-grader. “Each time,” she said, “I did the best I could to adapt existing resources or create new ones appropriate to the occasion.”

However, Saxby said, “each time I would have deeply appreciated the kind of guidance Dr. Kerr is planning on providing with this Web site.”

Saxby described the unique challenges clergy encounter when conducting the funeral of a child or teenager.

“In modern times, when most children in our society survive to adulthood, the death of a child seems particularly ‘unnatural’ and awful,” Saxby said in her e-mail. “In these situations you not only have to take account of the feelings and needs of the shocked parents and family and friends, but of other children who knew the deceased and may be present at the memorial. For many, it will be the first funeral service they have ever attended.”

Kerr, who next month will also start a Bible study grief group for parents who have a lost a child, said the death of the child is “a huge test of faith.”

She said people wonder, “Why is there suffering, and why did this particular family have to go through this anguish?”

Yet because the death of a child or teenager is not so frequent today, clergy members may not have any experience conducting a funeral for such a tragic event.

“It happens but it doesn’t happen a lot in one church,” Kerr said.

Personal experience

She said her experience at her teenage nephew’s funeral gave her insight into what clergy face.

Kerr said 1,500 people attended the funeral. They included people of all faiths and ages, including Ryan Kerr’s high school classmates. “There were people who had never been in a church before,” Kerr said.

Ryan Kerr, who lived in Wayne, Pa., a community near Philadelphia, battled osteosarcoma for six years before dying in February 2008.

He inspired a charity, ConKerr Cancer: A Case for Smiles. The charity began with his mother, Cindy Kerr, sewing color-filled pillowcases for him, and then doing the same for other children in the cancer ward. Volunteers for the charity now have delivered more than 175,000 pillowcases to sick children around the country, according to the ConKerr Cancer website.

That site describes how Ryan didn’t let cancer slow him down.

“Ryan loved adventures – big and small,” the website says. “He loved to go new places, to do new things and to launch off anything with a drop – a half pipe, a ski jump or a railing. Skiing with him was both a joy and sheer terror. He was constantly darting in and out of the woods, flying off the nearest bump and speeding down the hill with an incredible grace and aggressiveness.”

In the year before Ryan died, Pastor Kerr had skied with him –at the Sunday River Ski Resort in Newry. He had lost a leg to the cancer but was able to use a monoski. Kerr decided to use skiing as a theme in her sermon at the funeral service. It was an activity to which the young and old among her listeners could relate.

Her sermon was entitled, “Skiing Oz: A Funeral Meditation for Ryan Kerr.” Oz is the name of one of the mountains at Sunday River, and trails on the mountain are given names that relate to “The Wizard of Oz” movie, she said.

Kerr compared life to skiing and talked about the difficulty of the various trails Ryan and his family traveled in life before and after his cancer diagnosis. She also talked about the goggles one needs to be able to see well when skiing – and also when living life.

“Today, I would ask the question: If life is like skiing down a mountain, then what kind of goggles do we need? In particular, what kind of goggles do we need when we are faced with what happened to Ryan?” Kerr said in her sermon.

“Right now Ryan should be getting acceptance letters to college, instead of this, his funeral. What kind of goggles will help us see down this mountain? What will help us look at Ryan’s life and not go blind?” Kerr said.

In the end, she urged her listeners to “put on the goggles of love” to see clearly that Ryan was in a place free of pain and mourning.

On the new website, Kerr plans to include her sermon and examples of other sermons that other clergy share with her.

She also plans to include suggestions of symbols that could be used in a service.

For example, she said, one minister used toys at a child’s funeral. At the end of the service, Kerr said, the toys were put in a toy box and it was closed and donated to a charity for other children.

“It was kind of a closing and moving on,” Kerr said.

She also intends to talk to funeral directors to gain information and advice.

Kerr hopes the website will lead to some solace for grieving parents.

She said that she hopes that it will assist members of the clergy and parents in creating a funeral that is “a meaningful moment that is the beginning of healing – and an anchor of some sort in the storm.”

The Rev. Carol Kerr, pastor of the Blue Point Congregational Church in Scarborough, is developing a Web site to assist members of the clergy and family members in planning a funeral service for children and teenagers. Kerr, a licensed clinical professional counselor, has found there is a dearth of such resources.