WINDHAM – Windham Christian Academy’s LOL Club finds purpose in performance as it preps for its May trip.

WINDHAM – After two decades teaching Christian middle school students, Rick Hagerstrom knows how to catch an audience’s attention.

And for the last few years while teaching at Windham Christian Academy, Hagerstrom, a Bridgton resident, has led a club made up of students who use juggling, magic and other performing arts to grab audiences’ attention while sharing the Christian message.

The LOL Club, based on the Internet slang abbreviation for “laugh out loud,” aims to entertain and enlighten audiences at nursing homes, stores and churches.

In February, the 15-member club, comprising Hagerstrom’s class of seventh- and eighth-grade students, served as a welcoming committee at Shaw’s supermarket in North Windham by performing for incoming shoppers. The team, which began with little juggling talent at the start of the school year but through weekly practice has quickly gained skill, will perform in a fundraiser at Walmart in Windham in April.

And in late May, the team is embarking on a four-day tour based out of Essex Junction, Vt., where Hagerstrom taught prior to transferring to Ossipee Valley Christian School in Cornish in the mid-1990s and then to Windham four years ago. During the Vermont trip, the team will perform at a nursing home and for inmates at a minimum-security prison in Windsor.

Hagerstrom said his student-performers, who have learned to juggle everything from silk scarves to mock machetes, are looking forward to the trip, which is a culmination of a school year’s worth of practice.

“They have a great time,” he said. “We’ve got some kids juggling silks and other kids juggling machetes and every level of difficulty in between. Some take to it quicker than others, but they all learn enough to perform.”

Joey Sargent, an eighth-grader from Naples, really likes the juggling and has gotten quite adept, practicing in his spare time, as well.

“It’s fun. It’s cool to learn,” Sargent said. “I can juggle everything including clubs, machetes, fire torches, tennis rackets, plungers, balls, everything. I can do behind the back, under the leg, and I can do four balls.”

Sargent isn’t the only one who has learned to juggle. Most of the kids have gained that skill, something uncoordinated adults may marvel at but which doesn’t surprise Hagerstrom.

“For kids, it’s a great age to learn. Typically, they’ve got the coordination, and socially they all buy into it,” he said. “They don’t have the distractions of cars and jobs like high school kids, so it’s the perfect age to have a team like this.”

Some of the students may struggle to juggle, but, there’s still a spot for them on the team.

Rachael Lolar, an eighth-grade LOL Club member from Raymond who has been attending the academy since second grade, doesn’t juggle but “bounces between diabolos and devil sticks,” both of which are sticks that she uses to spin and toss rubber spools or another stick into the air.

Lolar enjoys being part of a team of performers that light up the stage and brighten people’s day.

“Whether it’s nursing homes and making people smile who don’t get a chance to smile often, or going to an elementary school and hearing one kid say, ‘This is the best day ever.’ To put smiles on people’s faces and to touch them, that’s really the best part of it,” Lolar said.

That’s the kind of effect Hagerstrom is going for. The school requires all classes to pursue a ministry and allots a period each week for the purpose. While some classes are active in the Root Cellar ministry in Portland or visit area nursing homes, the LOL Club fulfills the service requirement by performing.

Some performances are less evangelizing than others, such as the fundraising efforts at Shaw’s and Walmart, where the team performs and greets visitors and accepts donations for their upcoming trip. But skits performed at stage shows can send a powerful message, Hagerstrom said.

“We have a variety of routines, but a big chunk of it is based on Ecclesiastes and Solomon’s search for the meaning of life,” Hagerstrom said. “For example, in Ecclesiastes, it says all man’s labor is the result of one man’s envy of another. So, in one of our skits, the music starts, kids come up, they’ll juggle and then be upstaged by the next juggler, they’ll be tackled, they’ll be carried off stage, they’ll be squirted with a squirt gun. So we tell the story through a narrator and the juggling and the illusions.”

Windham Christian Academy seventh-graders, from left, Erica Bridge of Naples and Lucy Williamson of Gorham, join eighth-grade Taiwanese exchange student Michael Lee, who is living in Windham, in greeting Shaw’s shopper Janet Burns. The students are part of the LOL Club, which mixes performances involving juggling, magic and skits with a Christian message. The team was at Shaw’s raising money for an upcoming trip where it will perform for inmates and nursing home residents. (Staff photo by John Balentine)