Photo: Members of Rainbow Mennonite Church in Kansas City, Kan., gathered for a congregational photo on Oct. 25. Many members wore “Royal Blue” in honor of the Kansas City Royals baseball team. Photo provided. 

On Nov. 1, when the Kansas City Royals beat the New York Mets 7-2 in 12 innings to win the World Series, four games to one, Royals fans everywhere celebrated. Among them were members of Rainbow Mennonite Church in Kansas City, Kan.

Two days later, when 800,000 people showed up in downtown Kansas City to celebrate with the team, about 75 members of Rainbow were there, including the pastor, Ruth Harder. (Sunday attendance is around 150.)

In a phone interview on Nov. 6, Harder, a lifelong Royals fan, said that excitement for the team began to build two years ago, when the Royals finally had a winning season. Then a year ago, the team made the playoffs for the first time in 29 years, since they won the 1985 World Series. However, they lost in the World Series to the San Francisco Giants.

Harder said she remembers one Sunday when the accompanist played “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” for the postlude.

After that heartbreaking loss in Game 7, Harder wrote a blog, “Mixing (Mistaking?) Baseball and Religion,” that lightheartedly noted the parallels of faith and baseball.

The excitement only grew this year, as the Royals won their division, then won the division championship series over the Houston Astros and the American League Championship series over the Toronto Blue Jays before winning the World Series, coming from behind in all four wins.

People at Rainbow have had fun along the way. For Halloween, one person dressed as a “Royals fan” in an outfit that looked like a fan that blows air. A grandmother at Rainbow dyed her hair blue for the parade. And many members wore blue for a photo of the congregation on Oct. 25.

Jesse Graber, Harder’s artist husband, got into the act by creating cartoon characters based on Royals players (and mascot).

“Scheduling meetings has been difficult,” Harder said, as she and others didn’t want to miss watching the games. On Oct. 31, she and others from Rainbow left after the last delegate session of Western District Conference in North Newton, Kan., and drove three hours back to Kansas City to watch that evening’s game.

Then came the parade on Nov. 3. The next day, she posted a blog called “A Royal Celebration or a Royal

Waste of Resources?”

“There’s been a collective focus and energy in the city,” Harder said. “You catch yourself smiling at people you don’t even know.”

But now, she said, she’s “royally exhausted.” She found herself eating cereal out of a measuring cup and realized she needed to do the dishes and get back to normal activities.

She concludes her latest blog thus: “I hope that Rainbow [Mennonite Church] continues to be a place of true community, where we learn from one another and remain open to multiple perspectives all year long as we experience the various successes, celebrations, tough decisions, mistakes and failures that make up life. That’s to me what it means to be a true royal priesthood.”