I wanted to share this project that we started as a Sunday school class as a way to get to know other young adults in the area across denominations. Out of this project we hope to develop a website in our area for local young adults to list events and network better. I’d challenge other young adults groups to consider doing something similar as way of connecting with your local community by joining forces with other Christian brother and sisters.

Young Adults Begin Ecumenical Sunday School Project

By Denver Steiner

OMC Young Adults members fellowship with the young adult class at Orrville Baptist Church.

Operation “Orrville Church Visitation” kicked off this past Sunday, November 11, when members of the young adult Sunday school class from OMC (Orrville Mennonite Church) visited our church neighbor Orrville Baptist Church for their morning young adult Sunday school time. We began the morning with refreshments and coffee while meeting and fellowshipping with church members. The introductions continued as we moved into the Sunday school time, and we got to know two Buehler’s employees, a laser operator, an electrician, and several other Christian brothers and sisters connected to our community. Following a prayer, the leader of the class, David Barber, led the group in a study of Galatians 3.

In Galatians, Paul writes to a church that was forcing its Gentile members to follow Jewish customs and laws. In chapter 3, Paul tells the Galatians that they do not receive the Holy Spirit through obeying the law; rather it is through faith in Christ alone. Through faith in Christ, we are no longer bound to the curse of the law. How refreshing it is that experiencing Christ isn’t bound to obeying a set of rules or steps outlined by our denomination and traditions! Christ transcends that, and through faith in Him, we are all children of God. There is neither Mennonite nor Baptist, male nor female, for we are all one in Christ Jesus (paraphrase of Galatians 3:26-28).

What a fitting passage for our first church visitation. With this church visitation project, the young adults at OMC hope to meet other young adults in the Orrville area for the purpose of Christian fellowship with other members of Christ’s church in order to create a more unified Christian witness to our neighborhood.

For more information about this project and upcoming church visitations, check out our website: http://orrvillemenno.net/ya/. We encourage other small groups to consider undertaking similar projects as a way to meet other members of Christ’s body in your community in order to grow together in faith while sharing Christ’s love with your neighborhood.

Hello YAR Community,

Many of you have probably heard of BikeMovement. If you haven’t, we were a group of young adults that biked across the USA last summer talking about church and several other topics discussed on YAR.

Well the documentary following the trip is now complete, and a free copy is being sent to every MCUSA church this next week. For those of you connected to Mennonite congregations, I wanted to give you a heads up, first of all to let you know that this resource is available, and second, to encourage you push your church to use it. Included with the DVD is a study guide, making it ideal for a 3-6 week study group/Sunday school class. We strongly encourage you to try this in an intergenerational study group.

While we don’t claim to speak for all young adults, at the very least we hope you will be able to use this documentary as a tool to spark conversation about important topics relevant to your context.

I’ve posted the abridged 45 minute version of the documentary here:

1. Intro
2. Community
3. Questions
4. Connecting to Church
5. Creative PostModern
6. Language
7. Connecting Generations
8. Final Reflections

For more information, or to order your own copy of DVD which includes the full length documentary, study guide, as well as additional material, please visit: http://bikemovement.org/documentary/Order.php. All proceeds will be going to Amigos to assist young adults from all over the world to be able to attend the 2009 Mennonite World Convention in Paraguay.

Hello YAR internet community,

A quick plug for “BikeMovement the Documentary – A young adult perspective on church” that will premiere at San Jose 2007 Mennonite convention and be available for sale on-line in about a week. For those of you who don’t know, BikeMovement was a group of young adults who biked across the United States last summer talking about young adults and church. (BikeMovement involves more then just this, including a recent biking trip through Asia, but for the purpose of this post, I’ll focus on young adults and church in North America.)

BikeMovement has been asked to share 5-7 minutes during the delegate session on the topic, “What are hopes and dreams of young adults for the future church.” While we’ve conversed with young adults all across the country, finding an answer to that question is a rather daunting task since it sometimes feels like we are all over the board on that question.

So I pose the question to the YAR readers out there:

What is your visions and hopes for the future church?

If you are uncomfortable with the word “church” because of baggage associated with that word, substitute church for a community of people seeking to follow Christ in our 21st century context.

Second question:

Do you think the majority of young adults (who are seeking to follow Christ in our North American context) share this same vision? What would you put as overarching dreams of young adults?

While it’s an impossible task to speak for all young adults, here are a couple of scattered themes we have heard to get you thinking:

• All community members valued regardless of age/race/sex.
• Real – community that meets people where they are, and addresses real issues in our lives.
• Vulnerability – to be real there needs to be a mutual sharing of who we really are, and real struggles and to support each other in that fashion
• Accountability – a community of believers to hold us to our values
• Church is a safe place – We do not have everything figured, and we can be vulnerable and receive grace. It should also be safe to ask hard questions even if they challenge traditional beliefs held by the community
• Emphasize buildings and Sunday morning worship less and work at focus more on touching every aspect of our lives.
• Less divisions between denominations and in churches – focus on common values and beliefs and a respect for differences
• Reaching others – I’ll avoid the word evangelism because of the baggage associated with that word, but a way to respectfully share Christ’s love with others. I’ve seen the most diversity of opinion on this topic, some young adults are fairly passionate that we need to share our faith, while others, perhaps uncomfortable with the imposing way we’ve historically done this, seek to emphasis more of a mutual learning process where the “Christian” should be just as willing to learn from and respect the beliefs of someone who believes differently.
• IS THIS THE WRONG QUESTION? A friend of mine challenged me to ask “Shouldn’t we be trying to figure out Christ’s hopes and dreams for the church instead of ours?” Shouldn’t we be willing to scrape our plans and instead follow God’s?

So this is a quick list of points that I’ve heard. What would you add what would subtract? Why?

It’s father’s day, and I wanted to post something that was shared at my church service this morning that I found helpful to hear. I recognized it is limited in it’s patriarchal view of God, and I recognize that as men we have failed women in seeing them as equals (as well as failed them in many other ways). And I recognize that the attribute described are not limited to males, and that not all of us will agree with what “maleness” means. But this is not what this post is about.

This post is to the guys out there to say, it is OKAY to be male. Because of our historic power imbalance in our culture with our female counterparts, we have a huge responsibility to figure out what it means to be radical Anabaptist men seeking after what God intends for us while rebuking harmful stereotypes.

This is a day set aside to honor fathers. But we at Dayspring want to extend this honor to all men. Today, we want to celebrate your masculinity…your manliness that was patterned after the divine image of our Heavenly Father.

We rebuke stereotypes that hurt and hinder you…. that seek to destroy your competence and question your value.

We celebrate with you instead the Christ-centered model of manhood that embraces your sense of adventure, your love of nature and the wild, your need to do battle for justice and your call to protect. We celebrate by echoing the voice from Heaven that Jesus heard at his baptism:
“This is my Son whom I love; with him I am well pleased.”

If you’ve seldom heard those words from your earthly father, we ask that you hear them with your heart now:
“This is my Son, chosen and marked by my love, delight of my life.”

Thanks Katie for your post “’the homosexual lifestyle’ – a rhetoric of bigotry”. It is a perspective that needs to be heard and continues to challenge my use of language surrounding the LGBT community. Your article prompted me to think through some of the complexities of this issue and other divisive issues that tend to polarize the church while attempting, as you wrote, to avoid harmful stereotypes. This post is hopefully less of a commentary about homosexuality, but rather an attempt to use this topic to examine how the church addresses these divisive issues.

A quick background on where I’m coming from. I’m a white straight male who has grown up in a church that’s always taught marriage is between a male and female, and sex is to be reserved for marriage (which rules out sex with the same gender). The attempt of this post is not to defend this perspective, but an attempt to shed light on some of the complexities facing someone with my upbringing, who is attempting to figure out: what would Jesus do (sorry for the cliché) with a topic like homosexuality.

I have been in enough church circles and heard demeaning, hateful “rhetoric of bigotry” aimed at homosexuals. I’m extremely uncomfortable in these situations and have called people on using that language because it is contrary to how I understand the God of love, as I understand him/her.

On the other hand, I’m also uncomfortable, personally, endorsing sexual intercourse outside of marriage and am not sure about this same sex marriage thing. I recognize this discomfort has a lot to do with my upbringing, which affects my reading of scripture, how I value scripture, and understanding of God’s “intentions”. I think I am mature enough in my faith to recognize how much upbringing affects my approach to scripture and that I can’t comprehend God’s intentions, much less claim to speak for him/her.

As a straight male, I don’t claim to be able to understand homosexuality, but let me attempt to explain some of the complexities using experiences I do understand. The church body, as I understand it, is a group of broken individuals who are all attempting to follow the example of Jesus. As a group, we come together, and say, for example, “As followers of Jesus, we think it is best to reserve sex for marriage.” So as members of this group, we attempt to hold each other accountable to that standard. As a 25 year old dating non-married person, not having sex is a difficult standard, but I hold to that, because I think there is value to standard (which I won’t go into here).

Now it gets tricky how to deal with members who break that standard in our community, but there is this idea of to truly love this person, we must approach them in love about correcting what some would label “sin” and maintain that value that we hold as a community.

We should NOT attempt to force these standards on those who aren’t trying to follow this same Jesus guy, but it gets REALLY tricky when we run into people who are following this same Jesus, but do NOT hold the same standard that the group has valued.

As a community, we should NOT attempt to force these standards on those who aren’t trying to follow this same Jesus guy, but it gets REALLY tricky when we run into people who are following this same Jesus, but do NOT hold the same standard that the group has valued (name your issue: pre-marital sex, war, abortion, divinity of Jesus, alcohol, not oppressing people, rock music, women in ministry, and homosexuality). Our choice is either to say,” we agree to disagree, you can still be in this community.” Or “This standard is so fundamental to my understanding of what it means to follow this Jesus guy, that I can’t recognize you as a member of the same community I am part of.”

Premarital sex and same-sex marriage, for me, falls in the “agree to disagree category”. I think someone who is having sex outside of marriage or is in a same sex marriage can be just as good follower of Christ as me. The complexity therefore is that I am a part of a church community that discourages both. Unfortunately we have greatly erred in our approach to these issues and have attempted to IMPOSE these standards in way that is both hateful and discriminatory.

So here I stand, extremely uncomfortable at how church has hatefully approached homosexuality, but not willing to wholeheartedly endorse it. This may be the age old question but I’m curious to hear from others, what is the most effective way to relate with other followers of Christ on issues we don’t agree upon? Katie has done an excellent job of pointing out that the church has failed in this regard. Where do you draw the line on fundamental dogma or decide to agree to disagree on doctrine?