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:
- Intro
- Community
- Questions
- Connecting to Church
- Creative PostModern
- Language
- Connecting Generations
- 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.
If you are having trouble viewing the on-line version, please visit:
http://bikemovement.org/documentary/player.php. I’d love to hear feedback on the documentary. So feel free to drop a line, ask hard questions, challenge/affirm what you’ve heard. Blessings.
Denver,
Thanks for all your work in putting this documentary together. I’ve talked with my pastor and whenever it arrives I’m going to arrange a showing for folks at my church.
Denver, thanks for all your hard work on this! It’s an excellent documentary. Although I knew a lot of you on the trip, I hadn’t realised the questions you all were asking and the questions I’ve been asking were/are so similar. I resonate with Dave’s comment, “they don’t have a clue what to do with me sometimes.” :) I wonder if other YAR folks found resonance with that too. Thanks for sharing this abridged version – especially for folks like me currently outside of the states.
Good to hear from you Sharon. Are these questions you resonate with related to your overseas experience, or would you say they existed outside that? I am just curious, because a common thread for many of the bikers was that they have had outside of community experiences (for example cross-cultural, higher education) and struggled to differing degrees of how to connect that with the way church was done back home.
I have had both overseas and higher education experiences, and they have certainly contributed to who I am. I think it’s hard to pinpoint my influences – it feels like an organic maturing experience in which I understand more and more that the world is an incredibly complex and messy place, but our contribution to it – and our efforts at helping to encourage a sustainable, just, and loving world are born out of simple desires to engage our neighbours in loving, mutually respectful ways.
I have come to believe that I will never stop learning (at least I never want to), and at the heart of learning is being able and willing to ask questions. Questions are therefore rarely threatening or scary, but are essential to my growth. Thus, the more I seek to grow, the more I am willing and able to ask questions.
The church hasn’t often been a place where I have felt free to ask questions, but it also often feels that the state of the church today, having become such a large capital I Institution and carrying with it its own entire culture, (both of which should be noted as not inherently bad, but over time become intrenched and unmoveable) – especially in the west where there is more of a history of Christendom – is a bit disconnected from the reality of today’s world. However, I recognise that different to previous generations, I have grown up within a largely postmodern view of the world … so of course it feels disconnected.
Quick update. DVD’s are being sent out late next week. I’ve been getting conflicting information. I’ll believe when I see it. :-)