Witness

At the last General Conference of the UMC, the call to witness was added our membership vow in the church. As a member of the UMC, we commit our prayers, presence, gifts, service, and witness. Witness has always been a conflicted term for me due in a large part to my evangelical upbringing (and all it's instructions on how to save souls) that I have since moved away from, but this post is not about that. Rather, I think beyond all our divisions there is a base passion that drives the human soul and a key part of our spirituality is the act of identifying and expressing that passion.

This past week I was looking for a lesson for Wednesday Night Youth Group and I came to the idea of witness or testimonial. I will preface this with the fact that Trinity's youth group (Journey) is amazing. There never have been problems of cliques that often plague such groups and I have witnessed many friendships with new members. There has never been a discipline issue so our activities can be much more relaxed and I trust them to care for themselves. They are always open to learning and new ideas and indeed have taught me a lot in the few years I have been there. However, there is always room to move deeper and really learn their stories. Thus I came to the topic of witness.

NPR has a program called 'This I Believe' in which they invite anyone to submit a short essay sharing their life philosophy. A week or so ago there was the ubercute submission of a seven year old who wrote 30 things that he believed. The examples are endless: a high-school girl describing her belief in diversity embodied in her choice to wear a muslim head-scarf, a man describing life's ridiculousness and the beauty contained therein, Wayne Coyne's (lead singer of Flaming Lips) belief in finding your own happiness in all of life's moments. All of these, and many more, can be found here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4538138 . Anyways, I had the youth read some of these stories as well as the story of Paul from the Bible speaking about how his own experience of conversion drove his ministry and asked the youth to reflecting on a simple question: what do you believe?

The response was amazing. Many wrote several pages that went quite in depth into their own experience. They spoke of a desire for love and equality. They wrote about the need to stop violence based on the violence they had seen and experienced. Some took a more silly approach as well, but even then filled pages with their list. It was quite inspiring to hear them share. To conclude the exercise we all traced our hands on a sheet and wrote one word summarizing our beliefs. I wanted to use this as an altar cloth, a covering for our shared table that carries an imprint from each one of us.

The whole activity greatly inspired me. When planning youth stuff, I never know how it is going to go. The impression this left on me is that we all have issues/beliefs/whatever that we are passionate about. This is our witness, living out our calling to make a better community. The church as a center for our spiritual lives should be a place of connecting with and sharing these passions with other believers, but too often we replace these with empty ritual or pithy life lessons.

How can we as the church be better about sharing our passions and connecting with them in worship? What are the next steps to bringing these about? Perhaps it is a true sign of success when an activity raises more questions than it answers.