When One Suffers, All Suffer Together

This letter addressed to the people of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church of Charleston was signed on Sunday, June 21 by over 800 worshipers at First UMC in Cary, NC.

Dear Sisters and Brothers in Christ of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church of Charleston:

We cannot find adequate language to express our grief and heartbreak over the tragedy that you have experienced in these past few days. We know the truth of scripture that “when one suffers all suffer together” and we share your suffering as brothers and sisters in the Wesleyan tradition.

We wish you to know that…

…we believe, with you, in the power of Christ’s resurrection and that, in the end, God will triumph over every evil.

…we repent of our participation in a culture that breeds such hatred and violence and renew our commitment as the people of God to work for that day when love reigns in all human hearts.

…we will pray today with renewed fervor that God’s kingdom will come and God’s will be done “on earth as it is in heaven” and in that prayer we will be especially mindful of you.

…and we are humbled and inspired by your example of living out the Gospel’s imperatives of hospitality and forgiveness in the midst of circumstances that we cannot begin to imagine.

You will be in our prayers in the days and weeks ahead. May the God of all comfort and consolation visit you with all grace and love as you face the days ahead. May the God of all mercy have mercy on us all. May the Lord come soon with justice and peace.

Carl Frazier, Lead Pastor

William Green, Pastor of Congregational Care

Martha McLean, Pastor of Christian Formation

Colin Snider, Pastor of Outreach

Love: Often the Wound, Always the Cure

If you want to see inside the heart and mind of a Christian Millennial, check out INK, a blog written by Hannah Sillars. She gave us permission to repost one of her blog entries from a few years ago when she was still a college student. If her words are representative of other young Christian adults, the church is in good hands.
“You take a deep breath and you walk through the doors/it’s the morning of your very first day…”

Songs are written about being fifteen. No one writes on ages twenty, twenty-one or twenty-two, and I know why. This is the Great Unrest, when you are wise enough to know better but still not wise enough. Everybody says this is the time you choose who you want to be, and what you do (or fail to do) determines the trajectory of the rest of your life.

Face-down and eye-level with the ants on your dorm room carpet, you don’t try to smoosh them anymore. You see them flailing and know how it feels to carry three times your body weight.

You get used to the taste of sleep deprivation in your mouth. It tastes like desperation and dining hall coffee. You doubt you will feel nostalgia about this, ever.

Still, around lunch tables, over cups of milk and curly fries, you find kindred spirits. There are the people who dislike you for no apparent reason. There are also the ones who love you, even (and especially) when you can’t tell why.

But, it’s in an empty racquetball court after a most overwhelming day, when you’re all pink and stained and heartswollen, where God finds you. He comes in the form of Mrs. Rienhardt, who asks what’s on your mind, and reminds you of all the things you should know already, but have forgotten.

Then, stressed beyond belief over your sudden lack of motivation, beneath a sky of faded stars you consider collapsing in the soccer field for dramatic effect. You’ve heard of it done before. (Maybe God hears prayers best when spoken from that position?) Don’t do it (ticks).

You never work out as much as you should. You will never unsay all those things you said. You will never be as whole or perfect as you would like to be. You will never be able to rewrite this story. But who you are in Christ is who you are. Your identity in Christ is your real identity. It’s not the future version of you, the perfect Form of you that He loves.

People do things you don’t understand. They fail you. You can choose to let your educated mind wallow in the safe realm of facts and abstract truths–or you, too, can forgive as Sonia to an unrepentant Raskolnikov. You can live the poetry of Penelope at her loom, choosing peace and daily fidelity in a world of pyre-frenzied Dido’s.

There may never be Four (discernable) Causes clarifying the particulars of your circumstances, making them manageable. But you know the Prime Mover, and He has told you His name. All-Power has grace enough for your all-frailty.

Remember, love is often the wound, but always the cure.

Remember, remember, remember. Sleep-deprived and fighting to stay on top of assignments, sometimes we forget that one day, we’ll want to remember this. Our troubles are smaller than we think, and reasons to hope run deeper than reasons to worry. We’ll see.

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Hannah Sillars is a blogger and author. She wrote this blog repost while she was still in college.

Judy Bumgarner is a freelance writer in Nashville, Tennessee. She also works at Brentwood United Methodist Church in the church’s Caring Ministry.

Living Grace Matters

Create a compelling video story of journey, reconciliation, or community. This is the challenge to young adults between ages eighteen and thirty from Living Grace Matters, a crowd-sourced visual project. The idea is simple: give Millennials the opportunity to create and share a one- to three-minute videos to generate intriguing demonstrations of God’s movement in the world, through people and communities. Submitted videos are posted on the Living Grace Matters site, and the winners in each of three categories win $3,000.

In a recent Ministry Matters™ article, “What Millennials Crave and how the Church can Relate,” written by Chris Folmsbee, the director of discipleship at The United Methodist Church of the Resurrection (Leawood, Kansas), church leaders are told that if they are interested in the spiritual health of Millennials they must “change their way of outreach from an anxious model, based primarily on fear to a more faithful model based on hope.” Folmsbee includes the following info graphic to explain what he means:

The Living Grace project follows this new model of outreach on every level. Although the challenge/contest began only a few weeks ago, more than a dozen beautifully created, soul-touching videos are already posted on the project’s website. You’ll meet a Holocaust survivor who struggles with the memories and talks about forgiveness. You’ll see filthy drinking water in Sudan—footage that the Sudanese government doesn’t want you to see. You’ll hear a man talk about how grateful he is to have a job after years of running the streets and selling drugs as a child.

In his article, Folmsbee says, “Encourage millennials to engage the world not based on what’s wrong with it, but based on what can be right with it. Millennials are just as creative as any other generation we’ve seen, and they have a passionate desire to create things that others love and love to be a part of. For relevancy’s sake, invite their creativity.”

The Living Grace Matters project is a great segue to this invitation. Invite the young adults in your church to become involved. Talk about it in your church’s blog, website, bulletin, any social media presence, or during a youth Bible study. Show the introduction video from the Living Grace Matters website. Look at the FAQs on their site and if you can’t find the answers to your questions, hit them up on Facebook or Twitter—considering the audience, you know they’re well-represented on social media. Do not wait to engage this group after age thirty—they have valuable contributions to make now.

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Judy Bumgarner is a freelance writer in Nashville, Tennessee. She also works at Brentwood United Methodist Church in the church’s Caring Ministry.

Listen Carefully

 

Researchers tend to agree on how Millennials, born roughly between the late 1980s and early 2000s, feel about religion. A difference exists, however, between studying charted trends and carefully listening to what people from this age group have to say as individuals.

Are You for Real?

Statistics say that Millennials can spot phonies; so when they see a disconnect, they’re quick to call it out. Katrina, a marketing student at Aquinas College, a small Catholic school (Nashville, Tennessee), observes a lack of heartfelt worship. “It bothers me when I see devout Catholics that make their faith a big, showy deal,” she explains, “but do not pay attention during the mass. It seems hypocritical to go if you don’t want to.”

Ariana, a twenty-one-year-old senior journalism student at Hofstra University (Long Island, New York) says that church should be more than rote observances. “The predictability of church makes it boring,” she explains. “I do not believe that church should be entertaining, but I do believe that the members of the congregation should be excited to go.”

Going to church seems to be a duty to fulfill to Tiffany as well. She and her husband, both of whom are in their mid-twenties and live in New York, grew up in Christian families, but neither of them attend church now. “From our experience, we’ve seen a lot of fake people in church who go . . . just to check the box,” she explains. “I would like to meet people from church who actually enjoy going and want to improve their life.”

Santa Claus Is Evil?

Characteristically speaking, Millennials are generally more open to diversity on social justice issues. Just as popular opinion lumps everyone in this age group together regardless of individual thoughts and actions, many of the Millennials seem to use this same broad brush to paint all churchgoers a pretty awful shade of hate and hypocrisy.

Kaitlin attended Alvernia University, a Franciscan college (Reading, Pennsylvania), and loved the school’s focus on core values like service and humility. She even traveled to the jungles of El Salvador to work with children and their families. Now twenty-five and a licensed social worker, she no longer participates in any church activities.

“I have yet to find a church that aligns with my belief system,” she explains. “I would love to find a church that isn’t going to condemn me to hell for small infractions and allows the LGTBQ community to worship as well. I guess the church has yet to catch up with the younger demographic.”

In Kaneohe, Hawaii, Allison, a thirty-one-year-old mother of two, works with the United States Marine Corps and owns an event/artist management company; she agrees that some adaptation is necessary. “Speaking on my hometown church, there are many things done correctly,” she says. “But they don’t evolve. There are ways to speak on topics such as homosexuality, adultery, etc. without completely damning everyone to hell by the time the sermon is finished.”

Katrina puts it more bluntly. “I hate the hateful speech that comes from some of the pastors and parishioners, especially regarding other races, religions, sexual/gender identities, etc.,” she says. “The hypocrisy of preaching about loving your neighbor as yourself and then explicitly hating minority groups is too big of a turn-off for me to ever return to the church.”

As a preteen, Aryana, a marketing manager for a tech company in Denver, experienced several bad encounters at church—incidents that still keep her away from church nine years later. “The pastor only talked about how Santa decorations were offensive and evil because they didn’t have anything to do with Jesus,” she remembers. “Mind you, there were many children in the audience.

“I was repeatedly told that if I didn’t get my friends to come to church with me, I was going to hell for not doing my Christian duty,” she continues. “I was also told that I needed to have children in order to build the Christian population, that having premarital sex was equivalent to murder, and that missing one youth group meeting was just like turning my back on God.”

A Second Family

Thankfully, there’s some good news. Although Ariana is bored by “predictable” services, her Baptist church in Norristown, Pennsylvania, speaks to her heart. “I enjoy going,” she admits. “It provides me with the proper outlet to express my gratitude for everything that God has blessed me with.”

Brent, a thirty-one-year-old financial advisor from Las Vegas, attends a church run exclusively by lay clergy. “Everyone gives freely of their time and talents,” he explains. “The church has been my second family, no matter where I go.”

At twenty-nine, Kati says that although church has always been a part of her life, the significance of church has adjusted slightly now that she’s been in the “real world” for almost ten years. “I believe in going to church for many reasons,” the television professional explains. “First being my love for God, but as I’ve gotten older I have learned to appreciate how important the church community is.”

Olivia, one of Kati’s coworkers, agrees. Soon after moving to Nashville, the twenty-three-year-old felt the pull. “With a hectic job and life, I realized that I needed to have some time somewhere to think about nothing but God,” Olivia says. “I do not go every Sunday, but do my best to keep it a habit.” She attends a more unconventional church than the traditional Methodist church in which she was raised. “I am adjusting,” she says. “At the end of the day, worship is worship.”

And then there’s Lucy, a twenty-nine-year-old dietitian in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, who takes a different approach: She attends one of three churches, depending upon her needs. “I attend a United Methodist Church when I want the personal, homey feeling; the non-denominational mega-church when I want awesome music and a good teaching on the Bible; and the Catholic Church when I’m homesick and want the traditional, ritualistic experience,” she says.

If you read carefully, a common thread emerges from the varied opinions. The negative comments aren’t against church or religion; instead, they talk about the apathy and hate they observed from people at church. And the positive comments talk about the importance of people as part of a family and a community. People . . . as in us.

How does your faith community reaches Millennials who want nothing to do with church based on false (or valid) perceptions? Please share your stories.

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Judy Bumgarner is a freelance writer in Nashville, Tennessee. She also works at Brentwood United Methodist Church in the church’s Caring Ministry.

Making the Mission Letter Authentic

The summer-mission solicitation letter. Yikes! Did you feel that “Christmas-letter” twinge of dread, knowing that the final product usually resembles a jumbly missive or boring form letter?

Sadly, the mission letter is often a first cousin to the rambling holiday dispatch—but it doesn’t have to be. Use the following samples to help your kids create an authentic mission solicitation letter.

The two letter examples that follow are structurally alike, but each are personalized so as not to sound like a completed template copied over and over again. It takes a bit more time on the front end, but after reading these samples, your students will understand how much more effective their own letters can be when they know their audience.

The first letter is an example of what a student might send to people he or she doesn’t really know very well, like parents’ coworkers. The tone is decidedly different than the second example’s, which is intended for those individuals whom the student knows personally, and therefore shows more familiarity.

Example #1 (don’t know well)

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Jones,¹

As you may know, it’s the time of year when students everywhere begin to raise money for summer mission trips. Since it’s unusual for you to hear from me, you guessed it: that’s why I’m writing to you.²

Some of us from our First United Methodist Youth Group have the opportunity to take part in a mission trip to Haiti. We’re going to help hold Vacation Bible School for some children there, plus we’ll pitch in to help on various construction sites. Our trip is planned for July 10-15.³

In order to go on this mission, I need to raise $700. I helped my parents hold a garage sale where I made $200 and I think I can save another $50 on my own if I’m careful with my spending. I’m looking for 15 sponsors who are willing to donate $30 each to make up the $450 difference and I’m hoping you’ll be one of them. If so, please use the self-addressed-stamped envelope enclosed and make the check out to First United Methodist Church.⁴

Of course whether or not you choose to make a donation toward my trip, please keep our mission trip in your prayers. Thanks so much.⁵

God bless,
Bobby Smith
(555)555-5555
bobbysmith@xxxx.com⁶

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¹ If they take no other advice, try to convince students to personalize the salutation.

² Since Bobby doesn’t know Mr. and Mrs. Jones and therefore, has never written a letter to them in his life, it will be obvious that he must want something. So why not acknowledge that fact up front? Chatty first paragraphs in most solicitation letters sound plain phony when the recipient barely knows the student. Suggest an upfront and honest approach in every day language instead.

³ Hit the basics here. Who, what, where, when, and why? Short and sweet.

⁴ Explain how much the total trip costs and then, before asking for a donation, advise the student to share what he/she is doing to raise money. Dividing the total amount into “sponsorships” lets the letter recipient know exactly how much the student hopes to receive from them and that it is typically a doable request.

⁵ Almost everyone will suggest asking for prayer support before asking for financial support. If requesting prayers is a student’s number one goal, God bless ’em. Let’s call this letter a Mission Prayer Request and leave out any mention of money. Seriously—it might be something worth considering, but assuming they’ve covered financial support in the previous paragraph, students will, of course, want to ask for prayer support as well. And it’s just good manners to say “thank you.”

⁶ Because Bobby doesn’t know Mr. and Mrs. Jones well, he included contact information in case they want to get in touch with him.

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Example #2 (do know well)

Dear Aunt Betty and Uncle Jack⁷,

We had fun with you guys the other night at the barbeque. Aunt Betty, you make the best potato salad. Maybe you could give Mom your recipe!⁸

Did she or Dad tell you that I was going on a mission trip with a youth group at my church?

We’re going to Haiti to help hold Vacation Bible School for some children there, plus we’ll pitch in to help on various construction sites. Our trip is planned for July 10–15.⁹

In order to go on this mission, I need to raise $700. I helped Mom and Dad hold a garage sale where I made $200 and I think I can save another $50 on my own if I’m careful with my spending. I’m looking for 15 sponsors who are willing to donate $30 each to make up the $450 difference and I’m hoping you’ll be one of them. If so, please use the self-addressed-stamped envelope enclosed and make the check out to First United Methodist Church.¹⁰

Of course whether or not you choose to make a donation toward my trip, please keep our mission trip in your prayers. Mom and Dad would like that, too. Thanks so much.¹¹

Love,

¹²

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⁷ “Dear Friends and Family” to an aunt and uncle? Again, if nothing else, personalize the salutation.

⁸ You’ll find a hundred sample letters out there that consider something like this to be personalization: “I just finished up a busy year at school and I’m looking forward to summer plans.” If your students are robots, fine, but if this letter is going to aunts, uncles, Grandma, an old babysitter, a piano teacher, etc., encourage students to come up with something real here. It’s essentially a matter of showing respect.

⁹ Slight personalization here but mostly the same as in Example #1.

¹⁰ Mostly the same, but with personal details that will make the letter authentic.

¹¹ Ditto

¹² When writing to Aunt Betty and Uncle Jack, Bobby wisely decided not to type his name but to sign his name.

What Not to Say

In this issue’s article, “Making the Mission Letter Authentic,” you’ll see two examples of how to help your students write an authentic mission solicitation letter. But does anyone ever think about how to help students—or anyone who goes on a mission trip, for that matter—speak authentically about the trip once they return safe and sound?

Amy Peterson does. Among other things, Amy writes a blog called “Making All Things New.” She recently posted her thoughts on the subject in an article titled, “What Not to Say About Your Short-Term Mission Trip” and, with her permission, we have reposted it here:

Last night I was reading a book by a young woman who moved to Africa as a teenager. Her story stirred up a lot of feelings, both positive and negative, for me. I nodded off reading it, but woke up at 3:45, unable to sleep anymore because: I was thinking of myself at sixteen, and some of the things I probably said when I came home from my first trip to the majority world.

These things—which I’m nearly sure I said after a week in Tegucigalpa as a teenager—have settled comfortably into the realm of Christian cliché, but that’s not why they bother me. Words matter, and these statements carry troubling implications. If I could go back and talk to my sixteen-year-old self, I’d tell her not to say these things:

“They taught me so much more than I could ever teach them.”

“They gave me so much more than I could ever give them.”

“I thought I went there to help them, but in the end they helped me.”

This is probably true.  But when you say it this way, it implies surprise, and that surprise reveals your prejudice. Why should you be surprised that people from another country, culture, or socio-economic bracket might teach you more than you could teach them? Is it perhaps because you think that your level of education, wealth, or whiteness means that you are obviously smarter, more generous, or more able to help?

Try leaving yourself out of the equation. Instead, simply say, “I learned so much from the people I met,” or “I met people who were unfailingly generous and wise.”

“They were so poor, but they were happy.”

I understand that to your American eyes, this is truly remarkable. We’ve been conditioned from birth to believe that happiness comes from stuff, from shiny possessions we can purchase and then discard at will. How could you possibly be both poor and happy?

But reject that narrative. Happiness doesn’t come from money. Of course it’s possible to be poor and happy, just like it’s possible to be rich and sad. Your emotional state does not depend upon your financial resources.

At the same time, you don’t want to paint poverty as somehow noble, as something humanity doesn’t need to work to eradicate. “They were poor but happy” gives you, and whomever you’re talking to, license to ignore structural injustices and poverty, because after all, they were happy.

So let’s talk about these things, but not together, and let’s use words that are precise, not general. Let’s say, first, that you met people who were smiling, who laughed easily. Then let’s describe what else you saw—concrete, physical description (“rats as big as my foot”), not judgments (“disgusting”).

One final thing—think about the rhetoric you use when you ask for money, too. If it’s true that “they” will teach you so much more than you will teach “them”—and undoubtedly, much of the time, especially when we’re talking short-term trips, it is—then why don’t we change the way we talk about our trips when we’re raising support?

Instead of saying, “Please give me money so that I can take the gospel to a dark place (and please, don’t call it a dark place) / build a house for the homeless / run a summer camp program for kids in Haiti / assist in a temporary medical clinic in Tegucigalpa,” why don’t we say it this way: “If you would like to invest in me, would you help me travel to a different culture, so that I can expand my view of who God is and how God works by learning about him in a new culture?”

Because honestly, if this trip is really about assisting in a temporary medical clinic, it would probably be more efficient to send money and have the doctors hire local assistants, providing both medical help and much-needed jobs in the community without taxing the local missionaries who would have to host you. Buying an international plane ticket is rarely the most financially efficient way to support the developing world (or to evangelize, for that matter).

But it is a powerful way to learn about how God works. Let’s try to talk about it well.

Amy Peterson is a writer and a teacher. She also works with the Honors Program at Taylor University, Upland, Indiana. Follow her on Twitter @amylpeterson and read more at www.amypeterson.net.

Mission Miracles

Even before Rev. David Ssebulime was born in his native Uganda, missionaries influenced his path. Prior to his birth, Ssebulime’s father Mbuga felt called to the ministry after missionaries traveled to Uganda to share the gospel. Ssebulime, along with his eleven siblings, witnessed their father’s preaching, teaching, and ministering to the poor.

Rev. Mbuga was killed in a car accident when Ssebulime was still very young. Already poor, the family’s circumstances went from bad to worse. “We lived in a mud hut and the thing was falling apart,” Ssebulime remembers. “We all moved into one room and it leaked. . . . It was terrible.”

Singing Ambassadors

Following his father’s death, a Canadian man named Ray Burnett assembled a mission team of Christian friends to help orphans in Uganda. After giving a ride to a young boy and hearing him sing, Ray was inspired to assemble a children’s choir to tour North America as ambassadors—and the African Children’s Choir was born.

Ssebulime laughs, “Everyone had to audition. Me? I was lucky. . . . I played the drum. I stepped up, played my drum, and boom! I ended up in the African Children’s Choir,” along with one of his sisters.

Many Firsts

When the choir arrived in Canada for the winter season, they were greeted with warm, bright yellow jackets—Ssebulime’s favorite color at the time. At their accommodations, “every bed had a toothbrush and toothpaste—my first toothbrush,” he recalls. “And they gave us milk and some cookies, and we ate macaroni. And I also got my very first pair of shoes!”

For two years, the choir sang in churches, stadiums . . . even at the Grammys. Their host families introduced them to American culture while on tour: They learned English, how to write, and of course, they learned what American kids liked, too. “If [the host family] had kids, that was great because we played with the kids,” Ssebulime laughs. “And if they had TV, BMX, and a swimming pool, that was a winner!”

Back to Uganda

In Uganda, nothing much had changed. “We were still poor. We still struggled,” says Ssebulime. He managed to finish high school and decided to attend college in India, under the impression that it was an inexpensive place to live; he found out quickly that he was wrong. “I only had $700. But God showed me through,” he says. Out of the blue, a man Ssebulime hardly knew sent him more than enough money to keep him going.

Returning to Uganda after college, Ssebulime helped translate for a mission team from California. At their invitation, he moved to the United States in 2001.

Life in America, Remembering Uganda

Ssebulime worked in the San Francisco area in the financial industry, but he remained active in his church. “I loved God and working in the church,” he explains. “And sometimes, I would preach in non-denominational churches. People treated me as a missionary from Uganda.”

He married a woman from church, and they took mission teams back to Uganda to help raise money to finish the new church’s roof. These efforts led them to found an organization aptly named, “Raise the Roof Ministries,” and in six months, they raised $60,000. But they didn’t just stop there.

When Ssebulime was awarded a scholarship to attend Vanderbilt University, he and his wife Marlene moved to Nashville, Tennessee, in 2010. “I’d been blessed, and I said in my heart the way I can give back is to build a school,” says Ssebulime. “That school today has over six hundred students.”

From there, Raise the Roof provided scholarships to educate Ugandan children. While speaking at Christ United Methodist Church (Franklin, Tennessee), Ssebulime asked for additional help. “Over forty-five people came and sponsored kids,” he recalls. “I came home crying.”

Opening Doors

Only eight churches existed when Ssebulime’s father died, “and five of those churches died when he did. The good news is God is continuing to bless the ministry and it’s been rebuilt again.” Today, there are eleven schools and over three hundred churches.

“For me, God has always just opened doors, and it’s always been through missionaries,” explains Ssebulime. “And I still see myself as a missionary in America.” Today, as both a recipient and provider of mission work, he changes others’ lives as Missions and Outreach Pastor at Brentwood United Methodist Church in Brentwood, Tennessee, and his continued work with Raise the Roof Ministries.