Jazzed up for gathering Support ELCA youth bound for New Orleans
What are your memories of national Lutheran youth gatherings? Perhaps you participated. Perhaps a family member or youth from your congregation did. As I prepare to participate in this summer’s
ELCA Youth Gathering in New Orleans, I have reflected on my first event.
It was 1956. I was 10 and my dad, a pastor in the former Evangelical Lutheran Church, had been invited to preach at the Lutheran Free Church Luther League Convention. The service was outdoors at the foot of Mount Rainier.
I do not remember my dad’s sermon. But given his passion as an evangelist, I am sure he invited and challenged the young people to have a living, personal relationship with Jesus Christ nurtured through prayer, Scripture reading and worship. His references to the world probably addressed the temptations that threaten faith rather than the ways faith is lived out in service to the neighbor.
Fifty-three years later, the world has changed in ways my dad probably could not fathom. Then young people struggled with reception for their transistor radios. Communication to friends back home was through postcards. Now young people will communicate with friends through an
iPhone, text messages,
tweeting on Twitter and pictures sent via phones.
This summer’s
gathering theme — “Jesus Justice Jazz” — reminds us something remains the same. The good news of Jesus Christ proclaimed by my dad is the same Jesus studied in Scripture, proclaimed in worship and served throughout our days in New Orleans.
My dad’s description of the relationship between faith and life focused on “holy living” or personal piety. This year’s gathering reflects Martin Luther’s strong biblical theme that “holy living” gives priority to the neighbor.
The Scripture text foundational to the shaping of this Youth Gathering comes from Philippians 2, where we struggle with what it means to empty oneself for the other in the manner of Christ. Heidi Hagstrom, director for the gathering, described it this way: “Everything we have planned for youth to experience is shaped by a curriculum that involves preparation, action, reflection and celebration/worship. Each of the four disciplines beckons one back into the world with one’s neighbor.”
The gathering will address the larger systemic issues of social justice laid bare by the natural catastrophe of two hurricanes. The six areas of service were chosen after engaging in an intentional time of discernment with residents from all sectors of New Orleans. Those areas are housing, environment, wealth and poverty, health and wellness, the arts and culture, and literacy.
It is difficult to comprehend the planning that goes into such a gathering. Some 310 buses will take 12,000 young people a day to 154 service sites. I encourage you to be part of the preparation. Specifically, we welcome your prayers and financial support of youth from your area.
We also need tools and supplies that must be in place when 36,000 youth arrive to do their assigned work. Please go to
www.elca.org/YouthGiving and find out how you can help. The highest priority is the need for school supplies. ELCA youth will assemble school kits to be placed on the desks of 13,500 children in New Orleans this fall. These are some of the most
at-risk children in the U.S. because of poverty and ongoing trauma from the hurricanes.
In New Orleans there will be jazz. How fitting for this gathering. For blues and jazz are rooted in some basics — common chords, recurring rhythms — yet they are expressed improvisationally in music that is constantly innovative, fresh in each performance. My prayer is that gathering participants will discover anew that “holy living,” when it is most faithful, is as diverse in its expression as the needs of the neighbor and as fresh and new as each day’s rising to a baptismal life in Jesus Christ.