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Monthly Musings
April 2007
Together in Service
The Center for Faith and Action recently put together a Day of Interfaith Youth Service in cooperation with the Interfaith Youth Core of Chicago. The basic idea is thus: you bring together diverse groups of young people (elementary, high school, or college age) to work together on some sort of service project that benefits the community. This builds camaraderie among the participants, who then engage in a dialogue about how their particular faith tradition informs their desire to serve their community. It’s a great system for introducing young people of faith to other young people of different faith.
For our day of service, we brought together elementary and high-school age students from our local synagogue, Temple B’Nai Israel, St. Thomas the Apostle Catholic Church, New England Congregational Church, St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, and Aurora University students who served as facilitators. We met up at the Chestnut House, which is the home of New England Congregational’s youth program. They were our gracious hosts, and helped to prepare the space and the food.
We explained everything to the kids, and broke them up into groups. These groups worked to make no-sew fleece blankets for our local homeless shelter and transitional living community, Hesed House.
The blanket work was great fun, and we eventually paused to have some munchies (all kosher, of course!) and get back into our groups. The dialogue was good, too. We investigated what everyone’s congregation was up to when it came to community service. Some people didn’t have congregations, but they talked about service anyway. One young man who happened to be in my group didn’t seem to be the kind of guy who would take organized religion very seriously. He was very nice, though, and he said that it was refreshing to have a forum wherein he could speak about matters of “faith” without getting “religion” crammed down his throat. I found that touching, actually.
Some participants talked about work that their churches had done with Hesed House in the past, others mentioned Hurricane Katrina relief efforts. A few had done work with Indian reservations in South Dakota. It was nice to hear their faith stories, and no matter what their religion, to see them relating to each other by doing so.
When you count the adults that we had chaperoning the event, we had just over forty people; not a bad number for a first go, if I do say so myself. At the end of the day, we had put together twenty-six blankets for Hesed House, and had made rough plans for our next opportunity to engage young people of faith.
I’d like to thank our steering committee: Alex Golovin, Director of the Youth Program at New England Congregational Church; Dr. Ron Ramer, Professor of Education; our AU student facilitators: Bryn Golden, Steven Binns, and Drew Taylor; and the Interfaith Youth Core, for supplying us with the expertise, material support, and grant dollars to make it a possibility.
I look forward to future incarnations of this event.
Tim Brauhn
