– Beth Hartfiel

I remember my first Gathering as a youth. We were going to Atlanta. We’d never taken a big trip like this. We weren’t just leaving Texas; we were going all the way across the country. The hours we spent on the bus ride there and back were the start of lifelong friendships for me. When we finally arrived, I remember the amazement I felt walking into the Dome for the first Mass Gathering and the awe of being part of such a great cloud of witnesses during communion.

Several years later, I was taking my own youth group to a Gathering, which also happened to be in Atlanta. I was blessed to walk alongside them as they experienced the greater church in a way they never had before. From my perspective as a leader, I appreciated the wide variety of ways the Gathering ministry reached high school youth: through DAYLE (now the tAble) and MYLE events, through the Interactive Learning Area, and through the awe of Mass Gathering experiences.

When I was asked to be involved with the Interactive Learning Area for the 2009 New Orleans Gathering, I jumped at the chance. I was excited about the opportunity to help form this experience that was always so meaningful to my youth and to me. With the Interactive Learning Area in 2018, we are continuing to explore new ways for participants to express their faith in action and to offer them unique opportunities to recharge in the midst of crazy-long days. I especially love using different learning styles to help youth connect with others from their own home congregation, with congregations they’ve met at the Gathering, and with organizations that focus on sharing God’s love in unique ways.

I look forward to seeing how God is revealed through the partners and participants in Houston in 2018!

-Sarah Mayer-Flatt

There’s a renewed ministry of the ELCA Youth Gathering that I am excited to be a part of for the second time as Team Leader: the tAble. Formerly known as DAYLE, The Definitely-Abled Youth Leadership Event, the tAble is maintaining many of the best practices of this ministry, while also focusing on different opportunities to include and support youth who live with disabilities within the ELCA.

Without question, this ministry is where my sense of call first took root. I was a young person in a wheelchair at DAYLE ’00 learning about the ways God could use even me. But explaining what a “definitely-abled” person became cumbersome as I grew into my leadership over the next 15 years through the event. This past January, a passionate group of people came together and heard new ways God is calling this ministry into being.

The new name is simpler, with a focus on where we most concretely meet God in our lives: God’s table of grace. As we hear in worship, the bread is broken for all people, and the cup is the new covenant in our lives—signs of grace, of hope, of community—where all are welcome.

The community of young people with disabilities is growing within the church, and there isn’t always a place for us. As a pastor with a disability, the first questions I am always asked in any congregation are about accommodations. The tAble hopes to help reinforce that the kingdom of God has a need for abilities of all kinds, even if our buildings are less than accessible.

Accompanying one another through the kingdom of God with all of its stairs, written words, untranslated language, and tight schedules, is all of our responsibility as children of God. The tAble will be a safe space for youth and their companions to experience God’s power in their lives, while being empowered to go out into the kingdom—first at the Gathering and then back to their congregations, synods, and communities, knowing that they are a vital part of the church.

 

The tAble (formerly the Definitely-abled Youth Leadership Event or DAYLE) is a pre-event to the Gathering that blesses and empowers young people who live with a wide range of physical, cognitive and emotional disabilities so that they might grow as faithful, wise and courageous witnesses. The event also gives participants the opportunity to acclimate and orient themselves to Houston and the venues in which the Gathering are being held. The tAble will be held June 24–27, 2018. 

– Shawn Hannon

I was the kid whose parents had to drag him kicking and screaming to nearly every youth event, but whose parents also had to drag him kicking and screaming all the way home because I never wanted to leave. It was true for my first week of summer camp in 6^th grade. It was true for confirmation class and youth group. And it was even true for my experience as a teenager at the Youth Gathering in 10^th grade.

We had a small youth group at my church growing up, but we were tight. Our youth directors, Mike and Amanda, were my heroes. I wanted to be like my pastor, Pastor Billy, when I grew up. But when it came to boarding a plane and flying to St. Louis, well, I could think of better things to do. In hindsight, I was just afraid of something so big and so new. We boarded a plane just over the border from my western New York home in Pennsylvania. It was the first time I’d been on a plane in my entire life, and thank goodness they weren’t charging for baggage in those days. I definitely would have gone over the limit with the bag of nerves, fears, and worries I was bringing with me.

You know how this story ends. When we arrived in St. Louis the most amazing thing happened. Like he had so many times before, Jesus met me in my worry and reminded me that I was precisely where I needed to be—dancing at the crossroads. Tens of thousands of youth and adults were embodying love and celebrating community in Jesus’s name. When I heard people talk about the Youth Gathering before, I assumed it was a bunch of speakers and various Bible studies. And it is. But I discovered that it’s also so much more. The Gathering is the late night devotions with your church in your hotel room. The Gathering is splashing with strangers in a pool. The Gathering is high-fiving police officers on the street. It’s racing around a convention center trying to figure out how you can squeeze it all in. It’s skipping a meal and eating pizza at midnight so you don’t miss a thing.

Jesus used the Gathering to change the course of my life, and he would do it again several years later. I was still in school, but this time it was seminary instead of high school. I was given an opportunity to serve with the Safety and Security Team at the 2009 Gathering in New Orleans. Following that gathering I became the team leader, and I am very excited to serve in that role for the third time in Houston in 2018. I’m excited because, in hindsight, I was afraid of something so big and so new, but I’m not afraid anymore. I’m excited and deeply honored to be a part of a ministry where youth can so clearly see Jesus and become his body for the sake of the world. And I know now what the kid whose parents dragged to the airport 16 years ago didn’t. The Gathering is a bunch of speakers and some Bible study, but it’s so much more. It’s everything from the fundraising and getting ready to the going home and telling the story. And the work of the Safety and Security Team of the Gathering is to make sure that participants, like youth groups skipping dinner and eating pizza at midnight, still don’t have to miss a thing.

Houston is one of a kind, a great host city for the Gathering, and I can’t want to see you there.

– Naomi Krizner

Leaving New Orleans and looking back at my most eventful week, I realized the one thing I got most from the experience. I felt this renewed spark in me. Just seeing all those youth come together and focus solely on Christ and take their faith seriously was just a big wow for me. To see the results from all of us coming together just caused my spirit to become an inferno. I realized that youth are actually capable of having an impact on the world. I always had an impression that no one can do anything until they grow up and gain authority. But that is no longer true for me, and I intend to continue to put this in action.

I expected the Gathering to be more textbook oriented, to sit down and over-analyze the Bible. The minute I stepped into the Convention Center, those expectations flew out the window. I mean, you could actually play volleyball and ping pong! Exploring the Convention Center some more, we found there were really cool exhibits about issues that needed attention, like human trafficking, for instance. Reading real stories and seeing statistics just made me want to do something about it. And the evenings at the Superdome were filled with energy and spirit that can only be given by God.

I saw God almost everywhere that week. I saw God in all of the youth who were so willing to put forth their time and efforts towards people they never met. To me that is the real Christian. I saw God in the adults as they had to put up with the unending energy of the youth. I saw God in the speakers as we heard passion in their voices and saw it in their faces. To see God in that many places fortified my faith and pushed me toward devoting more of my life to God.

The Gathering changed me in so many ways. I can walk around with my back straight and say, “I know there’s a God. I know God exists.” I used to think no other young Christian took their faith as seriously as me. Because of that, I was afraid to show it. But now, I know that’s not true.

Naomi is from Upper Dublin Lutheran Church in Ambler, PA

– Liz Fisher

Hi, my name is Liz Fisher, and I am serving the 2018 ELCA Youth Gathering as the Community Life Team Leader. I served the 2012 ELCA Youth Gathering in New Orleans as the Gathering Coach for the NC Synod, and I served the 2015 ELCA Youth Gathering in Detroit on the Community Life Team. As a youth minister, my goals are to help young people have fun, experience fellowship, and provide a space to have conversations with others about their walk and journey with Jesus.

The Community Life Team is what I deem as the “fun” team. We are the team that gets to work with other teams to put together morning worship, dances, lip sync battles, inflatables, and a huge playground space. Incidentally, our last playground space was planned on a napkin, which is a true testament of youth ministry. If you can plan something on a napkin, you can do anything.

Another large piece for our team is hotel registration and hospitality to all of the different groups coming to the Gathering. We are there to greet you at the door, and it gives us a chance to give you some good ol’ southern hospitality, welcoming you on behalf of the ELCA.

When I am not working at church or on the Gathering, I like to travel and spend time with family and friends. I have a pet turtle named Squirt and a dog that I share named Candy. I am an Associate in Ministry with the ELCA and currently serve a congregation in Kannapolis, NC as the Minister of Faith Formation.

I am looking forward to serving the 2018 Youth Gathering. We have wonderful plans already in the works. Hope to see you in Houston in 2018!

– Rev. Stephen P. Bouman

“For by grace you have been saved through faith, and it is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.”
-Ephesians 2:8

As I reflect on my parish ministry, I realize that mentoring relationships were always forming. For more than a year in one congregation I served, I never knew that the sexton was a musician and a poet. William Garcia, a quiet and competent high school kid, cleaned the church and school every week. A year into our polite relationship, we finally had a real conversation as part of a series of one-on-ones I was doing in the congregation. Our church was contemplating beginning a liturgy in Spanish, and so I was meeting with and listening to some of our bilingual members. William and I sat for over an hour in the church basement. I listened as he told me about his passion for the violin, his love of poetry, the jumble of his chaotic family life, and his efforts to hammer out an education and musical excellence from the local schools. Looming over our conversation, as it does for most city kids, was the street. I asked, “Will you meet with me an hour a week for a month and teach me about your world? Oh, and by the way, will you play your violin in church sometime?” He smiled.

William and the other Hispanic members became my mentors in mission, setting a new table. When we began our liturgy in the Spanish language, it was William who accompanied the hymns on his violin and who wrote the prayers of the church in a language of poetic beauty. He played, prayed, and led, because one day I stopped ignoring him and listened.

That my own life has been given to me by my Creator as an act of unconditional love, and then returned to me through the death and resurrection of Jesus as a free gift to be shared for the sake of the world is an astonishing insight into my identity and vocation. And that is the lens through which we see all who touch our lives. Houston will be filled with William Garcias, living into the free gift of their own lives and giftedness, trying to figure out how to use that graceful freedom as a servant in the world, grateful for the presence and attention of those leaders and mentors who touch their lives and are touched by them.