You’ve probably never wondered how many tables and chairs it takes to make a Gathering
happen. Me either! Well, until I said yes to serving as the Operations Team Leader for the 2018
ELCA Youth Gathering. (For the record we used 9,555 chairs and 750 tables of varying sizes.)
Our team is the logistics branch of this event. We coordinate meals for volunteers, assign
spaces for offices and events, host the bishops, manage signage for spaces, and keep the
master calendar of everything happening across the city for our time in Minneapolis. It’s
spreadsheet central.

We’re a small group that spends our time behind the scenes making sure things run smoothly.
We work with the teams of the Minneapolis Convention Center and U.S. Bank Stadium to make sure your experience is focused on faith formation.

Part of our team training is problem solving. What would you do if….? Last cycle, one issue was
music stands. They weren’t in the storage unit as we thought. Our solution – a rental truck and
a middle school band director who was our person of the day for actually being at school during
the summer break. Synod day bands had music stands. Alleluia!

We don’t know what’s coming each day but our promise to you is to work hard so you get to
spend time with your young people. That time is priceless. You are part of their faith journey.
My prayer is that you take the time to share your journey of faith with them. We are thankful
for you and your young people are too.

Tammy Jones West serves as an assistant to the Bishop in the North Carolina Synod with responsibilities in most things around Leadership. She is married to Eric who is a CPA and we have one son, Robert, who graduated in 2019 from UNC -Chapel Hill and is in graduate school at NC State in statistics. Tammy serves as the Team Leader for Operations for the 2021 ELCA Youth Gathering.

by: Matthew Felbein

Hello! My name is Matthew Felbein and I am thrilled to be able to serve as one of the Gathering Hosts for the 2021 ELCA Youth Gathering in Minneapolis. This will be my second Gathering, and even though it is still about 450 days away (I might be counting already…) I couldn’t be more excited!

Currently, I am a junior in high school and I try to be involved in everything that I can. Music is a huge part of my life as well as my faith. I love sharing music at my church whether it’s in a brass group, the high school choir, or playing the organ and piano. I’m also involved with a lot of theater and music activities and my school.

I was absolutely blown away by the 2018 Gathering in Houston. From the first night, I felt named and claimed as a child of God more than ever. Seeing thousands of people of all different backgrounds from all over the country come together for worship, service, and lots of fun was an incredible experience. Without a doubt, it was one of the best weeks of my life and it really did change everything. When I left, I knew I wanted to be able to inspire people like I had been inspired by the emcees, speakers, musicians, and volunteers at the Gathering, and I am so blessed to have this new opportunity!

I can’t wait to see how God’s boundless love fills us in Minneapolis in 2021. See you then!

by: Ellie Abraham

At the 2018 ELCA Youth Gathering, I left each Mass Gathering feeling a buzz of energy, passion, and excitement that coursed through every extremity of my body like a wave of adrenaline. This feeling came from the power of experiencing God’s love, grace, and hope in community with tens of thousands of other equally energized worshippers.

However, on my final day at the Gathering, Savanna Sullivan invited the audience to not let this joy die out after we left Houston. She said: “If our joy is only for this place, if our joy is only for us, then it is not God’s joy. God’s joy is for everyone.” I took this to mean that the surge of passion I felt that week in Houston didn’t do any good just sitting inside of me, so I should take this newfound passion and energy and use it to share God’s love, grace, and hope with other people back home.

Savanna urged the audience to seek out inequalities and injustices in the world and use our newfound passion to contribute to their defeat—in such a way that we might live for a greater purpose than ourselves. So when I returned home to Brookings, South Dakota, I worked with my pastor at First Lutheran Church to start a volunteering group called Face of Grace at my church. 

So far, we have served free meals to people in Brookings, fundraised and constructed 20 beds for kids who don’t have a bed, organized clothes for a free clothing drive, roofed a garage for Habitat for Humanity, and sewed new costumes for a church that flooded and lost everything. What I am doing isn’t world-changing, but I am glad to be making a difference in my community and sharing the joy that still hasn’t left me since the Gathering.

by Claire Embil

I am thrilled to have the opportunity to serve as one of the Gathering Hosts for the 2021 ELCA Youth Gathering in Minneapolis, MN. This will be my third Gathering and I can’t wait! I went to the 2015 Gathering with my home church as a participant, and in 2018 as a volunteer with Lutheran Campus Ministry. In Houston, I helped lead youth through building house frames during their Interactive Learning day. Each Gathering has been different and brought something new to my faith. I am so excited to see what God and the Gathering teams have in store for each of us in 2021 and in these next 16 months leading up to it.

I am currently a junior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison double majoring in English-Creative Writing and Religious Studies with a minor in Photography, mainly digital but I do some film work. After college, I plan to go on to seminary and become an ordained pastor in the ELCA. Outside of school, I spend time serving with Lutheran Campus Ministry, ELCA Young Adult Leadership Team, and Lutheran Student Movement. When I’m not studying or doing church activities, I enjoy attempting to learn to play guitar, traveling (I’m currently at 28 out of 50 states), and I am also a competitive gymnast.

It was actually in the exhibit hall space for Interactive Learning in Houston that I finally stopped running from God’s call for me. The Association of Lutheran Church Musicians had a section set up for youth to go through stations of some of the parts of worship. This included a station for dress up. I wanted to try on the vestments and take a picture behind the altar. I stood up all dressed in Green for Ordinary Time, and it hit me. There is a very distinct sound that can be heard when a gong is rung. This feeling that hit me was just like that except I was the gong. I could feel something resonate in my entire being, and I knew that God had a call for me that would change everything. I found my place in the world at Gatherings and I can’t express enough how grateful I am to get to participate again in a ministry that completely transformed my faith twice over.

Claire Embil is a junior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison studying English creative writing, religious studies and photography. She is actively involved with the ELCA Young Adult Leadership team, the ELCA Youth Gathering, Wisconsin Campus Ministry, Lutheran Student Movement, and competitive gymnastics.

by: Adam Knudson

I am an ordained pastor and serve on staff at a Lutheran Church, but I am not an ordained ELCA pastor. My background is Presbyterian. My first Gathering experience was in New Orleans for the 2009 Gathering, Jesus Justice Jazz. I didn’t know what to expect. I’d never been to Louisiana before, I’d never attended such a large youth event before, I was afraid of what it would be like to lead a group of a couple dozen youth and adults around a city that I had never visited. Why did I agree to do this anyway?

Our church is in California and while there are MANY churches and many large churches in California, there are not a lot of Lutherans and even fewer large Lutheran churches. Attending the Gathering offers the youth from my church an opportunity to understand their place and their identity within a larger community. When the ELCA gathers tens of thousands of youth from across the country and beyond, some of our best values and our highest priorities are showcased, highlighted and lived in vibrant and compelling ways. 

When our youth attend the Gathering, I don’t need to teach a lesson, read a Bible story, or prepare a class on what we believe or how God calls us to live in the world. The core values of our faith are written large on giant screens, crowded buses full of folks with bright orange shirts ready to serve, and youth and adults willing to listen to the stories of our hosts as we enter their communities and their cities.

The ELCA Youth Gathering has opened my mind to understand the great breadth and depth of what it means to be Lutheran. The Gathering has given me a chance to share this perspective with our youth, to hold up their faith as a mirror in which they can see who they are and in turn, our youth return home and share stories with our congregation. For me, the Gathering is an opportunity to participate in the kin-dom of God and to recognize God’s family as a place where I belong.

Adam Knudson has served as Youth Pastor at Hope Lutheran in Fresno, CA for thirteen years. He is involved in youth ministry networks in his community and Synod.

by: Kelly Sherman-Conroy, MYLE Team Leader

In October of 2019, the Multicultural Youth Leadership Event leadership team, including youth, young adults and adults, gathered at Luther Seminary to discern a theme for MYLE 2021. Before we began our conversations as a group, we took the time to learn about and understand the history of the land where MYLE will be hosted in Saint Paul, Minnesota. This was led by an effort from Healing Minnesota Stories, to bring healing between people of faith and the Native American people who call Minnesota home. Native people have suffered deep trauma over many years, losing their land, language and culture. While many people and institutions contributed to that trauma, it happened with the full participation of Christian churches. As Pastor Jim Bear Jacobs mentioned to our group, “We all still need healing, healing is doable, and churches have a role to play in healing.”

As leaders of MYLE we believe in the power of healing stories. Stories heal because they make invisible pain visible. The listener and storyteller are both healed by their acts. This was a needed experience for our team and our theme discernment. We learned that churches and all faith communities can play a key role in promoting and experiencing healing by opening ourselves to our own history and listening to the stories of Native people. Through the sharing and retelling of traumatic stories, we can create new positive ones.

And this is how our theme for MYLE 2021 was created. Made Free. Our stories, our experiences matter. And together as leaders, we want to be able to nurture community and inspire healing with all our MYLE participants, leaders and volunteers.  We realize that our ethnic cultures are rich in community and family bonds. Made Free to me is an understanding that our MYLE community can be a pathway for healing and brings a time for celebrating the diverse expressions and many facets of our community which are woven through the Holy Spirit.

The scripture chosen for this theme says, “Now the Lord is the Spirit and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.”  What this says to me is that the Spirit empowers us and when we feel empowered, things begin to happen. The soul is very much a part of the body, and the Spirit awakens our soul and gives us life. As a body of Christ, our soul is not fully complete unless the rest of the body is also in harmony. Together at MYLE, we emerge as a community to listen courageously and create Spirit-Filled relationships of healing.

MYLE 2021 is going to be a space that will inspire and create liberating relationships with all in attendance and beyond. We want to characterize these relationships by equity, difference, mutuality, communion and oneness. MYLE aims to be an exciting Spirit-Inspired community, inclusive and accountable to all. Celebrating our cultures together we will literally be breathing Spirit into our own healing.