Courtesy of LutherTube by Brett Nelson and Zack Stoudemayer:
Scenes from the Closing Worship of the 2009 MYLE, Multicultural Youth Leadership Event, a pre event to the ELCA Youth Gathering in New Orleans. MYLE is a multi-ethnic and multi-generational event to encourage young leaders to lead their congregations toward a more inclusive and diverse church.
If you don’t Twitter, I’d strongly recommend it for at least the next few days. The conversation from people across a population of 37,000 is fantastic. Don’t know how to “do” Twitter? Learn how, then follow @ELCAyouth and @JJJ09 to start with (and add more as you go!). Most importantly, check out everyone who uses the phrase “#JJJ09” in their tweets to keep up on all the Youth Gathering news.
Highlights from Twitter this morning:
*As we were walking by a bus atop this morning, a young lady turn to us and said “thanks for being here, God bless you,”.
*Good Morning #JJJ09! Breakfast then learning center later. Very excited to learn about nola’s literacy & how we can help.
*good morning all #jjj09 attendees. we begin our day with prayer for all of you. do good work today in Jesus’ name and have a godly day
Twitter’s a great way to keep in touch, and you don’t even have to make an account anywhere to see what’s going on!
Update:
More Twitter highlights –
*read and played with kids, painted a school hallway, now I’m tired but so much more to do and see!
*About to head into the interaction center soon! Can’t wait to check out all the awesomeness in there!
*Check out Presiding Bishop Mark Hanson who will be at the Freedom School in the Interaction Center at 3PM!
Take a look at this introduction to the Gathering, courtesy of LutherTube by Brett Nelson:
In a variety of ways, the people of New Orleans are truly excited to see the youth of the ELCA arrive and prepare for their ServantLife events. The presence of 37,000 participants sets the stage for much-needed service work to be done on a massive scale.
The city has rolled out a red carpet for the ELCA youth. You may have seen my previous picture of the Welcome banners lining Canal Street and Convention Center Drive, but it certainly doesn’t end there.
Even the Hard Rock Cafe has entered the game with a limited edition Youth Gathering commemorative pin. By the time you read this, they may have already been sold out, because they had sold 90% of their 500-piece printing by Tuesday night.
The New Orleans Times-Picayune ran an article today describing the arrival of all the Jesus, Justice, Jazz youth, who “filled more than 70 hotels to capacity and engaged the services of 300 buses” in New Orleans.
But perhaps most telling are the words of the New Orleanians themselves. Conversations, blogs, and Twitter are abuzz with comments overheard on the streets of New Orleans: “The Lutherans are here.”
Tomorrow, all the preparatory work begins to pay off in service to the people of New Orleans–God’s work, our hands.
UPDATE:
I’ve been sent two more news articles from Louisiana’s WWLTV:
City Flooded with Teens Giving…
Lutheran Convention (video)
Groups at the Youth Gathering tend to bring really cool shirts. You can check out some of the early-bird entries at the Gathering Shirts gallery, which will be updated throughout the week.
I learned something new this morning. Actually, I’ve probably learned all sorts of new things since arriving in New Orleans, but I’ll limit myself to just this one. You may be familiar with the song “Lions,” aka “Th
e Slinky Song.” By now, it’s a pretty standard camp song that everyone who goes to a church summer camp will sing at some point in their lives. (If you’re not familiar with it, then you can thank me for providing this link to a Youtube clip.)
But like me, you may also have wondered all your lives: Why on earth do we yell, “Slinky!” in the middle of it? Let’s face it, that song has nothing to do with Slinkys. The theme is lions. Lions and eating and no way, baby sung in the lowest possible octave you can muster. And like me, this pressing question may have kept you awake through the long, dark watches of the night, gnawing at the edges of your mind.
Well, no more.
For today, the mystery is revealed to you. (Here’s the part where I started learning things this morning.) This particular camp song was written, I’ve discovered, by none other than Lost and Found–the very same group that, a few blog updates ago, I described having just heard for the first time. And Lost and Found wrote “Lions,” and they saw that it was good. But they thought that it might be better with a nifty sound effect thrown into the chorus, and they decided to put in the sound of a Slinky expanding and contracting: “They can eat my body, but they can’t *Slinky noise* swallow my soul, no, no, no…”
And so they began to do this at live shows, and people saw that it looked fun. So the Lost and Found fans began to bring their own Slinkys so they could slink along with the song. And Lost and Found saw that it was good. So instead of slinking their own Slinkys on stage–and here’s where the history gets made–they began to just call out “Slinky!” at the appropriate time, and everyone would slink their hearts out.
And as this song made its way to church camps everywhere, they kept the “Slinky!” call. But campers don’t often bring Slinkys to camp, so an entire generation has been trained to yell about Slinkys without knowing why.
But now, as Paul Harvey would say, you know…the rest of the story. Good day!