For me, Christianity has always been a choice. I didn’t grow up in the church. Occasionally, my mom signed my brother and I up for VBS (1) where my grandmother went, and we only sat through an actual service at Christmas and a rare Easter, where I fidgeted and paid more attention to the necklines of itchy dresses than anything happening around me. All I had known of my future faith was a children’s bible with pictures that were a little scary, a constant press of boredom during sermons, and a mandatory attendance when at my grandparents’ place in NC.
It wasn’t until middle school that I ever voluntarily set foot in a church, and then, it was only because of my friend, Paige. Ever since we were children, kindergarten/elementary school age, Paige was someone I idolized. Her compassion, creativity, and confidence was infectious, and even as a kid, she walked into a room and commanded attention. She shined. She still does. It’s one of my favorite qualities about her. So, as a 5 or 6 year old, I orbited her, amazed and grateful that she had somehow found something she liked about me. Then, in middle school, she started going to youth group (2) at her church. Monday mornings, she bounced into class, describing for me games of Manhunt and Sardines, inside jokes with the idolized eighth-graders, and hanging out with Ben and Josh, two of our friends (one of whom I had a crush on). The only thing we didn’t talk about was the God part. So, to me, youth group with its junk food, games, and built in social structure felt like the mother-of-all recesses. Pure, teenage heaven. And Paige went, so of course I wanted to go too.
I find it funny to look back and realize that this is how my faith journey started - one friendship, a few conversations after which I definitely felt deep FOMO, and the desire to play. (3) I begged my parents to let me go to youth group, and somewhat bewildered, they agreed. Perhaps at first they thought it was just a phase, perhaps I thought so too. More likely, I didn’t think much about it. I just knew that my friends were there Sunday nights, and that’s where I wanted to be. Then it turned out that I loved it: the games, the community, the leaders who were invested in me. That’s what sticks with me most, as an adult, realizing how much love and attention and effort my youth leaders put into us. When you’re a kid - especially as you reach that older middle and high school age - true and genuine care from adults outside of your family means the world. Lifting younger people up and watching them grow, like how Sarah and Scotty did for me, has got to be the most rewarding part of youth work. I would say now, there’s a bit of God in that.
However, it would be almost a decade before I truly began to wonder about the nature of God. We talked about God in youth group of course, read scripture and did some of those youth-focused workbooks. At that point in my life though, it was only something to get through before you could go back to games. Again, now, I admire my leaders’ persistence - it is hard to try and tell youth all the things that would have made a difference to a younger you and look in their eyes and know that they’re checked out. But as a former youth, I also know that what mattered more than anything my leaders said was that they were there. This is what got me through the hard days of my own journey in youth work - they may not remember what I said, but they’ll remember that I was there, and hopefully, that I cared.
When I became a regular at my childhood youth group, Mom and Dad decided that we might as well start attending services at the church that took me in for two hours every week. Time passed, and they became members. My mom to this day still serves as an elder on session (4) at East Union Presbyterian Church (EUPC), and my family still routinely, if not religiously, attends services there.
It was over those months that something shifted a little for me. I cannot point to the exact event that I started to experience faith for the first time. Perhaps it was after one or both of the weeks spent at Crestfield, a Presbyterian summer camp in PA that I attended with Paige and my new youth group friends. Perhaps it was a scripture or a lesson or a question that stuck in my ear and sprouted over the weeks. Perhaps it was just being around a religious environment. I’m not sure. But a year or two after I started going to youth group, I wanted to go through the confirmation (5) process with my peers when that time came around. Excited about the idea of becoming an ‘adult’ in the church, I chattered on about taking the class to my mom.
She paused, setting down a dish that she was cleaning. “Well you haven’t even been baptized.”(6)
“What?” I was sure I had misheard her.
“You were never baptized, so we’d have to talk to Jo about it.”
“Was Kyle baptized?”
“Yes, we did it when he was born.”
“Then why not me?”
“I’m not sure, we just never did it,” she shrugged. I did spend a few weeks wondering over my parents’ decision and wondering what was different between my brother and I, for him to have been baptized but not me. I had never thought nor cared about it before. I was also a bit worried that I would no longer be allowed to participate in confirmation. However, when we went to one of my pastors, Jo, she said, “Well then it sounds like we’re having a baptism and a confirmation, as long as you’re okay with that.”
This was how I ended up being baptized at 13, surrounded by friends new and old, all of us, accepted in the church together. Looking back, I count this as an important part of my faith story. Christianity has always been a choice for me. It was Paige who helped to introduce me to my faith, but it was my decision to want it, to accept it. Once I did, I started to grow in it. In high school, I joined our church’s Praise Band and played fiddle alongside some amazing mentors and truly kind, empathetic people. I volunteered with my mother and other school friends during our own VBS. I got excited about our Youth Christmas Pageant that Jo always wrote incredible scripts for (the highlights include Star Wars and Narnia themed plays). And of course, I continued to attend youth group.
College then brought an entirely new shift in my life. I moved to Charlotte, NC and began my major in biochemistry. Suddenly, the small church community that I loved was gone, and I found the newness and the bigness of the city terrifying. (This is funny to me now, as Charlotte has come to feel both small and like home in its own ways). I also found freedom to explore ideas and activities that I had enjoyed back home or had no access to. Of the many clubs I’ve participated in over my four years, only two stand out now: Rotoract, a college branch of the Rotary Club focused on community service, and the Interfaith Leadership Council (ILC). See, I may have left my organized church at home but I found the two things I loved about it on campus: service with Rotoract and spiritual community, albeit a diverse one, in ILC. Of those two, it was interfaith (7) that won my heart.
The beautiful thing about doing interfaith work is that it is more challenging to understand each other. Christian ideas and stories that I had (very wrongly) assumed were universally known, such as the Trinity or the Resurrection or the Last Supper, were definitely not common knowledge for my friends of different faiths. Try explaining the ritual and religious significance of any one of those out loud and see if you don’t sound a little bit crazy. However it was exactly within that process of trying to explain my faith to someone else that I began to understand and wonder about it. Often, the wisest questions are those that come from other people, because they ask us to think in a way we never have before - from outside of our communities. At least, that is how I see it. Additionally, when I engage in interfaith conversations, I already know that I and whomever I am talking with are starting at a difference. Christianity and Islam are not the same; neither are Christians and Muslims; neither are all Christians. However, it is easier to recognize the diverse beliefs and values of other people when you know you have a different starting point. I am less likely to assume that my Muslim friend has the same values as me, so I am more likely to ask about them in order to understand her. The inverse is true about Christians. I find myself more likely to assume we all have the same values, and I am therefore less likely to ask. And when we don’t ask questions of ourselves, and more importantly, each other, our faith falls stagnant, and we can’t even begin to explain the basic tenets.
My faith, the Christian faith, does not exist in a vacuum and is not a monolith. There is diversity within and among believers and within and among beliefs. That is a beautiful, godly thing.
There came a point in my college career where I really questioned whether or not I wanted to be a Christian - not that I was but that I wanted to be. My friends of different cultures and faiths told me stories of missionaries cursing them to eternal damnation for not forsaking their communities, their families. I began to learn of the many ways Christians have used scripture to harm others - indigenous peoples, Africans, enslaved peoples, Jews, Muslims, Black people, atheists, agnostics, immigrants, and queer people - friends I have grown to love and care deeply about. Even in my own family - good, god-fearing Southern Baptists who have the stain of ancestral slave owners in our blood. This is something I wrestled with, as a white woman and as a Christian, and I began to get angry with the silence of the Church (8), the silence of the faith that proclaims love and justice but refuses to stand by people who are hurting if they don’t look the right way or believe the right things. I am still angry about this. I think I always will be. As a result, I almost left the Church. I couldn’t see the good in it anymore, couldn’t see the message of Jesus through the hate of his followers.
It was my work in interfaith that brought me back. Being around wonderful, kind, and faithful people - some Christian, most not - is what gave me hope for Christianity again. I have been touched by the words of Buddhists, guided by the advice of Muslims, found power in the resistance of Sikhs, and been amazed by the service of Mormons. I have been given incredible opportunities to travel, learn, and experience things I never expected - from visiting the Holy Land to celebrating Holi with the local Hindu Center. All along the way, I’ve gotten to know and befriend so many wonderful people who have become family to me, because they choose every time the uncertainty of knowing and loving me. And it is that difficult love that reminded me of God and of Christ.
So no, I didn’t grow up in the church. I’m not well-read in the Bible at all. It’s a sore point for me, and one of the reasons I want to go to seminary. However, I have read a lot of theology and philosophy. I have met with, conversed with, and grieved with a great many different people, and I came into Christianity as an adult, not as a child taught what others thought I should learn but as someone who questioned and read and formulated ideas and questioned again. Christianity was a choice. In the beginning, in the challenging parts, and in the future. I believe in the message of Jesus, of a God who loves all people so much that They (9) became and suffered as one.
My faith is due to the community who welcomed me as a teenager and the community who challenged me as an adult. It has been shaped by learning about Islam and learning from Muslims. It is an act of love I decide every day to try and live up to. Striving for a pluralist (10) world is my expression of Christianity. Everything I am cannot be separated from it. Everything I hope is tied to it. I changed my major and my career path to pursue it, because I believe in the necessity of loving and affirming others more than I’ve ever believed in anything else. In short, my faith is formed of many things from the words of Jesus to the kindness of those outside the Christian circle. And as we ask in interfaith work, what can I do to draw the circle bigger? There’s God in that.
Amen.
1. A common ministry for churches is to offer a week-long Vacation Bible School (VBS) in the summer to kids from the local community. It's geared towards children preschool age to about fifth grade and features crafts, games, snacks, and of course, Bible stories.
2. Many Christian communities and churches offer a Sunday evening youth-focused fellowship time where middle and/or high school students can gather, build community, and study the Bible.
3. This always makes me think of The Theology of Play by Jürgen Moltmann. I unfortunately have never gotten a chance to read it, because finding a copy is like going on a theological treasure hunt and every other pastor is Indiana Jones.
4. Elders are people elected within a specific church congregation to be leaders and representatives of that congregation. They serve in terms of 3 years and meet together with church pastors to make decisions on church finances, hiring practices, discipline, facilities, and anything else that would be pertinent to the community. This is called session and can rival the U.S. Congress in gridlock.
5. Confirmation is a process in which youth who were previously baptized by will of their parents can now accept their baptism on their own. This normally happens around late middle school/early high school age, and the youth must take a class in the history and beliefs of the church, make a public proclamation of faith, and be accepted by their church congregation as full members/adults.
6. Baptism is an important practice for Christians, for “in Baptism each Christian is set free from sin, marked as Christ’s own, sealed by the Holy Spirit, welcomed to the Lord’s Supper, made a member of the Church, and set apart for a life of service” (PCUSA Book of Order W-4.0201, 2019-2021). It is a ritual that involves being submersed in or sprinkled over with water, symbolizing Jesus’ own baptism and start of his ministry. Many Christians are baptized as children or babies, and it is often seen as the start of their journey as a Christian.
7. Interfaith describes the interaction between any two people of differing or no faith. It is not engagement across religions but engagement with someone from a different religious background, which can happen naturally in our daily life anywhere from talking to a coworker or running into a stranger at a grocery store. Interfaith work often puts people of different faiths together in a space for an intentional conversation or a collaborative service project. Whether you know it or not, you engage in interfaith interactions just by living in a religiously diverse country.
8. When I say “Church” with a capital “C,” I am talking about the institution of the Church in America with all the weighted and challenging history that it contains, from the Doctrine of Discovery to Manifest Destiny to the idea of ‘Promised Land’ and more. I am not talking about a specific church or congregation.
9. I am using “they” pronouns for God in this instance to identify God as something beyond humanity and therefore beyond human constructs of gender, especially in this moment where a “they” becomes a “he.” I think it shows a lovely progression in the story. Cole Arthur Riley, creator of @blacklitergies on Instagram and author of This Here Flesh does a wonderful job of varying pronoun usage when talking about the role of God in different stories. Her work inspires and challenges me to try it myself.
10. Pluralism describes a society in which every person is accepted and affirmed for their humanity and multiple identities. It is a way for diversity to be celebrated rather than just tolerated. The Civil Rights Era call to action of “Beloved Community” promoted by Martin Luther King Jr. would fit into the vision of pluralism.
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Hey y’all! Thank you for reading another long post. I have some personal updates on YAV. Woo!
First, I have officially received my work placement. For the next year I will be working alongside Lutheran Family Services - Refugee and Asylee. I am not quite sure yet what my responsibilities will be, but you can check out the organization at: https://www.lfsrm.org/programs-and-services/refugees/albuquerque/
Additionally, I will officially be starting my journey to Albuquerque on August 18th! My dad and I are taking a 3 day road trip out there. It’s crazy that I only have a week left at home. Virtual YAV orientation starts on August 21st, and I’ll be starting at my work placement on September 8th. The next blog post will be written sometime after that!
In other news, I will actually be speaking at my childhood church, East Union, on Sunday, August 14th. In giving the message, “Can Anything Good Come Out of Nazareth?,” based on John 1.43-49 and Luke 10.25-37, I will also be talking about my experiences in Northern Ireland, the Holy Land, and what I hope to gain from my year in with YAV. You can watch the service live at 9 am EST or afterwards at: https://www.facebook.com/EastUnionPCUSA
If you’re interested in diving further down the interfaith rabbit hole, this YouTube video from IFYC (Interfaith Youth Core now called Interfaith America) describes in greater depth the ideas of interfaith and pluralism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slwwRpC29XE&feature=emb_logo
Finally, for fun, I’ve also posted a poem of mine that I wrote back in February of this year. It is a similar theme to what I’ve talked about in my blog post, just a bit of a different format. Basically, I write all the time and have pages and pages of things I keep locked in a vault called Google Drive - maybe a book will come of it one day. :,) Scroll down if you’re interested in reading it.
Wishing you calm summer afternoons with a cool ice tea,
Allison
P.S. I want to say a HUGE thank you to Emily Sears who proofed both this and last month’s post. She reads the worst of it so you don’t have to (entirely for free!). Anyway Emily, I appreciate you very much. Sending love always.