Central Young Adult Travels To
" Youth in Mission" Summit
by Katie Stehly
Over Labor Day weekend I attended the Moravian Youth in Mission Summit in North Carolina. The weekend was sponsored by the Board of World Missions and headed up by Rt. Rev. Sam Gray, Rev. Will Sibert and Rev. Chris Giesler. Our mission for the weekend was to formulate a plan of action involving strategies for the BWM to implement and begin to get more youth involved in mission work. Back in July, the sixteen “quarter lifers” (as we cleverly identified ourselves as) were split up into four groups. Each group had a topic to research and present at the summit. My group’s task was to create a marketing scheme to draw the attention of youth into mission work. Our main focus was to create a website for the youth of the Moravian church, geared towards mission. While our site is still under construction, I encourage you to visit our current site at http://www.moravianyouthmissions.org/.
We developed a powerful mission statement:
“We, as the youth of the Moravian Church, feel it is our call to restore the Moravian church to its original foundation in Missions. The Moravian Church was formed based on their readiness to "take a deep breath, pause briefly, then launch themselves outward…sending themselves out to proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ. They clearly understood this as God’s call on their community, on their lives… as their very reason for being a church." We feel that our generation is being called to restore our roots in Missions; whether this be in the community, at school, across town or in another country. We strive to unite as brother and sisters, partners, in God's Great Commissioning. We, as Moravian Youth, want to launch ourselves outwards in order to represent not only our family of Moravians but our generation as well.”
Some of the ideas we came up with for the BWM were: to put a church school curriculum in place to teach about mission, to start a pen pal program with Moravians in another country, and items such as brochures and young adult representatives to speak about mission experiences. While there were many more ideas that saturated our brains, the weekend came to a quick end and we all returned to our respective homes. However, many of us went home, myself included, with a greater understanding and passion for what we want to do with our lives involving mission. Our favorite quote of the weekend came from a young man attending the summit, it refers to the youth of the Moravian Church; “we are not the future, we are the now!”
Special thanks to Katie Stehly, Central member and a junior history/education major at Elizabethtown College, for her enthusiasm and involvement in Moravian mission work both here at Central and in our wider Moravian Church.