Anniversary Story-Seeking

This summer and school year, I’m the Service-Learning Center's 50^th Anniversary Research & Project Coordinator, a title more or less made up, like my position, like a lot of my work. I’m figuring out how to honor the Service-Learning Center’s first fifty years. So far, that’s involved organizing old files, perusing historical documents, books about service-learning, and articles about Christian education; googling alumni, digging through archives, interviewing former staff members, writing web copy, sending out surveys, pestering people to complete them, and transcribing hours of recordings. 

I’m a lover of structure and clarity in a very open-ended job, which has frustrated and challenged me, humbled and empowered me. I've had to ask for help and advice frequently. I've had to trust my instincts and follow through on ideas. I've been gutsy and also wildly inefficient, and I've generally felt somewhat intimidated by the tasks before me, undefined as they may be.

The Service-Learning Center has a powerful legacy. It’s been a community, a resource, a family, a home, a launch pad, a safe place, a starting point, and so many other things to so many people I respect and admire. Articulating that legacy, honoring it, feels like a fairly weighty task. It’s already hard to talk about the ideas that drive this place: justice, peace, presence, community, sustainability, shalom. We use those names to frame phenomena we don’t know how to describe, to talk about the often so intangible acts of kingdom-building that comprise our purpose in this life. Language is just a container for the dynamic, collaborative soul of this place that is not a place at all—it’s not the Commons Annex that forms the S-LC. It’s the people who are there and who have been there and who have built and absorbed a culture that changes with them.

I, as the 50^th Anniversary Research & Project Coordinator, have to find some way to articulate that culture, to ask good questions about that culture, and to do it all with some semblance of grace and concision.

But to do that well, I have to find the stories of people to whom the S-LC has mattered. I have to tell those stories with the same honesty and feeling they show, which means I have to really listen, and follow the threads of narrative backward and forward. The anniversary is about our history, but it’s also about the future, and the kind of chapters that have already been foreshadowed. So I’ll spend the next ten months or so teasing out the story, as faithfully as I can.

Any assistance is appreciated.

Shalom,

Katie Van Zanen.

Agency

Last week our summer student staff met with the summer orientation staff for one of our regular professional development sessions. The topic was the Reformed Identity of Calvin College, which was established from the beginning as “messy.” One of the foci of our conversation was the question of our agency in the process of redemption, something about which Calvin’s vision statement makes some claim when it says that “Through our learning, we seek to be agents of renewal in the academy, church and society.”

This got me thinking about what it is that we hope for students who go out into the communities of this city/country/world to do service-learning. To what degree are these people agents for God’s redemption in a broken world in the short time they spend serving there? In the four years I’ve worked professionally in the Service-Learning Center, this question has been a compelling one that I come back to perennially. One of the keys here, I think, is the phrase “Through our learning…” which qualifies our claim of agency.

So, what does this mean for students who might spend an afternoon stocking a food pantry for StreetFest? Or a week encountering the complexity of coal mining’s impact on Appalachian communities? Or a semester tutoring an English language learner at an urban elementary school? Or many hours interviewing community members for an ethnographic study in Peru?

My hope is that at the conclusion of each student’s experience, they might view their situation through a lens of shalom. Imagine what this place would look like in the fullness of God’s kingdom. Each person encountered would be living an abundant life, expressing their unique giftedness as an image-bearer of God. Relationships would be restored in such a way that each interaction contributes to the other’s flourishing. The flora, fauna, and built environment would all declare the glory of God. True shalom will be even greater than we could possibly hope or imagine.

But our communities are far from this vision of shalom. They are broken, fallen. Comparing our actual experience to the kingdom can help illuminate further questions: Has my service done anything to alleviate the brokenness here? How are people and organizations working towards renewal? How does the sin that affects all of my daily actions (and inactions) contribute to the brokenness I’ve seen? What is my agency in the fallenness of our world?

We trust that in spite of overwhelming brokenness in the world, Jesus Christ has power over sin. Through his resurrection, he will prevail in the redemption of this world. We may feel powerless, on a tiny boat about to capsize amidst torrential downpours, hurricane force winds and monstrous waves. But if we lift our eyes in search of the horizon hidden behind the storm, we may see a ghostly figure amidst the squall. That person, who with a word from his lips can command the rain to subside, the wind to cease, and the waves to still, beckons us to step out of our boat and walk towards him through the storm.

It is not in our own power to walk on water or to calm the storm, but with the power of the risen king behind us, we can step towards shalom.
-Noah

Urban Experience

Yesterday (Thursday, July 19), 231 incoming freshmen, along with their families, arrived on Calvin’s Campus to partake in Calvin’s orientation program, PASSPORT.  I think I may be feeling some of the same things as these freshmen and their families not because I’m going to college for the first time, or because my kid is going to college for the first time (though that is a really scary thought), but because I will be leading 6 of those 231 students on a special orientation trip today through July 26.

This new orientation trip is loosely modeled after the wilderness orientation trips, but will take place in Grand Rapids’ Creston Neighborhood and has the mission to “introduce new Calvin students to the ongoing efforts of partner organizations in the Grand Rapids area to do God’s work in the word and in Grand Rapids.”  This program has been one of the main projects I have been working on at the Service-Learning Center this summer.  But I’m not the only one to work on this project.  Thankfully, other students and staff have been working on the project proposal and setting up some of the basics for the week.  I only had to pick up where they left off and carry this project through completion.

Only. It’s been a lot more work than I thought it would be.  There are so many little details and logistical points to think through.  This is the first time our office has ever done an extended orientation program and I’ve struggled with trying to remember what it’s like to be an incoming student; to not know anyone at Calvin and to be experiencing Calvin orientation.  I know the Service-Learning Center and reflection materials like the back of my hand, but orienting new students to what college life is like?  Giving them the tools they’ll need to be successful at Calvin?  I can only hope and pray that I can fulfill this part of the trip.

In the S-LC we talk a lot about experiential learning.  I even spent last semester in Thailand as part of an experiential learning study abroad.  I love it.  And I love what this experience has already taught me.  Sure the week hasn’t started, but I have spent the past 46 days meeting with agency partners, Calvin faculty and staff, brainstorming ideas for T-shirts and ordering them, going on walking tours of the neighborhood and creating a reflection/reading.  I can’t wait to see what this week has in store.

Hannah Bechtold
Urban Experience Coordinator

In a Just World

Reflections on 'Vision,' in the document From Every Nation

Today, I read a section of the From Every Nation (FEN) document, which was released in 2004 as a "comprehensive plan for racial justice, reconciliation, and cross-cultural engagement at Calvin College."  The particular section I perused is called 'Vision,' and focuses on a vision of shalom in a multicultural community.

Each day as I stroll into work, I pass a poster representing the Multicultural Student Body of Calvin College.  There are faces in shades of peach, tan, olive, and golden-brown smiling widely at the camera, attached to bodies with arms wrapped around shoulders and waists.  They are unfailingly happy, perfect in community with one another.  What I'd like to tell you is that in this poster, I see a realized vision of the Kingdom of God.  Instead, I see an attempt to portray a Calvin College that does not exist.  We are not a community in which every person, no matter their ethnicity, culture, race or background, is accepted without difficulty.  Calvin is just like any other human institution: even with good intentions, it cannot achieve the perfection portrayed in that poster without a considerable amount of dedication to a goal, and the determination to complete it. 

In order to work toward the Kingdom of God, in which justice and shalom reign, we must first see ourselves not as we wish to be, but as we are.  By our nature as human beings, we are flawed.  Sin corrupts all we do.  Knowing this, we can address the conflicts, tensions and negative emotions that arise within the diverse community at Calvin College.

There are two ways to address tensions within a community.  The first is in the relationship between two individuals.  Even sincere and wholly self-aware Christians can fall into racism or prejudice when they fail to let go of pride in favor of cherished personal identities.  For some, this is due to a feeling of cultural superiority.  This feeling leads to prejudice against those perceived as 'inferior.'  In order to heal this prejudice, we must learn to take each person as they come.  This does not mean that we ignore the color of their skin or the background from which they have emerged - it simply means that we set aside preconceived notions in order to have an unclouded lens through which to see another person.  For others, a sense of injustice due to racism or other forms of prejudice plays into an inability to work toward shalom between individuals.  In both cases, these feelings must be put aside in order to truly engage with people from every tribe, language and nation.

The second way to work toward a just community is to grapple, as a unified group of believers, with the conflicts that arise.  We must together affirm the strengths of diverse traditions and cultures, and work to strengthen the weaknesses of the community in hope and preparation for change and renewal.  No single person or ethnic group can fully represent the Kingdom of God, and so we must become a diverse yet unified community always working toward a more just society.

Julia Hawkins
Summer Office Intern

Being Present Today

This morning when I woke up and looked at the date I could hardly believe we are already half-way through April! Where has this year gone? It seems like only yesterday we were sitting together as a student staff writing our covenant. I remember sitting in that room and being in complete awe of my co-workers. I realized I was surrounded by an incredible group of people and I couldn’t wait to get started with the year. Now, as I sit here and write this I cannot believe that our year is coming to a close. We have a month left and I know it will fly by. But as this year comes to its end I am starting to feel torn and a little bit confused.

As could be said by every member of our staff, the next four months are coming with a lot of change. For many, they are graduating from Calvin and are looking at the next phase of life, for others we are coming back to Calvin, but in a completely different way. For me, I will be student teaching. I am still a student at Calvin by my time on campus will be limited next school year and my year will look much different from my previous years at Calvin. With this being said, I find myself struggling with the idea of presence and what it means for me to be present in this community while continually looking forward and preparing for the community I am about to enter in to.

In our covenant we dedicated four questions to the idea of presence. Each one deals with a different aspect of this idea but the one that I am continually asking myself is the second question, “What does it mean to be fully present in a place? What does it look like?” This is what I continually come back to. What does it mean for me to be present in this office and in the broader Calvin community while also preparing myself to leave? How do I remain fully present here while anticipating my soon move to an entirely new community?

I have been asking these questions for a while now and have yet to reach any sort of conclusion. I have no idea. But, isn’t that what our covenant is all about, living the questions? I can honestly say I am living this question every second of each day. But I also know that I do not walk this journey alone. This past summer a friend of mine introduced me to this prayer and I find it fitting with where I am today:

May today there be peace within. 

May you trust God that you are exactly where you are meant to be. 

May you not forget the infinite possibilities that are born of faith. 

May you use those gifts that you have received, and pass on the love that has been given to you. 

May you be content knowing you are a child of God. Let this presence settle into your bones, and allow your soul the freedom to sing, dance, praise, and love. It is there for each and every one of us.

This simple prayer by Mother Theresa reminds us all that we don’t need to worry, because we are where God wants us to be. So how do we remain present when we are soon leaving? I don’t know. But I do know and take comfort in the fact that God is walking this journey with us and although we are at a crossroads, He knows what will happen next. So, to my fellow staff members who I now lovingly call friends, may you find peace within and may you know that you are where you are meant to be. And even with all the uncertainty that comes with a new phase of life, you will continue to be exactly where God has meant for you to be.

~ Ana

Chris Appreciation Day 2012

Hi, my name is Cameron, I work in the S-LC. This is my first time posting on the blog.

There are so many things to say, about the Service-Learning Center, about the folks who work there, about faith and justice, about struggle. I could right a hundred posts, but you'll all have to settle for just one for now.

To begin, the leadership in the S-LC is the best there is at Calvin (probably the world). Noah and Megan Kruis, Fondse, Jeff Bouman. These names should forever be remembered in Grand Rapids for their commitment to service and student growth. For those of you who don't know, the S-LC has the most autonomous student leadership at Calvin. We do such a good job because we have great mentors and role models in the office to walk by our sides.

I am relatively new to the "official" staff members here. I was a transportation assistant last year and last semester, but was "promoted" in January. I always knew how special the office was, and how wonderful and close the community of students working there seemed to be. Now that I am officially in on all the fun, I have experienced their love and warmth first hand. (I apologize, to my co-workers, at my seeming inability to reciprocate this warmth sometimes.) I could list a thousand examples of this love, but I will keep it to just one (maybe two).

This week, in the S-LC, we planned the annual "Chris Appreciation Day." Chris is our lovely, beautiful, brilliant secretary. As anyone will tell you, she runs the office. She keeps all our schedules, she knows where everything goes, and the majority of the time when a student walks into the office and Chris ISN'T there, we look dumbfoundedly at the student and say, "Chris will be back soon?"

She totally makes it all hang together, and the self-consciousness of this fact in our office is a matter for rejoicing. We all know we couldn't do it without her, so once a year the student staff puts together a day, a random day, to show their appreciation for Chris. I won't divulge the details of this year's operation because she may be reading (she keeps up on everything). But I will say that I am very excited. An email went out last night discussioning ideas, with requests for a number of tasks to be done in preparation. The first three emails in the chain after this initial "request" email were essentially, not verbatim, "Oh yeah, I'll do that." "I'll do that." "I'll do that."

It was INSTANTANEOUS. I read them this evening and was FLOORED at the out-pouring of love and service. You' think in an office of what, 15? that somebody would be thinking, "Hmm, I'll let someone else do that." But no, not here; already busy students jump at the opportunity to serve a co-worker. I was inspired and uplifted, and to be honest a little shamed. I don't think I would have been able to do that. The more I interact with these wonderful, beautiful, lovers I am challenged to change and to grow.

And again, this all goes back to leadership. We have some darn good bosses. Can I get an amen?

Another quick example. Last meeting Jack Organ (you know him, you love him) suggested that we all start hugging each other upon entering the office. His rationale, "Well, you need 20 hugs a day to be healthy." Like it's a fact! What other office does that? What office would be comfortable doing that?

This post could have, probably would have been, a theological mess, from a person filled with doubt and struggling to see God in the everyday. I could have rambled about my personal story or my struggle this week with not seeing God. Or I could have LIED and written about how wonderful God is and how important it is to pray and fast and all that. But I didn't have too. I was genuinely struck this night by the human love I saw out-poured because of the pursuit of Jesus.

And I got to thinking, maybe that's the point. Forgetting for a second the fallacies inherent in most theology, the problem of evil argument, the actual problem of evil in the world, doubts about God's presence, and about his plan, forgetting all that "heady" stuff for a second that we (I) so easily get caught up in, and focus on these simple actions by these Christ followers. What an inspiration. It makes me think that the Gospel might essentially be about action, not merely conviction.

Quantifiable Justice

Can we count or weigh justice? For the purposes of this discussion, let’s first agree on what justice means. How about this: Justice is correcting something that’s not right. Alternatively, justice is giving something what it deserves. Yes?

Consider justice in context. Say you’re driving to office one morning and an elderly lady is crossing the street rather wobbly. (You're actually running late because your dog ate the project proposal that you were supposed to present that morning.) Your vehicle is approaching her but she’s still struggling. Suppose that granny wasn’t using a pedestrian crossing, how would you respond? (a driver’s rights may vary in different jurisdictions, but assume you have the right of way.)

Whatever your response may be, you’d have probably consulted with your beliefs and/or values. Whatever your response may be, it is what you’d consider as a just reaction. Can that reaction, a just act given the circumstances, be quantified in any way?

Perhaps your dorm is serving at one of the local agencies, or maybe you have participated in an ABSL class or have went on a S-LC spring break trip. Can your service -- an act, or a series of acts, of justice -- be quantified? If yes, in what terms?

Or consider from a public health policy angle: Is it just to spend a few million dollars of tax money on a nation-wide vaccination program if it could only save 10 lives?

A Christian Student at a Secular University: Who Is My Neighbo[u]r?

This entry serves three purposes: 1) A break from reading some arcane 18C court judgments, 2) an opportunity to process the question on my mind since day one of my being at a major state university (note: ambiguity is necessary to avoid defamation lawsuits), and 3) an excuse to blog since I last blogged as a staff.

So what does it mean to be a Christian at a secular university? I have to get used to the idea that my worldview is the (lone) minority position. I suspect my experience might be very similar to those before me—especially those who are experiencing/have experienced the transition from Calvin to a state university. The only Christian voice, however, need not be silent. I just have to learn how to present myself in a language that the others understand. That’s not too bad. Sunday—according to my peers—isn’t a day of rest spent in worship. Sundays are used to recover from hangovers.

The Cupps mug equivalent over here is a booze mug. Granted it might be a cultural thing, yet many drinkers can’t hold their own. End result: missed lectures, and desperate visits to the doctors for screening, counseling, and scheduling medical procedures. If only condoms came with gospel tracks, or cars could detect alcohol. Not that such cases do not happen at Calvin, but it’s definitely fewer.

When I first set foot in a beautiful, prominent church one Sunday morning, I was surprised that there weren’t any more than 30 in attendance. Choose any two members of that church and their combined age would be greater than 120. Where are the younger people, I asked myself. Maybe I was at the wrong church. No, they are still in bed.

Calvin is truly a unique environment. I find myself in many conversations where I could talk about my faith, even challenge it.  It’s also somewhere where I hear people ask themselves such hard questions like “what’s my purpose in life?” and “why do good people suffer?” Calvin is a place where one’s intellectual, philosophical, and spiritual dimensions dovetail to receive some real prime-time attention for some imminent center stage action.

This morning in the bathroom, the janitor came in to collect the trash. I acknowledged his presence but he only came in to do his stuff. I thanked him for his work as he made his way out; he didn’t even make a sound. He came back in a few minutes later, “It was nice of you to say ‘thank you’.” That moment—a moment where the two-dimensional reading from a senior’s capstone seminar became alive in the very world that we have being wanting to reform and serve—made me realize that my neighbors are those whom I cross paths with. It’s that missing “u” in my “neighborhood.” Everyone is my neighbor. Ah, it’s so easy to associate with and stay close to those who share my worldview. Such brief moments, like the one with the janitor, might never come again, and any one of those moments might just be my last chance to love that neighbor.  

Who Is My Neighbor?

On Monday, I introduced the topic of community helpers to my kindergarteners with the help of my Uncle Jeff, a pilot, who came to visit. Later in the day we were discussing what a community is and how community helpers help those living within the community. We decided that our classroom is a community, as well as our school and our neighborhoods. We even defined our state, our country, and the world as larger communities.

Then, one of my students suggested that God was a community, or maybe part of one. "What do you think?" I asked. I wasn't sure how to respond. I sure wasn't sure what I thought. I wonder, as I believe my students do, Is God ever part of our human community? Does God want to be part of us, to "pitch his tent" among us, as Jewish tradition suggests? Or are we too presumptive, too bold to consider God, in some ways, as "one of us?" Perhaps we spend a disproportionately low amount of energy on the idea of God as a member, if not the most important one, in every and all of our communities. Perhaps we strive to remember and care for all of our human neighbors and we forget that God shelved his divinity to live as a person for awhile and desires the same commitment to him that we give to others. Or maybe that thought isn't differentiating enough between who is human and who is divine.

So, who has an answer for my kindergarten friends? Is God part of our community? Who is my neighbor?

A Better World

September is quickly wrapping up, with just a couple more days left. Many initiatives by the office are already happening, or completed. Some of these events include the successful completion of StreetFest, the first blood drive of the academic year that concluded last Thursday, the continued cultivation of community partnerships between residential dorms and their respective agencies, and students doing their Academically-Based Service-Learning at various neighborhoods in Grand Rapids. We sure have lots of real people doing real service.

I thought it would be a good idea to marry our two themes for this month, technology and communities, through this post. Announcing its latest program on the CNN last Wednesday, Google has put in place a $10 million program to fund ideas that have the potential to make this a better world. Check out this YouTube clip.



The “Community” category fits best with what we have been discussing this month. Maybe we should all sit down and proposal an idea?

Technology: Our Friend or Foe?

Technology brings people together. It shapes the way how we, of this (privileged) generation, interact with one another. Phrases like “Google that” or “Facebook me” pretty much grew up with us. We probably didn’t realize such phrases gained meaning only recently. Ask Shakespeare or Aristotle. Then ask your 4-year-old niece. Consider where you are right now on this planet, reading this blog. You probably don't know who its author is. In a way, technology unites people of common interests and promotes community. If online communities do exist, how should such online communal relationships be cultivated? Can technology function like strong and deep roots to keep relationships growing? Isn’t technology amazing and scary at the same time?

Technology can keep people apart too. Some people would rather text or Facebook message their friends even though they live just down the hall. Could this be a cause of many people's fear of public speaking? If so, how are advocacy and lobbying affected? For its powerful society-shaping potential, those before our generation either have to learn how to keep up with technology so to keep up with their children or grandchildren, or they are left sitting on the sidelines.

Thanks to technology, human communication received a facelift. Shakespeare could have been a billionaire when he was alive; Aristotle could have started an online school. Wow.

CAVEAT: I have nothing against Facebook. In fact, I occasionally use it to ask people to lunch... and perform counter-intelligence on identified stalkers.

How do we "read" neighborhoods and communites?

As a media production major, I have learned to "read" films in an entirely different way than I did prior to my studies. Where once I would have payed particular attention to the dialog and actions that compose any given film, I now take special notice of camera angles and camera movement, lighting, set design, the different layers of audio track, and the list goes on. In short, media production studies have immensely enriched film viewing for me, and more especially, have given me some new and powerful tools to analyze films as I discover new meanings that were previously hidden to me. This has led me to reflect some on how people might "read" communities and neighborhoods.

When we enter a new neighborhood or community, what do our eyes travel to, our ears tune into? How do we process the information in such a way as to deduce certain conclusions about the neighborhood or community? What structures exist already in our minds that direct the information that we take in towards certain conclusions? Do we process different neighborhoods and communities differently? That is, do we ever take in less information because we already have developed certain conclusions or assumptions in our minds?

I wonder, just as my film viewing experience was limited prior to my engaging in media production studies, could the same kind of thing take place in how I interact with a community. That is, is there a simplistic way to read communities as well as an enriched way to interact with neighborhoods and communities? If so, how can I develop this enriched way to understand new communities and neighborhoods? Media production is pretty straightforward, you take a series of classes with good teachers, and you are on the way to developing an enriched view of films. But what kinds of classes are there for living well in neighborhoods and communities? If not formal classes, then what?

Streetfest '07 Orientation (Video Clip)

Each year the Service-Learning Center at Calvin College organizes and carries out an event for new, incoming students called Streetfest. This event takes place over three days, with different groups of students each day. The general approach is to send students out into the community to local organizations where they can learn about the Grand Rapids community as well as serve that community. This event is a fast introduction to the rich and complex idea of service-learning, and certainly has its pros and cons. Each year the Streetfest coordinator develops a theme to center the event around, this past year Laura Wolff, the Streetfest coordinator, chose the theme of Revive, Restore, Renew (a play on the Reduce, Reuse, Recycle slogan). This video clip*me.

*Clip no longer available

Out of Silence and Into Silence

Often in the arena of justice and politics we interpret silence as oppression and marginalization. Undoubtedly, silence is often exactly that, a cue to the overt or implicit domination of a person or group of people in such a way that they do not even have the potential to contribute in a meaningful way to the society that they live in. I wonder, though, can silence ever represent something productive? I do not mean that the oppression or marginalization of a person or people could ever be productive, but rather, I wonder whether there could be other species of silence. Sometimes I think that for many people, including myself, spoken words act like a mirror, they remind me that I am alive and recognized by something other than my conscious self. Thus, in the anxiety of existence, we find ourselves chattering, so desperate to hold on to ourselves in this world. Perhaps what is necessary, though, is to be alert to the silence of the oppressed, who are all around us, and learn to make their silence our own. Thus by choosing to still our anxious tongues, we create a space for another to speak. What I imagine here is not the impersonal, faceless interactions of us and the masses, but rather the real encounters we have with other people throughout our day. This silence that we adopt is not the silence of oppression, merely the reversal of roles, but rather the silence that expresses itself as community. It is a silence that is bound up with words, each giving the other meaning, allowing a dialog to take shape.

Finding Meaning in Spaces

What determines the nature of the places we inhabit? At the end of my street, construction workers are tearing apart what used to be a hospital. The hospital recently moved further out into the suburbs to a new building, while their old building was to be demolished. In the past two sentences that I just wrote, I have used the word "hospital" in two different ways. In the first sentence, I used the term "hospital" to denote a building, while in the second, "hospital" refers to the collective community (staff, doctors, patients, and administrators). It is this ambiguity of the term that makes me wonder, do we understand a place through its architecture or the people and their work that happen to be in a certain building? I am inclined to say that it is the people and the work they do that gives a space its meaning. Whether it is a hospital, a school, a non-profit or a for-profit company, the buildings that populate the landscape of our lives, on closer inspection, derive their meaning from the communities within and around. This strikes me as remarkable. Human beings are architects of meaning through their daily work. In the case of the hospital that used to be at the end of my street, workers and patients infused the raw materials of that particular space with a significance and purpose beyond what any professional architect could have done. Now, the hospital has not been destroyed, but rather only relocated because the hospital is where the community is. This realization can be applied to any building that we recognize as operating for a certain function. It is incredible, really, that we recognize any particular building as performing a certain function (i.e. education, healing, worship, serving the community, etc), this is a radical testament not to the design or signage of the building, but rather to the work of the people inside and out.

Of Community

Human beings are chaotic and complicated. There is very little about the human being that can be reduced to a neat and easy model of explanation. Trying to seek out the motivation for any given action or thought often leads us on a trail backwards in our histories as we trace the elaborate series of events and people that have brought us to this present moment.
As human beings we find ourselves always afflicted and gifted with this thing called a past that has been formed through the communities and relationships we are always involved in. Have you ever noticed that human beings are perpetually in relationship to one another? The use of language especially testifies to this fundamental characteristic of life. There cannot be language in isolation from relationship between things capable of communication. Language can only take place in a world where there is at least a “you” and an “I.” Our near constant use of language then reminds us of our community-based existence. Sometimes we remain lifelong members of our communities, such as our families, and other times we migrate from one community to the next, such as the student bodies we belong to as we progress in our education, but always we are embedded in a web of relationships that form us and sustain us. Our identities, how we live, act, and think all bear the unmistakable fingerprints of this life in community, which we understand through what we call our past.
In each present moment, the past haunts us and helps us in each decision we make. That is, as human beings, we always seem to bring a particular perspective to any person or event. We are creatures conditioned by the communities and relationships we have been and are a part of, and they leave us with habits of thought and action.
In application, this means that when we participate in service-learning we are always coming to any given person, group of people, neighborhood, city, or situation with certain ideas and attitudes towards or about them. While we can and often do need to change the content of these ideas and attitudes that we carry with us, the general characteristic of being creatures perpetually in community, means that we are always going to be affected and guided by our past in how we act in the present and future. Our best recourse is to first understand exactly what it is we are coming with in our interactions with people and places. How do I perceive this person or neighborhood? Why do I perceive them in this manner? What experiences have I had with volunteering or acts of service that now govern the way that I engage in these acts of service? How do the religion, family, and neighborhood I have been raised in affect how I relate to this place or person(s)? How does the relationship I am now in with this person(s) and place leave me with new habits of thought and actions for the future? We are human beings, constantly involved in relational existence in this world, forever experiencing the present become the past, and the past affect the future.
Sometimes our histories within our communities leave us with wicked prejudices and opinions, and destructive behaviors towards the people and places around us. But sometimes our histories within our communities leave us with habits of compassion and nurturing, thoughtfulness and love towards the people and places around us. To answer the questions concerning how the past affects what we do, say, and think in the present does not always need to lead to being harshly critical of oneself, although it will likely involve that sometimes, rather the meaning resides in the larger task of realizing our humanness. We are limited human beings, forever with a past, present, and future, never stopping, always living and interacting in community.

1. What communities have you belonged to, or belong to now?
2. How do certain communities affect your habits of thought and action?
3. Can we, should we, escape the habits of thought and action we form in the communities we are members of?
4. For many of us, one community that we commonly belong to is the body of Christian believers throughout time, called the church. How do the traditions of the church equip us in our interactions with the people and places we will come in contact with through our experiences with service-learning? Are these traditions positive or negative?
5. How does your understanding of the degree to which you are deeply affected and guided by the communities which you have been a part of, in turn change the way you see others? Does this attitude cultivate a greater degree of graciousness, charity, and patience towards others when you realize that we are all deeply limited human beings?

Finally, the question of Now What? With the beginnings of an understanding of the habits of thought and action that our histories in communities and relationships have left us with, what do we do next?