Building Beloved Community — An Invitation into Relationship with Young Adults
by the Rev. Gretchen Roeck
Over the past eighteen months, in the middle of the pandemic, 30 young adults, ages 18 to 24, gathered over 200 of their peers. In small groups, in person and online, they came together to talk about life, love, calling, and discernment about God, faith, identity, and belonging.
Young people today face a loneliness crisis. Seventy-five percent of American adults report they experience moderate to severe loneliness — and that was before the pandemic. As followers of Jesus, we know that God’s dream for us is Beloved Community, not social isolation. All human beings deserve to flourish in a community where their giftedness can bless others.
The Small Groups Internship invites young people from across the eight dioceses of Province VI — Colorado, Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming — to create small group communities in their local contexts, communities that combat the loneliness epidemic. We do this by empowering them to lead through listening, guiding the group through questions, and building spaces where people can be their whole, authentic selves. In short, we empower them to build the Kingdom of God and be Jesus’ hands and feet in the world. We are empowering them to be the church without walls.
We need you to continue this work. We need you to invite the young adults in your life — those inside and especially those outside the church — to join this movement. Young people can be hard to find in our churches. But it’s not that they don’t need the church; they just need the right invitation. Two young adults from Colorado have already participated, and more are waiting to be asked. In addition to supplying empowerment, this internship is about accompaniment. God calls us to walk alongside our young people — not to teach them, but to be with them — to listen and reflect and ask good questions. Our young people need us to show up for them, even if that’s just asking how they’re doing. So please, check in with the young people in your life, show them that they matter, and offer them the opportunity to do that for others. A life guided by faith is a life lived in community. God’s love is found and experienced in relationships. Kate Saunders, a young adult intern from Iowa observed that we “will all reap the benefits … when everyone recognizes the beauty and importance of the beloved community being created.”
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THE REV. GRETCHEN ROECK is the Priest Associate for University Episcopal Community in Minneapolis, MN.
The Province VI Small Group Internship is led by the Rev. Gretchen Roeck and Steve Mullaney out of the Episcopal Church in Minnesota. For more information, visit: universityepiscopalcommunity.org/internships or contact Elizabeth Cervasio, Missioner for Children, Youth and Campus Ministry for the Episcopal Church in Colorado at 720.677.9018 or elizabeth@episcopalcolorado.org.
