When
I look over my time at the Disciple Project I cant help but smile. This
week long learning intensive was a time for exploration, discovery and
networking. Being from New Orleans I do not find many Lutherans. When I
tell people that I am a Lutheran, they ask me “What’s a Lutheran?” as if
it is some sort of drink you order at Starbucks.
To be at a Lutheran University with over a hundred Lutheran people surrounding me was nothing but pure joy. For the first time since the national youth gathering in 2009 people of the same faith surrounded me. Because so many Lutherans encircled me, it gave me the prime opportunity to network and meet other young adult Lutherans from the Texas-Louisiana Gulf Coast Synod and from the National ELCA office. This opportunity for networking was more of a blessing than I could have ever imagined; and for that I am truly grateful.
I did not know what to expect coming into this experience. I did not know how much I would learn, how many amazing people I would meet or how much my faith journey would be enriched. My track during this week long exploration was “Growing Disciples in a Digital Age”. We learned what it means to grow in faith formation with the help of technology. As cheesy as it sounds, technology is the wave of the future. If you want to be connected with what is going on in the world today, you must be involved with e-mail, or other forms of social media. If we want to continue growing our church we must embrace the different forms of social media that are out there.
It is so easy to access different systems of social media. There is more out there than even I knew about. I think to think of myself as being “social media literate”. Boy I tell ya, there is so much more out there than even I could have dreamed of. One of the main tasks we learned how to do was to develop a website, so that way we could bring it home to our churches and help them improve their own websites. Learning how to develop website was one of the easiest, yet overwhelming experiences I have been through while being an intern with LEAD. If you want to create a website, the step by step instructions are not the hard part to learn, it is the Pandora’s Box of information out there at your access that is a bit over whelming to absorb and comprehend.
Change is hard, especially within the church setting. It is also one of the most important parts of a church’s future. It will be a slow process, but in the end it will be rewarding more than our wildest dreams.
To be at a Lutheran University with over a hundred Lutheran people surrounding me was nothing but pure joy. For the first time since the national youth gathering in 2009 people of the same faith surrounded me. Because so many Lutherans encircled me, it gave me the prime opportunity to network and meet other young adult Lutherans from the Texas-Louisiana Gulf Coast Synod and from the National ELCA office. This opportunity for networking was more of a blessing than I could have ever imagined; and for that I am truly grateful.
I did not know what to expect coming into this experience. I did not know how much I would learn, how many amazing people I would meet or how much my faith journey would be enriched. My track during this week long exploration was “Growing Disciples in a Digital Age”. We learned what it means to grow in faith formation with the help of technology. As cheesy as it sounds, technology is the wave of the future. If you want to be connected with what is going on in the world today, you must be involved with e-mail, or other forms of social media. If we want to continue growing our church we must embrace the different forms of social media that are out there.
It is so easy to access different systems of social media. There is more out there than even I knew about. I think to think of myself as being “social media literate”. Boy I tell ya, there is so much more out there than even I could have dreamed of. One of the main tasks we learned how to do was to develop a website, so that way we could bring it home to our churches and help them improve their own websites. Learning how to develop website was one of the easiest, yet overwhelming experiences I have been through while being an intern with LEAD. If you want to create a website, the step by step instructions are not the hard part to learn, it is the Pandora’s Box of information out there at your access that is a bit over whelming to absorb and comprehend.
Change is hard, especially within the church setting. It is also one of the most important parts of a church’s future. It will be a slow process, but in the end it will be rewarding more than our wildest dreams.
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