YMJen

Tomorrow, my youth ministry will hold it’s largest fundraiser of the year, a Silent Auction, designed to raise money for our summer mission trip to Booneville, Arkansas.

In theory, it sounds like a great event – an event with the potential to bring together people from our family of Faith and give them an opportunity to enjoy one another’s company while supporting a worthwhile cause. It’s events like this one that enable our ministry to keep the cost of our potentially life-changing summer mission trip low enough for all our families to afford, something that I believe is incredibly important.

Despite knowing how important it is to make trips affordable, I struggle with this particular fundraiser a lot.

Because of the nature of this event, it’s difficult for youth to “own” it. They simply don’t have the skill set required to ask businesses to donate their goods and services. Those few students who are courageous enough to solicit businesses are usually not taken seriously by them. As a result, it’s up to parents & myself to solicit donations. What we’ve found this year is that businesses are hurting financially. So much so that it’s become difficult for them to generously donate to the plethora of events like this one held in our community.

This means that the bulk of our donations come from our own congregation. Thankfully, we have a talented community of artists in our congregation, many of whom donate their artwork to the auction. But we also have a lot of people who want to give generously & so they go to various stores, pay full retail price for items, and put together beautiful baskets.

Baskets, which unfortunately, we have to devalue in order to get people to bid on them. In fact, we have to devalue ALL the items that we receive – even the original artwork that people spend countless hours creating. At most, we start the bidding on an item at half its worth, hoping to raise maybe three-quarters of its worth once the bidding is complete. Though its a necessary evil of this particular type of event, this constant process of devaluing things is a part of this auction that I truly loathe. When we do this, what message are we teaching the very youth who we’re working so hard to raise money for?

I also struggle with the fact that for a Silent Auction to be a success, rather than encourage the discipline of simplicity, we must instead encourage people to consume material goods. We depend on our church family to attend the auction, to bid generously, and to buy our stuff, something that taxes the very group that has also generously donated items to the Silent Auction and diligently given their weekly offering to the church. Last year, I actually watched as parents donated baskets to the Silent Auction & then attended the Silent Auction & purchased those very same baskets again. Does that not seem absurd to anyone else?

But above all, I hate the theological message that the Silent Auction sends. I hate the fact that at the Silent Auction, I actually practice bad theology in order to raise money.

Its been a tradition in our congregation for the Silent Auction items to be set up in the narthex on the Sunday morning of the auction so as to allow people who won’t be able to attend the auction to consume anyway; To bid high in order to “win” their chosen items. Last year, we filled our narthex and our small chapel with items. The result? Pandemonium and a zoo-like feel after each service when people jockeyed for position to bid on their chosen items.

This on the morning when our lectionary reading was Matthew 21:12-13:

“Then Jesus entered the temple & drove out all who were selling & buying in the temple, & he overturned the tables of the money changers & the seats of those who sold doves. He said to them, “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer’ but you are making it a den of robbers.”

Oh the irony.

What would Jesus have thought of our tables & our merchandise set up on Sunday morning in His house of prayer? Would we have been driven out of His house of prayer by the one whom we seek to serve? By trying to raise money in order to make our mission trip affordable, have we really only taught students how to make Christ’s house a “den of robbers”?

These questions have only increased my struggle with this year’s Silent Auction.

Yet, because we have to raise money for our summer mission trip and because this Silent Auction is the “tradition” by which we do that, tomorrow, I will once again host this fundraiser and do all that I can do to make this event a success.

All the while I’ll be thinking, “There’s got to be a better way. There’s got to be a way to raise money while still practicing good theology.”

Once all the items are sold tomorrow, the money is counted, and the tables are torn down, I’ll start to search for that better way; And I’ll wonder – Did anyone notice the word left off of this year’s Silent Auction program?

Annual.

For several years now, I’ve used resources from Marv Penner and Megan Hutchinson to train my adult leaders on “Helping Hurting Kids.” This training is based on the premise that in the world of today’s teenagers, all kids are hurting.

I was reminded of this today when I received a Facebook message from one of my student leaders saying, “Jen, I don’t think I can come tonight. We have a family emergency & I have to go see my grandma, who’s in the hospital.”

After receiving this message, I immediately called this student and simply said, “Tell me about what’s going on.”

She took a deep breath and said, “It’s complicated.”

After several moments of silence, she then proceeded to tell me about how her grandma, who her family has only recently reconciled with following a several year estrangement, is now at death’s door. She’s been in the hospital for the last two weeks, battling lung cancer that’s metastasized throughout her body.

In that moment, my heart broke for this girl and her family: For the years they spent apart from one another; For a reconciliation that happened, but occurred too late for her grandma to recognize the incredible woman her granddaughter is becoming; And for my student’s mom who on top of dealing with her own grief, is now dealing with the guilt she feels over having kept her kids separated from her parents.

Life is, indeed, complicated.

So complicated, in fact, that there’s nothing I can do to fix this situation. There’s not even anything I can do to spare this student the pain that she’ll no doubt experience in the not to distant future.

All I can do is be present in her life and allow her to grieve, cry, and be angry, all the while reassuring her that those emotions are normal and that she WILL make it through this.

More importantly, I can also connect this girl and her family with Christ, not by spouting Christian cliches, but instead by reminding them that in Christ, we have a God who is present with us in the deepest and darkest hours of our lives, so much so, that he even weeps with us.

My small group is currently reading the book, “Take This Bread” by Sara Miles. In this book, Miles describes her journey to begin a food pantry at her church in California. She also talks extensively about how she experiences communion in and through that food pantry.

Though I’ve found much of Miles’ words to be thought-provoking, this weekend, as I led the 30 Hour Famine for the students in my youth ministry, I found myself contemplating some of her ideas in a new light.

In Chapter 14, Sara talks about the excess in our food system and remarks that “So many thousands of cases of bread are about to be wasted. So many tons of fruit are waiting to spoil.” She goes on to talk about how she makes “bread out of injustice” by “feeding the hungry with the excess of an unfair system.”

Though noteworthy, this idea seems far removed from the life I lead. The problem of hunger is vast and overwhelming, so much so, that I cannot even begin to comprehend how a normal person can really make “bread out of injustice” on an on-going basis. Yet, last week, I met a woman doing just that.

Lois is a member of our church whose ministry is “food rescue”. She works behind the scenes and I suspect that few people are aware of what she does. I found out about her when another member of our congregation suggested I contact her to see if she could help us acquire food for our Refugee Family Fun Day, a service event that we did in connection with the Famine where we invited local refugees to our church for a free meal, raffle, and a variety of activities. This was our first time doing such an event and we had no idea how many people to expect, making it difficult to determine how much food we’d need. When I told Lois about it, she was eager to help us “rescue” the food that we’d need for our event.

As I began working with Lois, I glimpsed the scope of this woman’s ministry.

Several times a week, Lois makes a circuit of Glen Ellyn’s local grocery stores and restaurants, picking up expired food that can no longer be sold. She then takes that food to a variety of organizations that can use it including homeless shelters, adult day-cares, a ministry for teen moms, a Veteran’s home and others. She takes the excess from our “unfair system” and repurposes it so that those in need can benefit from it.

For us, she acquired chicken and ground beef, breads, and an assortment of produce. Anytime she found something that she thought we’d be able to use, she’d bring it to the church and leave it for me. Then on Saturday, she arrived with her truck, filled to the brim with pounds and pounds of food that would have otherwise been thrown out. She let us go through it & choose the items that we still needed, reminding me, “If you have extra, send it home with people. If you still have extra, call me & I’ll take it to someone else who can use it.”

Because of Lois, on Saturday, the excess of an unfair system fed some 40 refugees and gave them leftovers to sustain them for a few days longer.

It’s tempting after an event like our Refugee Family Fun Day to point to our youth, who organized, prepared, and led this event and recognize them as heroes for serving an often forgotten group who literally live in their backyard. In some respects that would even be accurate. After all, they fasted for 30 hours to raise money and awareness to fight world hunger, all the while serving locally. Yet, they did this during a one-time event for 30 hours.

In contrast, Lois has identified an on-going problem and rather than be overwhelmed by it, she’s chosen instead to say “It’s not OK for this food to go to waste. Not on my watch.” So day after day, week after week, she sacrifices her own time in order to rescue food from stores and restaurants and give it to those who can use it for good. In doing so, she constantly makes “bread out of injustice”. And for this, Lois is truly a hero.