Making room for dialogue with #thecovenantcrew

May 30, 2016 | Web First
Deborah Froese | Mennonite Church Canada
Winnipeg, Man.

UPDATE: Youth Assembly 2016 has been cancelled, due to a shortfall in the number of registrations. See here for more information. Youth who are not attending Assembly 2016 but wish to speak into the Being a Faithful Church and Future Directions Task Force discussions are strongly encouraged to have conversation with their congregation’s adult delegates so that their voices can still be heard at Assembly. Specially designed youth curricula can be downloaded from CommonWord. 

Husband, father of two, Anabaptist, activist and writer. That’s how Chris Lenshyn describes himself. He’s also an associate pastor at Emmanuel Mennonite Church in Abbotsford, B.C., and a keynote speaker for Youth Assembly 2016, God~Faith~People.

Lenshyn is looking forward to creating a wide space for dialogue with youth assembly participants. “Dialogue creates investment and wonderment and the ability to dig deeply into matters of faith and life,” he says. “Youth are perceptive, really perceptive.”

He will share his role with Reece Friesen, an associate pastor at Eben-Ezer Mennonite Church, also in Abbotsford. 

The assembly theme is based on paraphrased text from Jeremiah 31:33: “This is the covenant . . . I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.”

To truly live into that covenant, God’s people need to live in community. “It’s important to be together, but it’s tough to do that in real life,” says Lenshyn. “The reality is our youth are formed in the settings that we create and the context we create. We have lots of divisiveness that youth pick up on. It’s important to talk about what it means to be in covenant together and with God, not mutually exclusively but intimately connected.”

On his blog anabaptistly, Lenshyn explores “the messy collision between my context and Anabaptism” and offers his thoughts as “a record of my attempt to follow in the footsteps of Jesus.”

That raw honesty and his willingness to be vulnerable are inexorably linked to his passion for “animating a faith that pursues peace and justice in the world.” He credits his passion to his parents, whom he describes as “classic hippies in the 60s” who were deeply engaged with civil rights and justice. They shared a cultural Christian background rather than a faith-based one, but a moment came when they realized that Jesus’ way made sense. It captured their imaginations, and their response to Jesus deeply impacted Lenshyn’s life.

Lenshyn fondly recalls many conversations with his late father—he passed away two years ago—that helped inspire his own passion for peace and justice in what he describes as “that’s-why-Jesus-is-so-important moments.”

He encountered those kinds of experiences on his own too. The first residential school survivor Lenshyn heard speak during the June 2013 Truth and Reconciliation Commission event in Vancouver was a grown man who had encountered abuse at the tender age of six. The man wept at the mic as he shared his story. Lenshyn remembers, “It was traumatic, an ‘ah-ha moment’ for me, but it’s one I felt like I should have known about before.”

During his first pastoral placement, Lenshyn and his wife lived in the core area of Winnipeg. He recalls encountering a woman who lay on the street receiving medical treatment after an altercation. She died. “It was literally close to me, and it further reinforced the need for peace and justice, for shalom,” Lenshyn says. “Shalom is harmony, a community of Creation and everything being connected, peace with the environment and how we treat each other.”

Lenshyn is looking forward to hanging out with youth at Assembly and sharing perspectives through a program that makes room for as much dialogue as possible, including the use of social media with the hash tag #thecovenantcrew.

He notes that the issues on the table—the Future Directions Task Force report and the Being a Faithful Church conversation—profoundly affect youth and the future of the church. A special curriculum has been developed to help youth consider each issue prior to the assembly so that they can take part in discussions with adult delegates. 

“It’s important that they are there to talk about the best and worst of covenant and community. Doing community and life together amidst the warts and our frailties and vulnerabilities is worth it because of Jesus,” Lenshyn says.

See more on Youth Assembly 2016:
Youth invited to join #thecovenantcrew 
Keeping up with #thecovenantcrew
Pastor and artist brings passion for generations to #thecovenantcrew

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