Adventure

INGREDIENTS

•  group of young people
• 1 extended block of time
• 1 setting without distraction
• 1 interactive adult for every 8 young people
• 1 challenge to accomplish
• Pinch of caring and love
• Pinch of support and encouragement
• Dash of awareness of Christian connectedness
• Fantasy and initiative-to taste

Mix ingredients together and stir well until blended. Knead slowly. As lumps arise, knead them gently but do not leave mixture unattended. Cook until done. Do not overcook! Check it periodically. Add fantasy and initiative as needed.

After the Adventure is done, let it cool. After it is cool, taste and savor. As the Adventure is digested, be aware that what we eat today is what we wear tomorrow. If the Adventure has been prepared properly, it is quite nutritious, and large servings are recommended.

This is the basic recipe. Note that the cook is only one important part of the whole process, and great care must be taken to ensure that no ingredients are omitted or overused. If the cook is not attentive, the mixture will become hard and crumble, or the ingredients will separate and turn sour. But with luck and care, everything will come together to form a most unforgettable, savory, Christian Community Adventure.

Developing a Christian community is like putting a recipe together. All the ingredients are important, and the cook must take great care with the recipe. Community building and the recipe analogy are different in that the group of young people and the cook are not only the parts of the recipe, they also partake of the food produced. The final outcome also needs some explanations.

Life Stories

First, the group members-including the adults need to feel free to share their own life stories. In sharing our life stories, we come to understand others; and in making new life stories together, we become a part of each other's stories. In learning about and sharing this history, we begin to see our connectedness.

The challenge of accomplishing a task or a goal is what allows us to share ourselves. The challenge cannot be accomplished by any one person. Each individual is needed. We realize another person's uniqueness by working on a challenge together.

Whether it is playing a game, resolving a problem, finishing a social action project, figuring out a Bible passage, or working on who is washing dishes and who is cleaning bathrooms, several things must happen to attain the goal. In sharing ideas, people begin to recognize commonalities and differences. Different individuals give their talents in order to accomplish the goal, in the meantime, the individuals are sharing themselves. The challenge is the vehicle by which the group makes memories together, and personal and group history is developed. It is in these memories that we become a part of one another.

Challenge

When the focus is on the challenge, people forget themselves. They must share their real selves in order for the group to achieve its goal. Masks and barriers drop; what is being shared is the whole person, raw edges and all. The members of the group can tell when someone is giving less than his or her real self.

The final aspect of the community building happens after the goal is reached. The group must be allowed and encouraged to "debrief" the activity. They need to process what happened throughout the challenge. Who made what decisions? How was the goal reached? Who led, who followed, and why? The "why?" question may be one of the most important. Whether it is why the group took a particular direction in achieving the task, or why someone did not contribute, or why someone felt the way he or she did, all of this leads to understanding. As these feelings come out and the group takes apart the process of how and why the task was accomplished as it was, the event and the people become more a part of each participant. The interrelatedness of the situation and the people comes to light.

Diversity

In the debriefing the leader can highlight some scriptural connections, to deepen the whole experience. The most obvious biblical foundation is the passages on the body of Christ: 1 Corinthians 12. In sharing a task and accomplishing a goal as a group, we become aware of the gifts each individual has to offer to make the group work as one. Attitudes about our interrelatedness are also found in Romans 12. It is in sharing these parts of ourselves that we not only recognize the gifts of others and the need for others, we also see the Christ in each other. John 14 adds the aspect that the actual connections for all of this come to us through the Holy Spirit.

The leader must be an enabler and a questioner, a part of the group and a challenger, a counselor and a pastor. But all this must be done with the attitude that the more the group can grapple with and discover and realize on their own, the more those discoveries will become a part of who they are as individual Christians and as an identifiable Christian community. The leader must help the group discover its diversity, its sameness, its brokenness. and its Christ-likeness.

Lock-In

At a lock-in all this may happen in the course of several hours. But at a retreat or conference, different aspects will happen at different times over the course of several days. Some of the interactions may happen on their own, and other aspects will have to be brought out by the leader. It is important that whatever the length of the event, after debriefing has happened, the event must be closed, packaged, and digested as an event that cannot and will not be repeated ever again, and at the same time the experience has become a part of every participant.

When a group can have the extended, intentional time together that a lock-in, retreat, or conference allows, closure to the entire experience becomes very important. The group has done the task (even an uncompleted task or goal is a situation for learning about failure and how a Christian community deals with that), debriefed the inter-workings, recognized the connectedness and disjointedness of its members, and can now seal the experience through a time of worship and sharing a common meal. Communion is the ultimate way and symbol of our recognizing our differences, our sameness, our need for each other, our brokenness, and our wholeness. An agape meal serves a similar purpose when an ordained minister has not been a part of the process.

Communion

The two words "community" and "communion" say exactly what has happened: Through sharing ourselves as individuals to make a group and in bringing that brokenness and wholeness together we are recognizing the common-unity we share and the common union we have as God's children in Christ. We need one another! We must be willing to share ourselves and risk showing our rough edges to become whole persons in Christ-we cannot do this alone.

Community

The final hope of any community-building activity is that in sharing and developing a community, we begin to recognize the transfer that must take place. The community we can develop at a lock-in or retreat is a community that tangibly does not last and cannot be repeated. But in the experience, the memories that become a part of each individual are a gift from God. We become a part of each other taking a bit of each other with us. It is in each community experience that we begin to see the community that does last forever. We are all a part of it, now and forever!

Community building is a gift ... a gift from God. It is recognizing our sameness, differences, connectedness, and it is celebrating all of this. It is recognizing that Christ is the greatest ingredient and the community builder.

In the biggest and best recipe for a Christian Community Adventure, we are all the ingredients. God is the master chef - mixing, kneading, blending, molding, and shaping the final feast of which we are all a part and of which we all partake.