A Note from our Youth Director

Baptismal Identity: Missionary and Servant

In the Advent edition of the GPC newsletter, I noted our responsibility as the church to guide our youth in finding and understanding their baptismal identity. This means helping them to embrace their identity as missionaries and servants. Mission and service – often understood merely as instruments of the church – are in fact the very identity of the church.

In baptism, our lives have been turned upside down. Everything we do, even the most mundane, has taken on new meaning because it is done in and through our identity in Christ, who has brought His Kingdom into the world. Over time, we learn to sincerely bear witness to God’s Kingdom through mission and service.

Helping youth develop a missional worldview is not about placing them somewhere to serve, but about nurturing them to listen. There is tremendous benefit in traveling to unfamiliar territory in which we discover the necessity of depending on God and one another as we are shown ways to serve others. But these experiences are only so good as they inform the way we live when we return to the familiar. Daily, we all find ourselves in places to serve – in fact it’s unavoidable. Whether at home or abroad, we must continually experience the world around us with ears ready to hear and eyes ready to see the needs of those we encounter. And as we learn to hear and see those needs, Christ enlarges our hearts to respond in love.

“You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light” (1 Peter 2:9). To be missional is to be those who belong to God, for we belong “in order that” we may proclaim Christ. As God’s people, we begin to see the whole world as a place where Christ is at work, and then to see ourselves as participants in that work.

We cultivate this understanding in our youth by drawing their attention to the ways we see Christ working throughout our daily lives and encouraging them to find Christ in their own experiences. Because as “God’s own people,” we are called above all to participate in God’s Kingdom – sharing His love by witnessing to His mighty acts and serving all those we encounter, that they too, through Christ in us, may experience His marvelous light.

To the glory of God’s Kingdom,
Kendra