Tim Anderson and Kristi Smith Co-Chaired the Invitation to Mosaic Planning Team along with team members Diane Leavitt, Kari Williams, Jedediah Kim, Kim Thomas, Britta Burger, Greg Yee and Erik Cave. Below Tim and Kristi reflect on the importance and impact of this event.
Tim Anderson, Associate Pastor of Youth & Worship, Creekside Covenant Church
Invitation to Mosaic was a great first step focusing on the call we, as a church, have received from God to see one another through His love. We heard the call to, ‘never stop fighting for our own,’ and as members of one body, each made in the Image of God, we are welcomed into a journey to live into a mosaic of ethnicities, histories, stories, and faith communities.
The PacNWC is home to people from all walks of life. Students from churches in Washington and Oregon were invited to see one another again, to have fun together and build bonds, and to challenge one another to put their relationship with God at the center of how they interpret our cultural context. As our nation continues to engage in conversations about race our church has seen the deep-felt need to respond in faith, looking to Scripture and prayer, worship and fellowship to better discern God’s heart for justice; while we are often tempted to start with where we are divided, we hoped to take a step forward by taking a step toward one another.
As a Native Alaskan with ties to the Yupik tribe in Southwestern Alaska, I was encouraged to see students and leaders from many ethnicities engage, participate, and reflect on our time together. It was so helpful to witness firsthand young people having conversations I only really delved into later in life.
I was just as encouraged to see kids making human pyramids together, sitting down and eating Mediterranean food from a food truck together, and getting on stage for a totally improvised freestyle rap battle together! It’s the kind of potential the Youth Commission envisioned a year ago, but realized in the lives of our incredible students.
I2M was an encouraging and exciting start!
Kristi Smith, Director of Children, Youth & Family Ministry, Milwuakie Covenant Church
Covid has changed many things, bringing loss but also gains. When the PacNWC Youth Commission realized a year ago that Unite (formerly CHIC) would not be able to take place as planned this summer, we began dreaming about ways we could replace that loss with something new for high schoolers in our region.
Our dream was to host a four-day Youth Journey to Mosaic event at a local campus, flying in speakers and taking students on excursions for interactive engagement with various racial experiences in the Pacific Northwest. Unfortunately, that dream also was thwarted by Covid, as the Delta strain swept through the region. When it became clear that being housed together was a risk we should avoid, we shifted directions again. Instead of a four-day journey, we launched a one-day Invitation to Mosaic — two synchronous regional gatherings for teens to explore God’s heart for racial righteousness. Our hope was to get teens and youth leaders thinking, praying and talking together about the intersection between Scripture, race and justice in our lives and communities, hopefully sparking what would become a lifelong discipleship journey.
Despite the Seattle and Portland events being separated by 175 miles, we worked to plan equitable experiences. Both sites had a live worship team and site emcees, with pre-recorded speaking sessions. Dominique Gilliard spoke in our morning session about Jesus and Justice, pointing out the biblical basis for racial righteousness. Tara Hollingsworth spoke for our afternoon session, talking about how we have to experience God’s transforming love and grace in our own lives in order to offer transformational love and grace to the world. In addition to our worship, learning and discussion sessions, our schedule included a food truck lunch (gyros in Seattle, and Lakota-inspired frybread tacos in Portland), a video scavenger hunt revealing the beautiful variety of gifts and skills found amongst our students, and a livestream interaction between both regions where we engaged in a Kahoot contest. Both regions followed the same general schedule and used the same printed materials ensuring that the experiences were closely equivocal.
Following the event, our students and youth leaders were sent home with a list of films and discussion guides they could use to take steps on their journey of exploring different racial experiences in North America. We hope Invitation to Mosaic was simply one small step in a lifelong journey of seeing one another as God sees us, of listening to the lived experiences of those with racial and ethnic roots that differ from our own, and of leaning into the diversity and justice of God’s enduring kingdom. Our hope and plan is to be able to expand from I2M and launch our originally-planned YJ2M event—perhaps in the summer of 2023.
You can find more information at the event website, here.
