Best Practices

“I’ll tell you why I wrote this article: because there’s a freshman in your English 101 class and there’s a guy on your sports team and there’s a 14-year-old kid in your church’s pew who is hiding a pretty big secret too.” Striving to cultivate a more open, inclusive community, Calvin College featured articles written by LGBT students in their student newspaper. We all have opinions on this issue and many are outspoken, on both sides.

While I was a student at Calvin College, one of the things I both enjoyed and struggled with was learning about different issues that related to international development. I loved being exposed to and being able to do meaningful research about issues such as global health, good partnerships, and environmental sustainability. However, what also made this one of the hardest parts of my academic time at Calvin was the recurring question: “What can I do about these issues?”

We pray; we lament; we give to relief agencies. But we also struggle to understand why this is happening and who’s to blame. And the TV news channels are quick to serve up all kinds of plausible-sounding answers.

How do you proclaim your faith, when that faith is culturally aligned with injustice?

“We always look for a Chick-fil-A when we’re traveling south. Their food is so good, and they’re a Christian company.” My friend said this last part almost as an aside. A definitive statement of absolute fact. It was more of a reminder, to herself and to the rest of us, both of the existence of these Christian companies in our midst and of our duty to patronize them as often as possible. Now I’m all for economic solidarity with my brothers and sisters in the business world, but her statement got me wondering, “How do we know they are Christians?

It’s a bit one-sided. They share their pain, and we listen (and hopefully are changed and respond). But are we willing to be vulnerable with them? Or with other marginalized people?

Last summer our high school youth group set out on a service trip. Nothing new, right? Hordes of students head out every summer to change another little piece of the world. But we were trying something a little different, and it wasn’t initially embraced by everyone in our group.

I began to learn about the sex trade in Canada after I began working as the Executive Director of Indian Metis Christian Fellowship (IMCF) in Regina, Saskatchewan.

It was obvious to anyone who drove the streets of North Central Regina that the women and girls standing at street corners were at work. They were ‘street workers’ waiting for ‘johns’–the men who would pay them for sex. In the area around the ministry, the majority of street workers were Aboriginal females, from children to young adults to grandmothers.

Social media: the ever-developing medium that we love and hate simultaneously. Where else can you reconnect with friends from long ago, take a quiz about how long you could survive a zombie apocalypse, tweet your opinion about current events, or pin hundreds of images in one day. This medium has become an inherent part of our lives. For all its good, we know there are challenges in equal part.

A few days ago, kids with foam crowns and Crown Point buttons sat patiently with their parents through a long workplace safety discussion at Hamilton City Hall. They were waiting for the chance to help their neighbourhood association tell their city councilors about the work the association is doing in their community: a volunteer-run, low-cost soccer league, property elves, street parties, a cargo bike share program, improvements to local trails, speed reductions on side streets….The kids are also part of New Hope Christian Reformed Church in east Hamilton, Ontario.