St Mark's ELCA: 2012 gNews: Post Youth Gathering updates

Our Youth are Powerful!

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Director's blog

This blog is for all of the adults who accompanied young people to the 2012 ELCA Youth Gathering. Your commitment to the faith formation of teenagers deserves the admiration of our entire church! We know how hard you have worked these past couple years getting ready for the Gathering, and we have the deepest gratitude for your 24-hour-a-day sacrificial service to your group in hot, muggy, rainy New Orleans. And we know that your work didn't end when the bus pulled into your congregation's parking lot.

From my experience, it is now that the Holy Spirit really gets busy. Please remain connected to the young people who had this potentially life-shaping experience together. There are resources on the Gathering website to help you continue the faith journey: www.ELCA.org/gathering. We also hope that you will share your stories and resources with each other on Facebook www.facebook.com/youthgathering and continue to follow us on Twitter.

Numbers and stories
We all like numbers. Numbers give us a sense of accomplishment and a sense of scope. How many people filled the Dome each night? Did we collect a million books for the Million Books Project? If all the water were collected from all the shoes that were soaked, could we fill 100 wells?

Here are some great numbers for you to share with your faith communities:

Ponytails collected for children with hair loss: 509
Blood donations: Goal - 900 pints. Actual collection – 1193 pints.
Sunday offering: $302,371.50 of which:
- $69,002.81 was given to the ELCA Malaria Campaign
- $64,884.63 was given to support new and emergent worshiping communities in New Orleans
- $103,599.43 was given toward the ELCA 100 Wells Challenge (which is included in the total number below)
- $64,884.63 was given to support the ELCA Young Adults in Global Mission program in southern Africa
100 Wells Challenge: Raised more than $500,000
Practice Discipleship days involved:
- 31 bands with youth leadership
- 60 bishops
- 17 directors of evangelical mission
- 3200 volunteer small group leaders (including hundreds of youth serving as leaders)

The Practice Justice numbers could take up this entire edition of gNews!

There is also another collection of data that can give us a sense of the Holy Spirit's movement in New Orleans: our stories.

For example, the Children with Hair Loss station on the Interactive Learning floor had to turn donors away because they ran out of time.

Jill from the American Red Cross said that once they loaded our blood donations into their storage facility her team realized they had never seen it so full.

You all have stories too. You have stories about the children to whom you showed love when you watched their play performance. You could tell us about the cars that stopped during your tour of the Lower 9th Ward just so the drivers could thank you for remembering them. You could fill volumes with the stories you were told about old New Orleans, the New Orleans of Katrina, and the New Orleans God has raised from the floodwaters.

Keep sharing your stories. With us. With your families. With your friends. With your faith community.

If each of us shared our story of how Jesus met us in New Orleans with three other people at home, over 100,000 people could hear about meeting Christ in the eyes of another. That's a number to talk about.

Post-Gathering resources
The Gathering is over, but as the adult leader you still have work to do. In fact, this might be the most important work you do in conjunction with the 2012 ELCA Youth Gathering.

To ensure that the Gathering is a faith-formative or faith-informing experience for young people, it is critically important that the mountain-top experience be integrated into the daily lives of young people, as well as the life of your congregation. The following resources were assembled to help you do the important work of connecting the dots between the experience of the Gathering and a passionate faith life.

Follow this link to find the first batch of post-Gathering resources!

Another hurricane; a different outcome
About a month after we left New Orleans, another hurricane blew through. The city came out better from Hurricane Isaac than other areas along the Gulf Coast. In Plaquemines Parish the wall of water overtopped levees, flooded the town of Braithwaite with 12 feet of water, and killed two people. Slidell, Biloxi and others also saw flooding. Some of you experienced how quickly the water rises in New Orleans. There were reports of people walking in water above their knees on Canal street on Friday during the Gathering. And that wasn't even a hurricane! Response to Hurricane Isaac was much different than for Hurricane Katrina, yet, there still were a few hundred people without power several days after he blew through, and some people lost everything. We mourn with those who were impacted by this weather event, and we offer our prayers and financial support as we are able.

To learn how our church showed up at the time, and to keep track of how we continue to show up, we have put together some information for you:

Follow Bishop Mike Rinehart's blog as he visits ELCA congregations in the affected areas: www.gulfcoastsynod.org/
Read how the ELCA is responding: www.elca.org/hurricaneIsaacNews
Stay connected to your church's ongoing response efforts:
- ELCA Disaster Response blog
  -- Read updates at: http://blogs.elca.org/disasterresponse/
  -- Sign up along the right sidebar to receive email update
- ELCA Disaster Response alerts
  -- Sign up at http://listserv.elca.org/cgi-bin/wa.exe?SUBED1=DISASTER&A=1

NOTE: Signing up for the blog will get you updates each time a disaster blog entry is posted, which covers both international and domestic disaster response. Signing up for the listserv will include you in all of the ELCA Disaster Response e-blasts (e-alerts and e-appeals).

Lost and Found
Did you lose a valuable item (camera, phone, jewelry, glasses) in New Orleans? If so, there's a chance we carried it back with us to Chicago. Please email gathering@elca.org with a detailed description (and photo, if available) of what you're missing, and we'll see if we have it! Please indicate "Lost and Found" in the subject line of your message.