How to Get Young People to Come to Church

Since our move to Chicago, my Woman and I seem to spend a lot of time church-shopping-- you know, finding the church that's right for us. In the meantime, we've seen how blessed we were before with two wonderful churches --thank God for St. Clare's and Canterbury House-- and how hard it is as "young people" to find a Home in the church. So, although this is rather off topic, I have a list of things I'd like to say to every church I've been to that's trying to recruit "young people."

How about you? Does this list match up to what you wish you could say to your churches or synagogues or mosques? What would you change?

So, here we go: Allie's 10 Sure-Fire Ways to Recruit "Young People" to Church

1. We get enough advertising campaigns from Apple and Ikea. Skip the marketing and be real!
2. We like pop. (Some of us.) We also like hip-hop, rock, jazz, techno, country, 18th Century Charles Wesley hymns, and genres you’ve never even heard of.
3. Talk to us if we show up to church.
4. If we’re not showing up to church, don’t give us flak about it! Our reasons for going or not going to church are just as complex as anyone else’s.
5. Try not to beg for money too hard. When you need to beg for money (because don’t we all in this economy!), refer to #1. It’s not about give-the-church-money-or-you’ll-rot-in-Hell; I’m pretty sure God would be just as content with my donation to Unicef. A church is a business just like everything else. You need money to keep the lights on and pay the priest and buy materials for the Sunday School classrooms. Tell us that.
   
6. We, like everyone else, need to participate. This doesn’t mean we need our own special group, although that’s sometimes nice. Welcome us into your choir, let us teach Sunday School, or invite us to Bible studies.
7. If you have a group for us, please stop trying to be cool unless you’re already that cool to begin with. Why? For starters, not all of us are cool, so we don’t need a church that has all the same cliques as the rest of our lives. And lets face it, we can tell when you’re faking it, so please refer to #1.
8. Don’t make us choose between our faith and our friends of other faiths. If you do, odds are good we’ll pick our friends-- not because we don’t believe, but because we don’t want a church we can’t bring our friends to.
9. Don’t be stupid about science or social issues-- if you have to be stupid about them, be stupid quietly. Lots of us stay away from church because all we ever hear about church is how church-goers “don’t believe” in evolution or gay people. If church focused more on worshiping together than pushing beliefs on people, it’d appeal more to us.
10. On that note, don’t force us to believe things and be open to doubt. Everyone doubts-- think Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane or Thomas after the Resurrection. If we have to have all our doubts cleared up before we walk in the door, you'd never see us! (You probably wouldn't see half your older parishioners for that matter, either!)
    

Navigating Public Transportation in the City

I have lots of things I could post about and I probably should, but for the moment, here is a thought for you. Just FYI, I'm on Chicago public transportation at least twice a day and usually more than that, so I speak from experience.

If you are just a little tired of spooning with strangers on your morning commute, wear a hijab-looking headscarf. No Seriously. All other things being equal, when I'm wearing something that looks like a hijab, I am the last person anyone sits next to on the train. Except maybe the other girl in a hijab.

If, however, you are feeling chatty and want perfect strangers to strike up a conversation with you about intimate details of their life (which, by the way, never happens in the city-- people look at you funny if you say a cheerful 'hello'), then wear a bonnet. (Mine is a lovely kapp by Sowers of Hope, like the one in the picture.) Seriously, I could be wearing the same clothes otherwise, and this would happen. What does it say about the world that what I use to cover my head changes people's opinions of me so drastically?

A Modest Wedding, Part 2

I've been engaged for a little over a month now and it's getting harder and harder to manage a modest wedding. I'm not just talking the clothes, either. The average wedding in the US cost more than $26,000 this year! Now, my Woman isn't necessarily modest in dress (that's not to say she doesn't wear modest clothing sometimes, but that she is not intentionally modest on a daily basis). However, I think it's safe to say we try to be modest about our life in general-- you know, it's not about us being flashy; it's about God. Well, we try, anyway.

But the whole wedding scene is decidedly not modest, particularly in that respect. Every time I open a bridal magazine (and, I'll admit, I open a lot of them), they're telling me, "This is your big day" or, "This is all about you."

I've got news for the wedding industry. This isn't "all about me." It's about me, my Woman and God (not in that order). It's also about our families (as my mother so often reminds me), our friends and our communities. And whether we want it to be or not, it's also about politics. Because, for whatever reason, two women walking down the aisle and saying "I do" is a political statement.

Anyway, it's about all of those things, but mostly it's about love. And I think the hardest part about planning a wedding is taking a step back and thinking: "Okay, this isn't my day to look like a princess. This is the day I declare to God and everyone else that I'm spending my life with this woman."

A Modest Wedding?

Eee! So excited! So I proposed to my Woman and she accepted. The wedding won't take place for at least a year and a half yet, so we have time, but I'm already looking around for a modest wedding dress-- and that's hard!

Everything is strapless-this and spaghetti-straps-that. Ugh. And don't get me wrong-- I know I'm being high maintenance: I'm not just looking for any modest wedding dress-- I want THE ONE. I know-- the makings of a bridezilla. :) Anyway... let me list my requirements... and feel free to send suggestions.

Modesty requirements:

• Sleeves. As an example: I went to church today in a dress that had 2-inch thick straps. I'd brought a scarf to put over my shoulders, but it was so hot, I didn't wear it at all at first. Then, as we're getting up to go to Communion, I realize I won't feel right without my shawl. I threw it on and was fine, but it does mean I want my shoulders covered at least.
• Floor length. I'm with the Mormons on this one: modesty is relative, but most gowns are floor-length, so I want one that is at least floor length.
• Headcovering. Obviously, in the form of a veil.

Bridezilla requirements:

• Lace! I love lace and, like any good six-year-old, I think my dress should have as much of it as possible! Long lace sleeves, in particular, would be lovely.
• White-- my Woman wants a white dress and to have one bride walk down the aisle in white and the other walk down in a "Champagne" gown would just be awkward.

Practical requirements:

• Does not cost an arm, a leg and my first-born child. I'm not looking to hemorrhage money any more than necessary.
• Can be bought nearby so I don't have to do that crazy shipping back and forth thing.

Now that doesn't seem too difficult. Except it is.

What have I found? Well, surprisingly, the Mormons and I get along rather well on this front too.

www.beautifullymodest.com (shown above) has some wonderful things, but nothing local.

David's Bridal actually has something wonderful... and maybe I should just go for it. I just want to say, though, that I was into modest wedding dresses before the Duchess of Cambridge made it cool! Check out David's Bridal's copy of Kate's fabulous dress.

Oh! The lace sleeves! The gown is a little intense for me, but maybe I can't be too picky...

These are my thoughts so far, but I'm also only 1 day into being an engaged woman, so I'm sure I'll have more opinions soon. Thoughts, anybody? Suggestions?

I Love the Big City!

The other day I was early to the train station and decided to do a little people watching. In the process, I saw two groups of hijabis, a tzniut woman in a snood and a Plain Amish family.

You can say a lot of negative things about the city. My least favorite at the moment is the fact that I'm supposed to be excited about my apartment's "manicured green space." However, one of the things I love about living here is that you see all kinds of people-- particularly, for me, I like seeing all the women that cover.

Now, I only ever see Amish women at the train station downtown-- I don't know why. What do Amish people do in the city?

I see tzniut women in my neighborhood and on my local train, because I live in a neighborhood that is very gay and also very Jewish. (Have you noticed that there are many neighborhoods like that? I stayed in one in Paris too... Why is that?)

I see hijabi women everywhere --it really isn't an uncommon sight in the city-- and I see niqabi women at work, because I work in a hospital.

There are a bunch of other groups of women who cover for more cultural reasons (I think) as well. Black women cover a lot more than white women, as far as I can tell. This was certainly true when I lived in Senegal, but I guess I didn't realize that black women in the States did it as well. One of my coworkers mentioned that she saw a lot of women wearing head coverings similar to my favorite kind (for work, anyway) at the Greek cultural festival.

My Woman has commented about this too. She says that while I used to be one of the few people she knew who covered --and so she thought I was rather weird for doing it-- now she sees women who cover all the time and it makes her think of me! :)

Immodesty for Social Justice?

Okay, so first things first, read this: Israeli and Palestinian Women Take a Rare Swim.

Since I can safely say that y'all probably didn't read it (I know, we all lead busy lives), here's the gist: in an act of civil disobedience, several Israeli women took several Palestinian women to the beach. Which is illegal. Palestinians are not allowed out of the West Bank/Palestine/whatever-you-want-to-call-it. (Have you noticed that what you call that location is making a political statement?) Anyway, here's the part that interests me most. In order to participate, the Palestinian women dressed like Israeli women, which meant wearing significantly less clothing than what they believe is right.

So here's my question. For those of you who do wear clothes that you believe are important (or necessary) religiously or morally, would you participate in something like this, for a cause you believed was right, if it meant shedding the clothes that you believe are right?

Religious Justifications for Immodesty

So I spend a lot of time on this blog talking about my religious justifications for modesty, but truthfully, I believe that God really just wants us to be humble and not worry about what we wear. (Check out the specs on that here.) Modesty makes sense for me, but it may not make sense for everyone.

Since I feel this way, and since I know many religious people who don't believe in religiously-motivated modesty or believe in what I'll call religiously-motivated immodesty (ie. that God is okay or promotes us wearing things that aren't modest), I feel like I should write about it!

Perhaps one of the biggest argument for religious immodesty is that God, in all God's wisdom, created us naked. Genesis 2:25 "Adam and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame." The nakedness isn't the sin of Adam and Eve. Neither, mind you, are the clothes, but the clothes are emblematic of the sin: eating from the tree God told them not to eat from was the sin, which resulted in them being ashamed of their nakedness, so they made clothes for themselves.

Let's think about that for a second: our first sin as humans as symbolized by clothes-- God knows we sinned because we came out of it clothed. Forever after that, every (or nearly every) human over the age of, say, 2 wears clothes.

Let's pull back and personify God for a second. (I think that's appropriate because much of Genesis personifies God.) A friend of mine describes Genesis as a love story. And I so agree. God has angels. Why would God create humans? Answer: humans have free will and God wants to love a creature that chooses to love Her. Being loved and praised by creatures that are unable to do anything besides love and praise you isn't nearly as fulfilling as being loved and praised by a creature you gave the free will to turn away from you.

So God orchestrates this beautiful love story, creates humans and gives us stewardship of the whole earth and what do we do? We turn away. The marker of this change in the relationship is that humans now wear clothes. For millennia afterwords, humans continue to wear clothes. Rubbing salt in the wound much? Now, God is infinitely loving, so She has forgiven us this, but it still looks like we're just trying to piss God off, doesn't it? That right there is a fabulous argument not to wear any clothes at all. Of course, generally speaking this is an impractical argument, because most places in the world won't let you be naked.

Now let's talk about Jesus's feelings about clothes.

Jesus denounces even the most splendid of clothes as not as beautiful as what God has created. ("Consider the lilies, how they grow : they neither toil nor spin ; but I tell you, not even Solomon in all his glory clothed himself like one of these" Luke 12:27.)

Jesus continues, "If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today, and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, how much more will he clothe you—you of little faith!" (Luke 12:28) What I get from this is that we need to relax and not worry about what we wear. What one might get from this is that the "clothes" God has provided for us (our skin, our hair, etc.) are enough and we don't need other adornments.


So there you go. Two basic arguments for religious immodesty.
1) Since clothes are a symbol of our first sin against God, the wearing of them and --worse!-- the fussing over them is a continual reminder to God of our sin.
2) Jesus even told us that what God gave us to cover us should be enough for us, at least in the way of beauty. We could not find any kind of clothes in the world that would make us more beautiful than the way God made us.
Actually, in fairness, these are probably better arguments for religiously motivated nudism, rather than immodesty, but it's what I've got.


Anyone else have thoughts on this to share?