Brethren Witness - Just for Youth

Here goes!

Peace

There are many ways to express your peace convictions as a Christian young person. One challenge is to know what to say when your friends—even your Christian friends—have different ideas about things like the war with Iraq. Conscientious Objection to war is a path that has been taken by Brethren young men throughout the history of our church. While there is no way to officially signify your commitment to be a C.O. prior to a military draft, there are steps you can take now to prepare for an eventual C.O. claim. You also need to be aware that the No Child Left Behind legislation passed by Congress in 2002 has a provision that requires schools to give military recruiters your home address and phone number—unless you request that this not be done. Find out how to do this.
Apply for the Youth Peace Travel Team. This group of four youth spends the summer traveling to Brethren camps and talking about what it means to work for peace as followers of Jesus. You'll lead discussion sessions and worship times, and generally have a great time while promoting a great cause. All your costs are covered and you get paid to boot!
Join 100 other Brethren youth for six days in New York and Washington, DC for the annual Christian Citizenship Seminar. You'll see the sights while learning how to live out your faith in the world today.
Take the Pledge. A simple statement that simply says you won't take another human life.
Order your own copy of The Peace Book—a pocket-sized manual for Christian youth wanting to be peacemakers in the world. Special sections on sweatshop labor, conscientious objection, and violence against women.

Honduras Faith Expedition

Go Global

Go on one of our Faith Expeditions. These trips take Brethren to really cool and really challenging places to see how people really live and what we can do to give them a hand. How old do you have to be? As long as your folks think it's O.K., it's O.K. with us.
Check out Brethren Volunteer Service. They'll send you to incredible places to meet incredible people to do incredible things—and even pay you $60 a month besides! Are they crazy or what!!??

Hunger relief and development aid

Do a lock-in or fast or special event at your church to raise money for hunger relief. Take a look at some of the ways we're helping people around the world, and then give us a hand.
Make a deal with your friends to do a hunger party. Here's how it works: Invite them all over to your place on a weekend night. Tell them to bring whatever money they might normally have spent on going to a movie or the fast-food place or whatever. Then you provide the food, the games, the video—and they contribute to hunger relief what they would have spent by going out. Pick a project from the list on the Global Food Crisis Fund page and see how much you can raise toward it. (At $12 for a case of soap in Sudan, or $25 to build a stove for a Guatemalan family, or $120 to keep a child in school for a year, you may be surprised how much you and your friends could raise!)

Care for God's earth

Do a Turn Down the Heat Sunday when people carpool, bike or walk to church. Then you add up how much CO2 was kept out of the air by not driving all those miles. Funny skit, handouts, and CO2 chart provided.
Do the If a Tree Falls... project. The world's forests are being cut down at the rate of an acre a second. This is the main reason species are going extinct at the rate of 50-100 a day! The deforestation rate in the Central American nation of Guatemala is one of the worst in the world. That's why we're helping plant 25,000 trees in Guatemalaevery year—preventing erosion, providing habitat for critters, reducing flooding, recycling CO2, regulating the climate, providing firewood.
Recycle every aluminum can you see—if you don't, it's like filling it half full of gasoline and pouring it out. That's how much energy is saved by recycling one drink can.
Take a shorter shower. In the average home, producing energy for heating water for showers creates about 750 pounds of CO2 per year—and we all know that a big percentage of this is used by the resident teenager! :) Cut your showers in half and save about 250 pounds of CO2!

Sunday Morning Sensations
Use Sunday morning as an awareness raising time for your congregation regarding issues in our world today of concern to Christians. (For those who were at National Youth Conference, these events could be similar to the witness events outside Moby Arena each morning sponsored by the Brethren Witness office.) It would be important to prepare people for these events by placing notes in the previous Sunday's bulletin or in the church newsletter. And if possible it would be great to tie them in with the worship themes of the morning.

Photo by Chris Detrick

Do a landmines awareness event in which worshippers are invited to give up a shoe for the morning. Use the shoes to create a visual reminder on the walk or parking lot of the 500 new landmines victims in the world since the previous Sunday. Once inside, invite people to sign a petition to President Bush calling on our government to sign the international treaty to ban landmines (we and Cuba are the only nations in the Western Hemisphere not to sign it). The Brethren Witness/Washington Office can provide educational handouts.
Create a guided walk through the parking lot or fellowship hall highlighting the situation of a particular group of people in the world. Use photos and text to tell their story; at the end, invite some kind of response. The Brethren Witness/Washington Office can provide photos and texts for a walk featuring Sudan, Guatemala, Honduras, Iraq, or the Gwich'in people of Alaska. The office also has educational handouts and action ideas.
Make a chart out of boxes showing the difference between US military spending (huge) and government spending on domestic social problems (small), the military spending of our "enemies" (smaller) and US spending on foreign aid (smallest). Get the numbers as well as handouts from the Brethren Witness office.
Create a display of barrels to highlight the 18 barrels per person per year gasoline consumption of Americans. Link this to the warming of the earth via global warming, as burning fossil fuels in our cars is a prime culprit. Have youth stand on several of the barrels reminding people passing by of our consuming ways. Again, the Brethren Witness/Washington Office has the stats and handouts you need.