By David Steele, General Secretary Greetings to you in the name of Christ our Savior! Once again, I want to express my gratitude for the many ways you and your congregation faithfully strive to live out the gospel—to simply try to do what Jesus did. The vital ministries of our Church of the Brethren congregations,
“another way of living”
Hey! It isn’t Christmas yet
The most counter cultural thing a Christian can do today is to refuse the drive to Christmas. If you watched the Macy’s parade on Thanksgiving, Santa came riding in at the end of the parade with the bold symbolic statement that Christmas has come. The commercialization of Christmas is obvious. “Santa has come, the Christmas season is
Living the simple life?
By Ben Bear Being a volunteer through BVS can be a radically different experience from person to person. Some of us live in single apartments, plopped down in a city or town hundreds or thousands of miles from “home” and hit the ground running with their project. Others end up living in intentional communities where
The Kitchen
By Katie Cummings In my house When I want to be with Someone I come To the kitchen And I sit At the kitchen table. Organically people may Emerge— Stretching on the floor after a run, Shuffling pots and pans for dinner, Reading a book in the glorious sun. It is the heartbeat of our
A Declaration of Love
By Katie Hampton I spent three years and three months (2007-2010) as a BVS volunteer in OKC Abrasevic in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina. I am still discovering all that those three years meant to me, but it is no exaggeration to say that it changed my life. If I’m being completely honest, sometimes I freak
Shop till I drop
By Katarina Eller, Brot und Rosen Community, Hamburg, Germany My days mostly consist of cleaning, chopping vegetables, and food shopping. Our day begins with devotions in the chapel, with a simple prayer-song-Bible-reading-silence-song-prayer model…. Like a sandwich, or an Oreo cookie. Almost all of the songs come from the Taize movement. (You know you live at
The Beginnings
By Allison Snyder I will begin as most stories do, unless you’re Kurt Vonnegut, at the beginning. BVS began following World War II as an alternative to military action. It’s been ongoing ever since and has become a big thing in my church denomination, the Church of the Brethren. Basically, it is a smaller version
Hyper-real Unconditional Positive Regard: BVS Orientation
By Emily Davis Perception of reality is often so subjective and inconsistent that it can subvert being present with others. That in conversation or from moment to moment there is a sense of surreal space and time, where situations seem distant, foreign or magnified; where waking consciousness seems more sleep-like. A friend recently spoke so
The Why
By Jenna Horgan We leave for Central America tomorrow morning. We have been preparing for this moment for over two years now! I think we have told our story to at least 1,000 people in 1,000 different ways. Everyone has different responses. “Oh wow, you’re doing mission work?” or “that’s nice that you’re going there,
Living our way into a new way of thinking
By Bryan Hanger I’d like to talk a bit about what pushed me to join BVS, and how my journey before and during BVS has affected my understanding of God and what it means to be the Church in the world today. I had grown up at Oak Grove Church of the Brethren in Roanoke
