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OUR QUIRKY LEADER
Elizabeth Campbell, our quirky leader for a time!
Hello! My name is Elizabeth, and I am the author of this part of our site, although I hope it will change hands and transform as our youth program develops. I am part of the second year of Young Adult volunteers at Watsonville UPC. My time in the program has been a very precious one. I have learned a lot about myself, of course, as well as about the in’s and out’s of working with youth! I originally hail from Upstate New York, where I grew up in a small farming community, mostly-homogenous, but in a far less developed part of the state. In some ways, the rural-feel of Watsonville has felt familiar and reminded me of home. I was introduced to the importance of youth ministry by my first long-time pastor, Rev. Burton Huth, who helped lead a youth program for myself and a few other young people, affectionately known as “Huth’s Youth” at our church: the Spencer Federated Church of Spencer, NY.
After graduating from high school, I attended a Presbyterian-related university in North Carolina called Davidson College (See: http://www.davidson.edu). Davidson offers a unique blend of rigorous academics, great community-service and travel/grant possibilities, and a spiritual/religious community that I found to be open as well as life-giving and challenging. There, I met life-long friends who nurtured and challenged my perspectives and more than anything, affirmed me in my sense that our God is about love, grace, and peace. Here, I also became aquainted with the great narrative tradition within our faith and met, with great delight, the words of contemporary faithful-writers: Thomas Merton, Henri J.M Nouwen, Frederick Buechner, Kathleen Norris, Annie Dillard, Lauren Winner, Anne Lamott, and many others!! I was also taken out of my provincial point-of-view, having rarely traveled outside of the United States before and granted several opportunities to widen my understanding of Christianity around the world. I traveled to a L’Arche community in Ontario, Canada and learned about the Gospel-vision revealed by Fr. Jean Vanier. I traveled with a campus group to the Community of Taize in France twice and worshipped in this international, ecumenical community that has offered the world prayer in the form of soothing-melodies in its admirable quest for reconciliation, social justice, and peace. I was given a grant to undertake a pilgrimage throughout Europe with three other Davidson friends, where we visited Canterbury in London, the Vatican in Rome, St. Francis’ home in Assisi, John Calvin’s church in Geneva, Zwingli’s church in Zurich, Luther’s church and where he hung his thesis in Germany, etc. With the support of many incredible campus mentors, I was also connected to the work of the National Network of Presbyterian College Women and joined the Presbyterian Peacemaking Program in their travel seminar to Guatemala in the summer of 2004. As you can see, Davidson provided me with many opportunities that increased both my awareness and my compassion, challenging me personally and pushing me to grow psychologically, emotionally, and otherwise. Overall, I learned one message:
Our society consistently presents us with the message that we must prove ourselves, prove that we are people of great worth, by showcasing our abilities to be efficient, proper, and reliable. This is a tricky message, especially for youth, because they need to be responsible, and yet the line between responsibility and perfection is too-easily muddied. And God judges differently.: God completely inverses the standards that our society presents. Christ, the King, was born as a humble baby. To prove divine power, God chose to give God-self, in the form of Christ, and to suffer, for our sake. Strength did not look like too many of our surburbs look like today: Clean, Convenient, and Sterile. Christ’s love was an intimate one, as he dared to get down in the dirt and walk with the disciples, to love them & wash their feet, and in the end, he died for them and for us. And so unlike human love, God’s love is unconditional. So as Christians, we can walk in the FREEDOM of grace, knowing that when we suffer, God suffers with us.
Christianity is not about being perfect people and never making mistakes. It is a journey of love and learning to open our hearts to let our love grow wider! As a youth director here at UPC, my goal has been to help affirm the youth that I have met and grown to love that God loves them and that, as the Book of Jeremiah shares,: “God has …”. (To learn more about what we have experienced together and what is to come, check out the Events page).
Inspired by what I learned in theory at Davidson, I spent the Fall of 2005 – Spring of 2006 as a house assistant at a L’Arche community called Daybreak in Richmond Hill, Ontario—twenty miles north of Toronto. It was a very powerful and life-changing experience for me, especially caused by my relationships with the core members I met at Church Street, Corner House, and Green House and the assistants I was close to their, many originally from Asian and European countries (See: http://www.larchedaybreak.com). During February of 2006, I was able to explore my ecumenical interests further as a mutirao participant at the World Council of Churches General Assembly in Porte Alegre, Brazil.
As I am preparing to leave my year of service here at Watsonville, I am filled with a gentle sadness. I do not want to leave these youth and do not know what will happen to them, although I am praying for the ability to trust in the frustrating process of letting go. Yet, I don’t plan to completely leave the area or abandon my connections with the folks here! Next year I will begin my Mdiv (Masters of Divinity) studies at San Francisco Theological Seminary and, to continue my relationship with the community of Watsonville, have made the commitment to offer the community a sacred space, in the form of an ecumenical Taize service (bilingual, of course), once a month. For more information on this service, please click on the Taize Link! Also, I am in the process of negotiating a way to continue offering a Sunday School program and Sr. High program here on Sunday afternoons.
Thanks you all! Gracias Todos! Remember, if you are interested in helping and/or connecting with our program, we would be glad to have you!
Peace,
Elizabeth Campbell