Many Cultures, One Faith • Muchas Culturas, Una Fe

from Naim Wiest-Laird

One of the things I’ve been thinking about as a youth is what I want the church to look like in the future. But in thinking about that, I’ve first had to think about what church is like for me right now. So, at home the big motto we have for our church is Many Cultures, One Faith. And we’ve been looking this week at concepts of having no boundaries or limits. 

So, these social boundaries are things such as age, race, sexuality; the things that other people identify you as, or how you identify yourself. For me right now, it’s more learning what I need to learn from people in church, the ones I can get the knowledge from, like my mom. She’s the pastor. Learning the lessons from her and taking what she teaches me and taking that out into the world. 

For future church, to me it is not necessarily changing how we think about what we do or changing traditions, but how we take our Christianity and ourselves into the world. How we pass on what we know to the next generation. Like in the scripture that has the rock as the foundation, because without a strong foundation we can’t build.

I recently was baptized, and I’ve been thinking about myself and how I am. And for me it’s important to think about myself before I go out and look at how everyone else is. Self-love is needed in order to spread love--the more love you have for yourself, the more you can love others and the more love you will be open to receiving. This will help us to get rid of boundaries and limits that we in society set for ourselves. Thank you.