I’m going to take a trip down memory lane to start, because there’s a bit of grief wrapped up in this post, and remembering can help.
I was a child of the 80s. I was an early reader of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rulebooks, and although I didn’t have a basement group to play with, I did spend some time creating characters with pencil and graph paper and drawing dungeons and talking with friends about the game with the cord to my parents telephone pulled out their bedroom and down the hall.
If we went to Davenport, the largest nearby city (I grew up on a farm), my favorite destinations were either a) my church, St. Paul’s Lutheran, b) Whitey’s Ice Cream, or c) the mall. And specifically, I loved going to the mall in order to visit Waldenbooks. There really weren’t other bookstores in the Quad Cities of that time, and although I loved the little rural Eldridge public library, they didn’t always stay up to date on the newest releases of science fiction and fantasy. To read those, I had Waldenbooks.
My childhood roughly coincides with the period immortalized in the television series Stranger Things. In one of the seasons, quite a lot happens in a shopping mall, and they even recreated one of my favorite mall outlets: Waldenbooks. Somehow it’s just about perfect that in order to evoke the spirit of the mall, they needed a Waldenbooks.
Even though Waldenbooks formally closed its doors across the country in 2011, it still carries a certain kind of iconic spirit. More on that in a bit.
So this week our denomination announced that its national youth gathering, scheduled for July of 2022, was cancelled. This is after it was already postponed from summer 2021.
Now, the national youth gathering is another touchstone of my youth. I went to the gathering in 1988 in San Antonio, and another one in Dallas in 1991, two of my first forays into the state of Texas, and opportunities to try out using “y’all” in a sentence.
Since then, I’ve been to most though not all of the gatherings that take place every three years. I missed a few when I was a missionary in Slovakia. But I’ve taken groups to the Gatherings regularly.
Here’s the thing about these gatherings. They may be the largest gathering of Christian youth on the planet other than the Roman Catholic World Youth Day.
At its height, it has sometimes had as many as 40,000 youth in attendance over two weeks. In 2009, 37,000 youth gathered in New Orleans, the biggest convention in New Orleans since Katrina.
The Gathering is many, many things, as you can imagine given that it gathers thousands of youth from across the ELCA. For small congregations in rural areas, it is one of the few times youth can truly experience the breadth of their national denomination. For youth who attend the DAYLE or MYLE events (differently abled youth leadership event and multicultural youth leadership event) it’s a chance for training and community with young people who share similar life experiences and contexts.
And of course, national youth gatherings of this size are a chance to put on the stage people and speakers who can forever shift the messaging, the “brand” of our denomination. At the most recent gathering in Houston, Texas in 2018, for many of our youth that was Rebekah Bruesehoff, a transgender activist youth and member of the ELCA.
Large iconic events like this are life-changing for participants, and they are also brand-establishing for the organization.
For decades, perhaps most of my life, if I were to describe the ELCA to you, I’d probably mention a bit of Lutheran history, tell you we are a confessional church, mention our social statements, and then talk about the gatherings. The youth gatherings are perhaps THE most singular mark of who we are as a denomination.
Now, I do get it. These are hard times to plan conferences. The pandemic has affected many events around the world. But this summer is 2022, not 2021 or 2020, and so when the ELCA announced they were cancelling the event, I no longer thought to myself, “Well crap, I guess they have to, it just makes sense.”
Instead, I thought, “No, that wasn’t the right decision. We need to take good precautions, encourage vaccinations, and continue life. We can’t keep cancelling everything.”
I spent part of the day watching the Olympics in China. Even the Chinese, who are very strict about Covid protocols, have figured out how to modify and still conduct a global event.
This summer in Minneapolis, there will be the Minnesota State Fair (okay, it’s in St. Paul but you get my point). Large sporting events will happen. Public schools meet for class every day. Concerts are happening.
A larger gathering with which I’m affiliated, the World Science Fiction Convention, will meet in September of this year, and they met last December also. Those are some of the most Covid safe people I’ve ever met, and they sorted out how to do contact tracing, how to set up processes (like requiring vaccinations of all attendees and providing live-stream options) in order to make sure the event could happen.
That we couldn’t figure out how to pivot and adapt to a smaller registration pool (over 10,000 youth had registered… that’s not 30,000 but it’s still 10,000!) signals to me something much deeper, and it seems that Covid safety is being used as a cover for the real reason for the cancellation of the event.
So what is the real reason? Well, we’re a small denomination. It doesn’t take long to get a bit of information.
Turns out that some of the staff for the gathering have been arguing for it to be canceled because they did not believe they could pull it off safely. Tension within the team was mounting because the director was increasingly resistant and belligerent with the team.
After Christmas over half of the gathering team quit. More recently the gathering director was fired because of, as I understand it, problematic language in e-mail communications (like name calling).
In other words, the whole leadership team fell apart.
Now, that’s tragic and I’m sorry there was such division at the church leadership level. But oh my gosh, the church has a responsibility to thousands and thousands of youth to get this right. If they aren’t getting it right, and it’s gotten so bad they actually have to cancel what is perhaps a hallmark event of the ELCA, then they have a profound responsibility to be more transparent about that.
Now back to memory lane. For years and years the youth gathering was under the effective and amazing leadership of Heidi Hagstrom. Heidi died in 2021 from an aggressive form of cancer. I had the chance to get to know her over a couple of youth gatherings when I served as the synod coordinator for churches traveling to the gathering.
It’s hard to find someone who knows how to work with an entire city as it plans to host 30,000 youth. Heidi knew how (as did Donna Wiegel, who also died too young, in 2018). It was the responsibility of the ELCA to ensure they had the people and team in place to make a go of it, and using the pandemic as cover for dysfunction is really worrisome.
It’s like Waldenbooks blaming JCPenney’s for their decline.
As a friend has written, “Is the cancelation of the gathering a sign of the end of the institution because it was a bad decision? Maybe or maybe not. A sign of the end of the denomination because leadership is not working? For sure.”
That’s the real story here. Leadership isn’t working. We’re in a Waldenbooks moment. I think we are incredibly close to the point where the ELCA will be seen as perhaps a pleasant brand with which to affiliate, but definitely not an institution you can reliably visit or will draw you specifically to the mall because there’s a bookstore there.
It’s hard for me to write all of this because I’m a pastor of an ELCA church, and I know inevitably my own members will read this. Many of my own members have very little connection to the ELCA as a denomination (they belong to Good Shepherd because of Good Shepherd, not because of the denomination). But what they do know of the ELCA I think they respect and love, that we have made moves toward full inclusion, that we have social statements that put us out there and public and vulnerable, that we are in full communion with many other denominations.
Anyway, I guess I’d really rather not say, “You know, this denomination on our sign is mostly just a brand like Waldenbooks or Montgomery Ward, something that was pretty great for a while and now we just keep the sign up because it looks cool when we do nostalgic television episodes fighting the demogorgon.”
Okay, admittedly that’s even a little cool. If we’re fighting demogorgons I’m all in.
But right now we need one thing from the ELCA they can do: be better about transparency and communication and work on leadership.
And we needed one thing from them that’s no longer possible: pivot to host a great youth gathering this summer in Minneapolis in ways adaptive to the shifts in the pandemic. We’re at a point now when life needs to go on. We can gather safely with others, with the right protocols in place. The rest of the world is doing it. So can the church.
I would like to ask this question. I have never attended a National Youth Gathering, although I temporarily served as a synod coordinator to the gathering held in New Orleans following Katrina. I continually question the validity of such a gathering. I think the event speaks highly to white privilege or at least to the privilege of wealth. Many ELCA churches are located in rural areas and do not possess the resources, financial and otherwise, to bring youth to a gathering of this nature. And a congregation does not have to be rural to experience similar difficulties. Furthermore, the gathering costs a ton of money, money that is being spent on youth having a good time rather than going to assist with something like hunger, poverty, etc. I'm not saying there isn't validity in the youth of the church getting together with youth around the nation and sharing in their faith, but isn't there a better way to go about this? One that would allow more participation from more congregations? One that would better steward resources? I say it is time to lay the National Youth Gathering idol of the ELCA aside and focus more on being the disciples Christ called us to be in our everyday lives, not some glorified mountaintop experience that has little to no ongoing implications once youth return to their home congregations and communities, who cannot "compete" with the gathering.
I didn’t grow up in the Lutheran Church and I’ve never been to a gathering but I did get 8 youth to sign up this summer. I’m not disappointed it was canceled and I know it was not canceled because of Covid. I really believe as someone who didn’t grow up in the very white ELCA that the gathering needs to be placed in a vault with other relics of Lutheran history and left as a distant memory. And yes our bishop and other leaders need to stop lying to us! -youth director St Paul MN