My sermons and reflections. I am a pastor in the ELCA. Posts before June 2014 are reflections on life during my theological education and internship (2008-2013). Posts from June 2014 - January 2022 are my sermons from Ascension Lutheran Church in Shelby, NC. I began serving at Grace Lutheran Church in Hendersonville, NC in February 2022 and began leading and preaching in Spanish in April 2023.
Often news stories blur together but this weekend, I read an article about child brides from National Geographic. It was shared on Facebook by The Girl Effect an organization working to break the cycle of poverty in developing countries by focusing on providing education and opportunities to girls and getting them to adolescence whole and healthy. Read the article and watch the video and read why it haunts me.
Why this story haunts me
I cannot imagine either of my two daughters marrying, even though they are years older than the girls in this story. However, that isn't what makes this story so startling. What keeps rattling around in my thoughts and haunts me about this story is what I have in common with at least some of the parents of these children.
Pay attention to the conversation that takes place between an activist and a father in the article and to the words of the girl in the video who "escaped" child marriage and instead was introduced into child prostitution.
These child marriages, which are conducted illegally and covertly, are, at least some of the time, preemptive. At least some of the families believe that giving their daughters to marriages at the age of five, seven, or even eleven is a way to protect their daughters against rape and other violence.
Is there anything I would not do to protect my daughters from violence?
While it doesn't make child marriages any less disturbing, Sinclair and Gorney's work makes me ask harder questions before firing off an indignant email or letter. How do families survive, how do children find safety and security, and what are the obstacles that people face? If legislating no child marriage has failed, what are the possible solutions? I don't have easy answers but I think looking at each other as daughters, sisters and parents is a start.
There's a beautiful shot in the video when the narrator says: "Childhood is not for cooking and cleaning and having babies. It is for education and having friends and having fun." I'm not sure what the next steps are, but I hope more of us can live into a future where children the world over can spend their childhoods being children.
Just as we begin each educational leadership class by looking at our knowledge competencies, we conclude each class by reassessing our skills, knowledge and attitudes, measuring what we have learned and how our classroom experience has informed our understanding of education. Early on in Media and Technology in Parish Education I identified two goals that were still growing edges for me. The first one is supporting intergenerational learning, and the second one is supporting theological and biblical reflection in a variety of contexts, and with a variety of people involved.
Often when we talk about intergenerational learning, we talk about forging relationships between older adults and youth, but I am in the middle and personally, I am much more comfortable reaching out to older adults than children, teenagers and even college-age young adults. However, technology and media create openings for conversations in ways that might not happen otherwise across multiple generations. Three of us in my family shared this video with each other – my retired Navy officer father, my eleven year old flute-playing daughter and me.
Similarly, my almost sixteen year old daughter commented recently on the way that we watch people grow up through the photographs they share on Facebook. I have classmates who have posted scanned photographs from our high school years and for my daughter, cameras have always been digital so pictures from kindergarten through high school are easily shared online. Comfortable with using social media and technology to tell our families' stories, now we are beginning to discover how we can use them to tell our faith stories as well.
Blogging our theological and biblical reflections for this class has let me invest time in Blogger, adding elements to my blog like a cloud of the tags, labels or subjects in my posts and a blog roll or listing of the blogs I subscribe to in Google Reader. The reader itself has a search engine to find blogs based on keywords so I can search for a title or a topic and add it quickly. And for a twist, in Blogger, when I list my favorite musicians, I can click on a name and find other bloggers who share an interest in that musician. (So look out for more bluegrass theologians.)
These tools and resources have connected me with other people who are blogging particularly about faith, leadership, education and social media. But just making the connections isn’t the same as having conversations. For conversations, I will always hope to find and make opportunities to sit down across a table with other people in a concrete, physical space, but as a distributed learner, I am also very comfortable with asynchronous conversations.
Using Hootsuite I can read feeds from Facebook and Linked In, and even RSS feeds from blogs, but I primarily use it to follow conversations on Twitter where I tweet @christinaauch. In Hootsuite, I set up streams or feeds – lists of Tweets by other people - in Twitter using hashtags. Hashtags are words preceded with a pound or number sign (#). Right now I have my main Twitter feed where I can read anything posted by someone I am following, but I also have a half-dozen or more streams that I read that are based on the hashtags or subjects:
#chsocm (people interested in how churches are using/can use social media; tweetchat begins July 11) #isedchat (independent school education chat) #edsocialmedia (education and social media) #finalsite (a web communications conference in June near Hartford, CT) #gather2011 (Bread for the World’s conference in June in Washington, D.C.) #WGF11 (the Greenbelt-esque Wild Goose Festival held in June in NC) #NN11 (Netroots Nation 2011 conference in June in the Twin Cities)
Here I see tweets from many more voices, anyone who uses the hashtag in fact. For tweetchats we are actually engaging in synchronous chats, at a given time and date, but you can also stumble onto them and go back to them if you can’t be online at the proposed time.
It is in these conversations that I hear a number of voices, including Lutheran, Episcopal, United Church of Christ and Unitarian Universalist, and other Protestant voices, and now the Pope as well. Different nonprofits and denominational offices and ministries (Bread for the World, Vibrant Faith Ministries and David Creech at ELCA World Hunger, for example) are on Twitter, too. Tweets are conversation starters, and the conversation grows as comments are retweeted or people reply to earlier tweets.
For people who don’t think real conversations happen in 140 characters or less, in the past few days, I have had a conversation about how to talk to our children about Jesus, our gathered community and worshiping together without answering “Why do we go to have to go church?” with “Because that’s what we do on Sunday.” and connected with someone who has written his thesis on themes similar to Clay Shirky’s. Earlier this year, I spoke to David Creech about a course he had taught on Christian responses to poverty and hunger.
These are real conversations happening without the benefit of a landline phone, knowing someone’s full name or having a peer introduction. They are respectful, engaged and thoughtful conversations about God, wealth and poverty, justice, faith, fear and pain as well as places where joys and sorrows are shared. The participants often are more diverse in racial, ethnic and cultural backgrounds than I would find at a roadside diner or coffee shop in my corner of the world, and probably in my congregation, although I’m less convinced that we are any more successful at bridging class divides. Nor do I think our digital spaces should replace our physical spaces and face-to-face conversations, but they afford unique opportunities that complement and even enrich those conversations.
