“The church doesn’t always recognize or value young people. But we are the past, present, and future of this church,” begins a prayer drafted based on table discussions at this summer’s Canadian Lutheran Anglican Youth (CLAY) gathering, held Aug. 21 to 24 in Saskatoon. This year’s event, themed “Rooted and Rising,” brought together around 350 youth from around the country, making it larger than the previous gathering of around 300 in 2023, but with substantially fewer than pre-pandemic highs of around 850, says Sheilagh McGlynn, the Anglican Church of Canada’s animator for youth ministries.
The prayer was written by Lauren Odile Pinkney, chair of CLAY’s national planning committee, based on discussions in which organizers asked the youth to name a message they wanted to send to the church. “We have talents to offer if there was space for us to share them,” it states. “By giving youth the chance to invest and sow seeds into the church, we will grow old and reap the benefits of a church we built together on the rock of Christ.”
The message of the prayer mirrors a speech delivered to this summer’s General Synod by lay youth member Noah Skinner, who told Synod the youth would not settle for being spoken of as the church’s future when they were already here and seeking inclusion in its present. “We’re often thrown a bone, so to speak, being given issues that people believe the youth want,” he said at the time. Responding to a motion brought by Skinner and other youth members, General Synod voted in favour of forming a new Youth Council.
It was one of several major Canadian Christian denominations in which youth engagement was a major theme this summer. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada is creating a youth council of its own and there was a similar upsurge of youth voices at the United Church of Canada’s general council in June, says McGlynn. Taken together, these may represent a new current of involvement from youth after the pandemic impacted the high school years of an entire cohort, resulting in disruptions to the cohesiveness of youth groups in many parishes, she says.
The other key theme of CLAY, she says, was inclusiveness, a focus on the value of every human being and their worthiness of God’s love. The message undergirded the programming, worship and decoration of the weekend event, partly through a series of short skits put on by a drama team which showed the experience of a young person going through confirmation and reckoning with their doubts about the church, she says.
“I think peer pressure and culture out there, media is trying to form people into being something that they’re not. ‘Buy this and you’ll be better.’ Or, ‘If you only did this instead of that, then you’d be worthy.’ But no, we’re just worthy who we are. That’s the message that we’re trying to get across,” says McGlynn.
This article has been corrected to reflect the accurate spelling of Lauren Odile Pinkney’s name.
