Friends, I want to tell you about something on the horizon for Trinity’s young people, and for all of us.
From June 28 to July 2, 2027, the ELCA Youth Gathering will bring together roughly 25,000 young people and their leaders from across the country, and it is coming right here to Minneapolis. Trinity has a long history of sending groups to the Gathering, and we intend to be there with a large group again.
The theme for this Gathering is “Imagine More,” drawn from Ephesians 3:20, where Paul writes that God is able to do far more than we could ever ask or imagine. I keep coming back to that verse this year. Our young people live in a world that often teaches them to expect less: less certainty, less belonging, less room for wonder. The Gathering pushes back against that. It asks them to imagine a God who is not finished with them yet, a church that is bigger and more alive than they have experienced, and a future that is not as small or as settled as it can sometimes feel. That is not just a nice idea for a slogan or a t-shirt. It is a promise I want our kids to carry with them long after the buses come home.
I want to tell you why this matters:
The first thing I hope for is faith. Not faith as an idea our young people can recite, but faith that gets stirred up in worship with thousands of others, in service projects that put their hands to work for someone they have never met, in late-night conversations in a hotel room where they finally say out loud what they have been wondering about God. I have watched this happen before. Something opens up in a young person when they encounter the gospel outside the walls of our own sanctuary, and it stays with them.
The second thing I hope for is that our own group grows closer to each other. There is something about five days together, tired and away from home, that builds a kind of community you cannot manufacture on a Sunday morning. Our youth will laugh together, experience new places together, sing together, and come home knowing each other in a way they did not before. I want that for them. I want them to have people at Trinity they know will show up for them.
The third hope is bigger than our group. I want our young people to walk away understanding that they are part of something much larger than Trinity, larger than Owatonna, larger than the Southeastern Minnesota Synod. The Gathering puts them in a room with tens of thousands of other Lutherans their age, from every corner of this country, all of them wrestling with the same questions of faith and life. God is at work in all of those places, not just here. I want our kids to feel that in their bones.
And then there is this small joy that comes with the location. Minneapolis is our home turf. For once, we are not the ones traveling into someone else’s city wondering how to get our bearings. We get to be the hosts, in a sense, showing the wider church what our part of the world looks like, from the river to the lakes to the life of this state we love.
We are beginning to plan now. Jackson Dalen, our new senior high youth minister (he begins his work at Trinity on September 1), Deacon Kris and I will keep you updated as registration and fundraising details take shape. I know there is a financial side to a trip like this, and if cost is a concern for your family, please come talk with one of us directly. We have never let that stand between a young person experiences that deepen faith, and we are not going to start now.
More information is available at www.elca.org/gathering. I hope you will start praying now about who from our congregation might be a part of this experience, whether as a participant or as an adult leader.
In Christ,
Pastor Todd
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