During our lunch break yesterday, MoSAIC (Methodist Students for an All-Inclusive Church) held a rally and march to the church’s exclusionary practices.  The theme of the protest was that the young people’s vision of the church is already one of inclusivity, so we, as the young people of the church, are calling the rest of the church to follow our lead.

It was my first large-scale protest/action I’ve participated in and I thought it was a great experience.  Here’s a couple reasons why:

• MoSAIC drummed for 24 hours prior to the rally, attracting many supporters and fundamentalist protesters.  I even got condemned to go to hell!
• Rachel Birkhahn-Rommelfanger, a classmate of mine at AU, co-chair of UM Student Movement and a leader of MoSAIC spoke, calling the rest of the church to “meet us where we are.”  The speech was so powerful that it prompted the Institute of Religion and Democracy (IRD), a caucus on the extreme right, to blog about it. The blog says that Rachel is calling the church to meet us in sin.  Check it out here: http://www.theird.org/NETCOMMUNITY/Page.aspx?pid=604&srcid=626
• A couple of my friends from AU came down for the weekend to just to participate in the protests.  A picture of Miriam Wood and Katie Kraft, more of my classmates, can be found in the UM News Service article about the event. Check it out here: http://www.umc.org/site/apps/nlnet/content3.aspx?c=lwL4KnN1LtH&b=4017527&content_id={EDFDAA64-7BE9-4FE4-A0E1-93CF8619F874}&notoc=1
• Several other people in my delegation also attended in the rally and protest.  Some of them were adults, too!  One even wore a rainbow clergy shirt.

Now we’ll just have to wait and see if the church will choose to listen to us young people and meet us where we are in sin.