The Dare to be Christian Project

I love the way ideas spread; the way we can take hold of an idea or concept and make it our own; running with it and watching it take on a life of its own.

This is exactly what happened at my congregation recently with the Outside church walls project to engage life outside the walls of our church. One of our youth leaders came up with an idea to engage our youth in conversations about our faith outside our walls. He called the youth project, “Dare to be Christian”.

Basically, kids come up with inventive ways to talk about their faith with their friends, they wrote these “dares” down and then picked out a dare to try during the week at school.

One person had to anonymously doing something kind for someone else. She left two quarters taped to a gumball machine. Another kid picked saying hello to the class out cast. Yet another chose to talk about God with someone at school.

As some of our kids have come back to talk about their experiences, they have some really good questions. How come some Christians hate gay people? How come some don’t like science? How come others feel differently than we do in our church?

Our youth group then dared our adults to write and try their own “dares”.

What would you choose?

A new college student from our church family practiced his own version of dare to be Christian at University. He recently came home and shared with his mother he’s really glad that he was raised in the Episcopal Church. “Some of my classmates that are Christian were raised with so much hate,” he told his family. “And some kids don’t have any faith.” One of his friends lamented that he wished his family observed and believed in something. “Its not too late, our college student responded, “ you could come to church with me.”

I always find it so interesting that kids are so much more at ease with being authentic than we adults are. This dare game has helped our youth consider ways of talking about their faith in Christ AND changing the conversation about what it means to be Christian.

No, Jesus’ followers don’t have to hate science or gay people.

We have so much to offer our communities—why are we in the Episcopal church so reticent to share our good news.

I wonder: can we dare to be Christian like the kids of my congregation’s youth group? Can we change the conversation? Talk about our love reason as well as scripture? Talk about the beauty of our tradition?


Go on… I dare you!

George