Creating memories: A mission and ministry focus
06-01-2023
Bishop Yehiel Curry’s commencement address to McCormick’s 189th graduating class was saturated with memories from his childhood. For the past 25 years, the Bishop of the Metropolitan Chicago Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America has made it a mission and a focus of his ministry to help youth create positive childhood memories as well.
Teaching at Chicago’s James R. Doolittle Elementary School back in the 90s, Yehiel Curry realized that many of his students who resided at the Ida B. Wells Homes had never been outside their neighborhood. He started researching for different experiences for them. He found one and a whole lot more.
Bishop Curry ran across Safe In My Brothers Arms (SIMBA), a camping program for boys that was starting up and is now offered by Rescue, Release, Restore. “It was meeting at St. Stephens Lutheran Church on Chicago’s southside, remembers Bishop Curry, who earned his M.Div. from the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago in 2013 and became the Bishop of the Metropolitan Chicago Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, ELCA in 2019. “Back then, the church held worship services on Friday nights for kids who didn’t attend the church, but who went to its summer camp. I took 12 students to camp that year. I became a fixture in that community.”
Out in the woods, Bishop Curry saw students come alive in new ways. “They were hearing the wind and the trees, seeing the sun come up and watching deer run around,” he recalls. “The summer program helped them get in touch with the peace that must first be found within us, and the peace that’s offered by the natural environment.”
By 2006, Bishop Curry was the camp director, and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America asked him to be the mission developer for the worshipping community that was forming out of the camping program. “Most of the time, you hear about a church starting a camping program,” notes Bishop Curry, “this time the camping program was starting a church.” The group became Shekinah Chapel and settled in Riverdale, Illinois, a Chicago suburb. More than 50 percent of its congregants volunteer at the camps.
Reaching out, bringing in
Through ELCA’s network of churches and communications, the summer program started to get campers from New York, Detroit, and other cities. “We started forming chapters in Columbus, Ohio; DeKalb and Rockford, Illinois; and Indianapolis,” Bishop Curry says.
A camp for girls, Safe In My Sisters Arms, (SIMSA) was started as well as MYLA, the Multicultural Youth Leadership Academy that partners with Living Water Ministries in Michigan. It allows young people to explore what it means to live in a multicultural world.
Like most summer camps, there’s a lot of fun, notes Bishop Curry, and there’s time for life lessons on conflict resolution, respecting each other, the meaning of Scripture and appropriate ways to release pain.
“There’s a lot of anger bottled up inside so many of us,” says Bishop Curry, “we lash out because we don’t know how to deal with our pain – the pain we caused, and the pain that was done to us.”
Once back home from a week at camp, the campers meet monthly in their various cities and every February, they can attend the annual reunion. “If you made a friend at camp when you were eight or nine, you could still be meeting up with that person when you were 15 or 16,” says Bishop Curry. “Many campers have stuck around that long.”
Nearly 90 percent of the staff today used to attend the camps, underscores Bishop Curry, and there’s a waiting list of former campers who want to serve as counselors. “We are developing our future leaders,” he says.
Learning and change, reports Bishop Curry, is a two-way street at the camps where adult volunteers gain insights alongside campers. “The kids who come to camp are willing to be involved, but involvement may not look like showing up every Sunday morning,” he states. “They’re more into social justice activities…they want to talk about immigration and food insecurity… they want a place where all their friends can show up. I’ve learned that it’s wiser to spend my time making friends with young people than trying to convert them to become members of a church or denomination. It’s easy to walk away from a church or denomination. It's far more difficult for them to bail out on a friend.”
Bishop Yehiel Curry