In late June/early July, I spent 9 days at Brock University in St. Catharine’s. Although I had no idea what I was getting myself into, it was an invaluable experience of learning, forming community, and sharing wisdom across different cultures, and I am eternally grateful for the opportunity to have gone through it.
I went as the youth representative for the Presbyterian Church in Canada (PCC), and with me were four youths from the Presbyterian Church of the Republic of Korea (PROK), two from the Korean Christian Church in Japan (KCCJ), two from the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan (PCT), and three from the United Church of Canada (UCC).
It was overwhelming meeting with all these global partners and having to overcome culture and language barriers, and even more so against the daunting backdrop of knowing that we had four days to get to know each other, and to jointly develop a workshop to be delivered at the PCC/UCC Audacious Hope conference.
We were definitely on a time crunch, especially among other commitments that our group had, however one thing that we always kept at the center of our time together was worship. Each of us were responsible for leading a different worship for our group, with the intention of learning how other cultures and denominations do worship – this may have been one of my favourite parts of my time there. I learned about Taizé worship, famous children’s songs in the United Church tradition, and danced to Taiwanese worship music.
Whenever we weren’t worshipping or on hikes or other mini trips, we were in Alphie’s Trough (our worship space that eventually became our home), trying to find topics that all of our denominations could relate to. This process was incredibly difficult, especially with a pretty extreme communication barrier between most of us, however we finally established that two issues that were universally experienced were Indigenous rights and declining YAYA (youth and young adults) in the church – these topics ended up being the focus of our workshop.
Over the next couple of days, our attention was solely on our workshop – how we were going to deliver it, what we wanted to say, and how each topic relates to each of our experiences. Through this process, I was blessed with an incredibly eye-opening experience of listening to what my global friends had to say about each topic. The Canadians in the group intentionally took a step back to lift up the voices of our international friends, and thanks to this we learned about what Indigenous rights mean in the Taiwanese context, and some potential reasons why we’ve noticed a decline in young people in each of our denominations.
Thankfully, despite the intense time restriction, we came through and ended up delivering a very successful workshop that all of us were sincerely proud of. We spent the rest of our time there as participants in Audacious Hope and spending as much time together as we could before everyone had to fly back to their respective homes.
If there’s one thing my 9 days at BrockU taught me, it’s that even though everyone came from vastly different backgrounds, it was not difficult at all to find common ground. I experienced firsthand how universal human issues are, as well as how differently they manifest in different contexts, and this gave me such a good opportunity to learn from people in those different contexts. It’s helped me become more globally aware and also more understanding of others. I properly learned that humans, no matter where they are, tend to experience similar struggles and that there is more common ground amongst people than we might think. There’s no one way of doing worship that is inherently better than another, just like there is no one way to experience a certain struggle that is more valid than another. Every new person we meet (internationally or otherwise) presents to us a new opportunity to learn something, and to find shared experiences that unite us.
– Jocelyn Chung
