Guest Post: Katelin Ryan '13

Fridays are the most popular days in Chapel because it is when Senior students speak. They are always incredibly inspiring moments for those of us who work at the College. Senior Chapels give us an opportunity to hear how God has been at work, through the Wartburg Community, helping them to discover the people God created them to be. 

From time to time I plan to share some of these Senior Chapels on this blog (with the student's permission of course). We can talk about the faith lives of young adults all we want but there is no substitute for hearing them speak in their own voices. I would hope that every community of faith would find opportunities to allow young adults the chance to share their experiences publicly.

Today's post comes from Katelin Ryan '13. Katelin is a History Major and has been passionately involved in caring for others in our community as a peer helper. This year she has also been a mentor in our discipleship process "The Way of Jesus". Katelin is a wonderful young woman who speaks very honestly about her faith journey. I know you will enjoy hearing what she has to say.

James 2:14-17

¹⁴ What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save them? ¹⁵ Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food. ¹⁶ If one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? ¹⁷ In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.

Thank you all for coming today. 

I want to share with you a little bit of my faith journey starting with my first year out of high school which I spent as an intern at a Church in another state.  I do not talk about my time there very often because it has been very difficult for me to see how those experiences serving in the church fit in with the rest of my life.  I will explain a little bit about the church and what I did there, and talk about the difficulty I had trying to merge those experiences with the rest of my life, and then tie it back to that scripture from James.

There were 12 other interns in the program I was in.  I worked with the nursery director and helped to organize the volunteers.  I came up with lesson plans and craft ideas for the toddlers and pre-schoolers.  I spent a lot of time volunteering in other areas of the church as well.  I cleaned a lot of bathrooms and mopped a lot of floors, which I did gladly because I my actions were serving the church.  I was at the church for eight hours a day or more at least five days a week.  I read the Bible a lot, I prayed a lot, and I did a lot of things to serve God’s kingdom.

As part of the internship we did a lot of outreach events.  We partnered with an inner city elementary school where we provided school supplies and backpacks and tutored students on a weekly basis.  We went to a low-income housing complex and shared a meal with the community.  We went on a missions trip to a Native American reservation in Arizona.  It was the first missions trip I had ever been on.  We served Easter dinner to inmates at a prison.  These are just some highlights of my experiences, and you are welcome to ask me questions about any of them. 

But what I really want you to understand is that while I was doing all of these good Christian things, my heart was not in the right place.  My actions reflected my faith, but my faith was all pretty superficial.  I was doing a lot of good things for God, but the purpose and meaning behind it all was visceral.  It came from what I thought it it meant to be a good follower of Christ.  I knew that what I was doing is what good Christians were supposed to do, but my actions did not come from my heart.  My actions were not out of genuine love and concern for God’s people or his kingdom. But out of a sense of pious religious duty. 

So when I returned home for the summer I was completely disoriented.  I did not see people in my church community at home being so involved in the surrounding community, and I grew really frustrated.  And I didn’t know what to do with myself.  I was planning to spend a second year in the same internship program but decided almost at the last minute that that was not where I wanted to be.  I toured Wartburg and immediately realized that it was the place for me.  I registered for classes a week before they started and began my college career.

At that point, I pushed that tension and frustration I felt toward my church community aside.  I refused to think about why I was judging so many people in my church to be hypocrites, and I stopped going to church.

It wasn’t until this past summer, when I went to church on a Sunday morning with some friends while I was in Denver, Colorado that I realized what really bothered me about going to church was that I felt like the biggest hypocrite of all.  And so I had something new to wrestle with.  And I am only beginning to figure out how to handle that, but the biggest revelation was that up until that point I was just “doing faith”  I was just going through the motions of being a Christian.  I was concerned about people’s eternal soul, but I didn’t really care very much about their present situation.  And a lot of the people I met when I was interning were suffering.  I thought they just needed Jesus and their lives would be better, but then I had to wonder why some people were so resistant.  The Bible tells us that we are to take care of a person’s physical being as well, otherwise our words are meaningless.

Last term, I took Christian Ethics as my second required religion course, and that class really got me thinking about my faith, and at some point early in the term we read the chapter “Moral Ambiguity” from a book by Ellen Ott Marshall called Christians in the Public Square and I realized that my Christian faith and what I do don’t have to be two separate things.  Both my faith and my experiences can inform each other.

So now in my faith journey I am trying to discern what that means for me exactly.  I am a history major with no clear career path before me, but I am in classes right now that are developing in me compassion and concern for the well being of God’s people.  And I am excited about the part I have to play in God’s present kingdom here on earth.

My time as a Church intern exposed me to a lot of eye opening experiences.  I was serving the kingdom of God, but I was doing it not out of love and genuine concern for others but out of a sense of Christian duty.  Like James says, faith without action is dead, but action without genuine love for ones neighbors is pointless.  No one will learn the good news if we do not carry that good news in our hearts and allow it to penetrate all areas of our lives.