Gone Fishin This Week

I am out of commission this week, off to Elkhart, Indiana for a service trip with the high schoolers from my church. We are volunteering for Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary. I assume this will involve clearing the brush of sacrilege from the green spaces of orthodoxy, or wiping the stain of sin from the student housing of temptation, in order to leave a clean start for incoming seminarians (although we can't do much about their original sin).

We are also going on a Mennonite heritage tour. We'll visit the historical MennoHof Museum (or Mennonite Hall of Fame, as my daughter once called it) as well as tour MCC, MC-USA, MMN, and all those other Mennonite-titled denominational offices. Also, we'll let Goshen College's admissions recruiters have a crack at the youth, which we are hoping will include food or marketing swag of some kind. My hopes are not high, though, since Mennonites are not great self-promoters, and free stuff in the service of marketing doesn't flow nearly as easily as free stuff in the service of disaster relief or poverty assistance.

If all goes well, our high schoolers will be freshly programmed and indoctrinated Mennonites by the end of the week, and spend the rest of their lives helping others in a shy, introverted kind of way.