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Together to serve the poor

In Atlanta, ELCA youth join interreligious peers

The Atlanta Community Food Bank is a typical warehouse with cold, cement floors and the echoing voices of workers who run forklift pallets of macaroni and cheese to assembly lines—all to feed 42,000 people a week through partner nonprofit organizations. In July it was the site of a peacemaking experiment involving teenagers from Epiphany Lutheran Church, Suwanee, Ga.

While participating in an Atlanta service event in July, Lutheran youth talked and worked with peers from a variety of religious faiths.

The youth were there with peers from many faith traditions for a day of service sponsored by Emory University’s Youth Theological Initiative and Interfaith Youth Core, a Chicago-based interreligious organization founded by Eboo Patel, an American Muslim. Such encounters are essential to world peace, said Patel, co-author of Building the Interfaith Youth Movement (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006). It’s part of the imperative “for all communities within a diverse society to take responsibility for embracing a common life while maintaining their uniqueness,” Patel wrote.

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