All during the 7th grade school year, students have been learning about missionary discipleship and becoming missionary disciples themselves.

Our students understand missionary discipleship as a process that involves:
• Encountering people on our “margins” (people who are not in our close circles of family, friends, and neighbors we interact with on a regular basis),
• Experiencing disturbance at injustices that people on the margins experience, and
• Planning and carrying out a response that reflects God’s mission of love and care for all.

 

Throughout much of the early part of the school year, students worked together in their religion classes to research six broad topics related to people on the margins. The six broad topics are:

Care for Creation

Immigration and the Movement of Peoples

Education

Gender Equality

Economic Justice and Poverty

 

After learning something about each of these topics, each class narrowed down to focus on just one or two of the topics.  Prior to this year, each class worked together to develop a response topic.  However, due to the need for social distancing created by the COVID-19 pandemic, students this year planned and completed their projects individually or in small groups that would still allow for social distancing.

 

The goal of their project was to do something that can make a difference and encourage others to join their cause.  The students’ year of learning about missionary discipleship is an introduction to what we hope will become an ongoing part of their lives.