Belonging - Different and Unified

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  This year we are excited to celebrate the larger community of Capernaum on our socials and blog!


Our global community

Our local community

Our volunteer community

Our student community

Our family community 

Our staff community


It is all ONE community.  We are interconnected through a shared mission of introducing adolescents with disabilities to Jesus Christ and helping them grow in their faith.  And a shared vision of creating spaces of belonging in all these spaces around the world.  Join us this year as we share photos, videos, and stories of our #OneCommunity!


For February, we hear from Tasha Taylor, Midwest Capernaum Coordinator, as she shares her thoughts on belonging and community.


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I have been thinking about marginalization a lot in recent years and in one of my classes at Western Theological Seminary called Ministry and the Margins with Dr. Ben Conner, we learned about five ways people are marginalized through power dynamics:


According to Robert Schreiter we, 

  • Homogenize: Assume “they” are all the same. 
  • Colonize: Exercise control over others. Put people together in one setting.
  • Demonize: Consider “them” fundamentally fallen. 
  • Romanticize: Make people into inspirations.
  • Pluralize: Get rid of differences in a way that is not helpful by saying we are all the same.


Our broken power dynamics have created marginalized people because of difference.  We have made difference something to hold at arms length or worse. 


But we also know God created us to be interdependent.  Desmond Tutu talked about it with this African concept of Ubuntu which can be translated as, “I am because we are.”  And Pope Francis talks about it as Fratelli Tutti - a universal brotherhood and sisterhood.  An interconnectedness - I don’t exist as a singular entity.  Like the Body of Christ where all are needed and all are different on purpose and for a purpose.


Jesus shows us what God is like in his ministry to those on the margins which were of primary importance.  He centered those on the margins.  Like in the Great Banquet he kept sending them back out to bring in the people who society had pushed out because he wanted his house to be full.


And this past year I have been really struck by Revelation 7. 


Revelation 7:9-10

“After this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands. And they cried out in a loud voice:

“Salvation belongs to our God,

who sits on the throne,

and to the Lamb.”’


A vision of the end times, of the culmination of all things, of the Kingdom of God as people coming together in their differences.  It is not about sameness, it is about retaining the God-given differences.  They are unified in their worship of the LORD.  



It has been reminding me of this painting by Joel Schoon-Tanis.  So many beautiful things all together in harmony, in shalom.  They are different but unified.


So how do we move forward as we join what God is desiring to do in and around us?  Through personal and collective reimagining.


It is about looking at ourselves over and over again to see the ways we may be marginalizing others.  (Go back to the five examples.)


It is about justice.  It is about doing things differently and reimagining systems and structures.


It is about our God-given honor to redraw the boundaries around who is “in” over and over again.  We can join God in the act of building community where all people belong.


I love that we get to do this within Young Life and Capernaum!  It is a joy to see God at work in these ways.  Which is why I wanted to share these fun photos from our Fall Weekend because there is a sense of infinite joy in these camp spaces where we live and play alongside Young Life peers from Chicagoland.  



- Tasha Taylor 

(playing mixers with my friend Tempest at Fall Weekend)


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Each month this year we will be sharing about community and belonging within Young Life and Capernaum.  Follow along with us!

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