What the Episcopal Youth Event Means for Me

Zack Nyein

 

Growing up in Maryville, Tennesse - the Foothills of the Smoky Mountains - I was the only Episcopalian in my high school of 1,700 students. Bound tightly in the buckle of the Bible-belt, my Anglican faith was suspect at best, and often I was accused of being something “un-Christian” altogether. You can imagine the sense of isolation. Yet I wish those with any doubts about the faithfulness or vitality of our denomination could have experienced the utter euphoria of an entire arena filled with Episcopal youth praying, singing, and dancing in the Spirit at Berea College in 2005. For me EYE was an incredible witness to the work of the Spirit in the Episcopal Church and to the power of the Gospel to transform our world.
 

I first attended EYE as a rising junior in 2005 and again as a member of the music team in 2008. EYE gave me a glimpse of a Church more concerned with people than politics, and one that values its church members over its churchmanship. It provided a picture of a Church that celebrates the diversity of God’s people and honors the centrality of young people to its common life. Now, as a college senior who is heavily involved in campus ministry leadership, I often point back to EYE as a touchstone in my growth as a disciple.
 

EYE is a big event. And as a small town boy, I need EYE. It reminds me of just how unimaginably big God is. It reminds me how great our world’s needs are. EYE serves as a source of excitement, hope, and energy for the future, and gives participants the courage to ask big questions about how to be Church in a changing culture. It provides tools for building the Kingdom and inspires a vision of what could be. Above all EYE has simply afforded me the opportunity to know some flat-out amazing people. I am so thankful for the abundance and variety of gifts among us and am constantly surprised by how folks from EYE keep popping up in my life!

 

At church recently our All Saints prayer spoke so eloquently of what EYE makes so plainly evident; that our Lord has “knit us together… in the mystical body of Christ…”

We are “intimately linked in this harvest work,” indeed!

Zack Nyein (pictured on camel, top right) is a senior in Music Education at the University of Tennessee and the Peer Ministry Coordinator for the Tyson House Lutheran-Episcopal Campus Ministry.

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