An Interesting Understanding of Welcome and Love – The Journey of ELCA Vice President Imran Siddiqui – Part 2

Dawn Rundman, member of the Connect Journal editorial board, recently interviewed ELCA Vice President Imran Siddiqui. For Part 1 of this interview, go here. Read on for Part 2, where he talks about youth ministry, the presence of God and how family is more than just the folks in your house.

What have you witnessed in the space of children, youth and family ministry since you’ve been part of an ELCA congregation and especially in the last year, in your role as vice president?

When I first became Southeastern Synod vice president, I said, I’d like to help or participate in the youth organization. I went to an executive board meeting, and I would have gone more often, but then COVID happened.

So I went that first year, and it was very interesting. I introduced myself, and then I opened it up to conversations. And the thing that I found most striking, I still remember, is that folks who were on this Lutheran youth organization board told stories about how in their congregations, they would not be listened to. 

I remember distinctly this one young woman who said, I’m on my church council in my congregation, and yet no one really pays attention to me. I make a suggestion and no one says anything, but someone else says the exact same thing and they say, oh yeah, that’s fantastic.

There’s kind of this weird dynamic of these youth. The synod lifts them up as leaders. At some point we made all of the executive committee of the Lutheran youth organization voting members in our synod assembly. So we lifted them up in those ways, but in their congregations, they still felt unheard.

One of the things that’s kind of interesting, and I don’t know if it’s changing at all, but I find this in a lot of spaces where a lot of churches are happy to say, we like to have youth involved. But they’re involved as being the acolyte during worship or they’re in the council meeting, but they don’t necessarily get brought into the discussions a lot.

I remember what I told this one youth. I said, you’ve been a Lutheran longer than I have, so you tell your congregation, I’ve been Lutheran longer than the synod vice president.

And I also found this interesting dynamic of how we don’t necessarily know what to do with youth after confirmation. We say, now you’re confirmed and you’re a full member of this community, but we don’t know what to do with that or what that means.

There are some churches that have it figured out, but a lot of churches simply don’t know what to do with it.

We don’t really know how to talk to kids about faith and how to be included in our congregations. A lot of times, people who are growing in their understanding just want to have an opportunity to have open questions and talk about things and figure out, hey, that doesn’t make any sense or, that gospel seems kind of harsh. How do we make sense of it?

And we don’t really have a space for young people to ask questions. Sometimes they feel scared that if they ask questions, we’ll be very harsh towards them, right? In other churches and more strict fundamentalist type of churches, the answer is “this is what it is.”

But I think in our churches, we have curious children. And so it’s good to have conversations and ask about that, but sometimes we don’t feel comfortable doing so.

Since I’ve become ELCA vice president, I haven’t worked a lot with the youth organizations. But I am invited to the Youth Gathering, so I’m excited about that. I think that’s a great opportunity. You have people who are really interested in the faith, and these folks are excited. What happens is we see a lot of times that they go off to college, and sometimes they fall away, and sometimes the issue is that we didn’t treat them or their questions seriously. 

We don’t want to admit, especially to our kids, that we don’t understand what something is. Things like, I don’t understand why Jesus would tell that parable. Sometimes it’s easier to admit to other adults rather than our kids. We don’t want to tell our kids that. We don’t want them to think that we don’t know the answer, even though they’d probably respect us a little more if we did.

That approach is opposed to denominations or traditions that are more, “This is how it is. You read it and you believe it and that’s it.”

If we have humility to say, sometimes we don’t understand this, I think that benefits children and youth when they go through college, where they get taught that in many ways that we need to question assumptions. If they already know that in their faith we can question things, I think it sets it up better as opposed to being a fight between faith and reason or faith and science.

When you look back now at when you were a child and a teenager, how did you witness God at work in your life?

My parents instilled a level of faith. It was almost like more of a fundamentalist bent—this is what it is, and we believe in God, and this is what we do. I was almost taught not to ask too many questions. We didn’t necessarily go to mosque too often, maybe for the big holidays.

But there was always a sense of there’s something else out there. And there was a very close-knit family structure, and it was an extended family structure of cousins—my father’s and my mother’s.

And I saw a lot of God working through people helping each other in the family. Like, we have to go up to Long Island, New York, to visit with this person who’s sick. And they turned out to be maybe a fourth cousin of mine, but it was kind of like—this is your family. They’re related somehow. And so they’re part of your family.

And so the idea—and it’s something very common in traditions in Asia but not necessarily as common in the West—but it was this feeling of a family being more than just the folks in your house. The family is a wider concept. It’s one of those things that I think that it’s hard to think about in a Western mindset, but it’s kind of like your family doesn’t have to be the folks that you see all the time.

In a certain way God was working in that and saying, your family is people you just may meet once every 10 years, and they’re just as close to you as the people that live upstairs.

I’d go back to Pakistan now and then—maybe three times when I was a kid—but every time folks that I’d never met or only talked to once or twice would treat me like they were fast friends or close family.

So it was this interesting understanding of welcome and love.