During the trip, Kristin fell in love with helping the homeless experience kingdom justice. Her commitment to deep justice was crystallized when she and one of our adult leaders met J.R., a homeless man hanging out near the San Francisco Convention Center. Kristin offered her extra sack lunch to him and started asking him questions about his family and his life in San Francisco.

J.R. responded with a tirade against the government, the middle and upper classes and Christians. While not a member of the government, Kristin is upper-middle class and a Christian. She remembers, “I left that lunch determined not to be the type of apathetic Christian J.R. hated.”

She came back and dove into our church’s Beverage Crew, a ministry in which high school students offer drinks to homeless persons and try to build relationships with them, eventually understanding why they have ended up on the streets. Kristin has realized “some of them choose to be there, but others just end up there. We don’t know their stories until we talk to them. And we need to figure out how to help them help themselves.”

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Over time, Kristin’s commitment to justice on behalf of the homeless has grown deeper. Her junior year she served as the student shepherd for that San Francisco trip, and the next year was the student director. Probably just as important, Kristin encouraged a friend to attend; and the friend loved it so much that she is pursuing a global studies major in college in the pursuit of righting wrongs.

Or take Marcus, a high school senior in our church who received a Hi8 video camera as a Christmas gift when he was in sixth grade and has been making movies ever since. His passion for and skills in movie–making increased concurrently with his concern about the friction he experienced at his public high school between students of different races and socio–economic levels. He and his friend decided to write, direct, and produce Viola, a full-length film about two students—one white American girl and one Chinese-American boy—and the lessons they learn about “fitting in” with people who are different from them.

“We got more than we bargained for,” Marcus recalls. Once it was completed, Viola was screened at a major Pasadena theatre and was also accepted at several film festivals. Even more importantly for Marcus, this justice movie made entirely by high school students provoked great conversations about race at both his school and church.

Since Viola, Marcus has worked on a number of projects, all geared to spark conversation and insight about racial and economic injustices. Marcus’ small group leader, Jeff, has played a major role in Marcus’s desire to change how others think about race, class and disabilities. “It wasn’t so much what Jeff has said about any of that; it’s more how he has put us in positions that force us to think about it. The more I see, the more I realize how many wrongs need to be righted. We can’t just meet people’s needs short-term; we have to help them learn how to meet their own needs long-term.”