Faith is like riding a bike. When I was younger, I was with my parents on a tricycle. I went to whichever church they wanted to attend and absorbed everything they said and everything the church said. When I went to college, I took the training wheels off, but I stayed on the sidewalks in the same neighborhood. For the first time, I was in charge of where I went to church. But I still attended a similar type of church. My beliefs altered some, but not in a dramatic way. Now I’ve left the neighborhood. I’ve found different paths previously undiscovered. I’ve ventured pastRead More →

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Greetings from Wilmington, Delaware! It’s been eight weeks now since the six of us moved into the aptly named Koinonia house. It has truly begun to feel like our new home. Living together and getting to know each other has been a very fruitful experience so far. We have a lot of fun together! Our weekly dinners together are often filled with laughter. There’s already a whiteboard hanging on the wall in the dining room, filled with ridiculous things each of us has said, and inside jokes. The closeness of our housemates (along with a collective level of sassiness that I am rarely ever preparedRead More →

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What do you get when you throw one person from Oregon, two from Iowa, one from Minnesota, one from Michigan, and one from North Carolina together in a house in Delaware? So far it’s been teasing each other’s accents, discussing the difference between “scotcharoos” and “special K bars,” and wondering when we’re going to run into Joe Biden. Exploring the east coast this first month has been an adventure. One of our first goals in Wilmington was to get to know our neighborhood. We ate our first dinner as a house outside on our front porch. We made an effort to say hello to everyoneRead More →

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Often when folks think of a “year of service”, the train of thought tends to highlight direct service opportunities, or work that is seen as community service: after-school tutoring, serving in a soup kitchen, building a house, cleaning up a stream, etc. However, it’s pretty unlikely that you’ll build a house during your year with LVC. Like many service year programs, LVC provides a mixture of both direct and indirect service positions – our direct service positions leaning towards relationship building &  case management, and indirect service positions typically following a capacity building role: communications work, development work, policy building & advocacy work, etc. Sometimes, a positionRead More →

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Morgan (second left), with Koinonia housemates It’s now been more two months since our new Volunteers began serving at their placement sites! For our Volunteers, these months have been  filled with new beginnings, uncomfortable amounts of vulnerability, realizing the importance of intentional budgeting (usually after it’s too late), and finding some peace in that the fact that they’re all doing it together. Volunteer Morgan Simmons is serving this year in Wilmington, DE at Lutheran Community Services and living in the Koinonia House. Morgan is one of a couple of our Volunteers focused on food insecurity, as this year she serves as a Food & Shelter Assistant,Read More →

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