This journal was created for young adults “engaging the world through service.” The Krista Foundation for Global Citizenship, our publisher, understands this phrase in two distinct, yet related ways. First, the Foundation supports young adults who have committed to a sustained period of voluntary or vocational service as an expression of their Christian faith and values. This type of engagement is bounded by both place and time and can usually be summarized by a one sentence description of the type the Foundation uses on its website (www.kristafoundation.org) to introduce the young adults it supports as Krista Colleagues. For example: Kirk Harris is working with the Program for Christian-Muslim Relations in Nairobi, Kenya with the Presbyterian Church (USA) Young Adult Volunteer Program. Megan Hurley serves with Jesuit Volunteer Corp in downtown Portland providing posthospitalization respite care for homeless adults who need continuing attention to effectively recover. Nathan Brouwer is serving with the Peace Corps in The Gambia, Africa as an Environmental Extensionist. Lisa Villano serves with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps at L’arche Tahoma Hope in Tacoma, Washington where she lives in community with mentally disabled adults. However these bounded engagements usually last just one to three years, with the Colleague moving on to other life pursuits at the end of their term. Because of this, the Krista Foundation is careful to articulate a second critical dimension of service, which is the belief that engaging the world through bounded acts of service helps shape young adults into global citizens who will then continue to engage the world through an unbounded ethic of service.
In an effort to explore the nature of this ethic, we have arranged this issue of The Global Citizen around the metaphor of a table. Tables, be they the tables of our childhood or those of our adult lives, are by their very nature places where we gain our values. Thus, in the first article, “Come to the Table: Five Values for the Global Citizen,” I have invited you to explore the nature of this ethic at each of five tables. The values set out at these tables – mutuality, influence, competence, humility, and celebration – are neither a complete nor settled set. One might question why I chose mutuality over sacrifice, community or wonder; or perhaps why hope or change were left out. By sustaining a metaphor of invitation to this series of five tables, I hope to leave space for such questions, indeed space for other tables where this ethic might be further shaped.
Following this first article, we have arranged the remaining articles in this issue around these five metaphorical tables. Although each of these articles was selected for its stand-alone strengths, we hope that this arrangement will foster a more robust understanding of each table by inviting you to read beyond my limited framework. Each table may, in fact, host several values and any given value may in turn find a place at more than one table. For example, Darien Palpant, as she writes about life after her term of service in Uganda, reminds us that the values of sacrifice and community belong with mutuality at the communion table. At the same time however, she shows how humility and celebration also belong there. Similarly both Sarah Wanless and Lindsay Leeder show how hope and change reside alongside humility at the operating table.
Eleven of the fourteen contributors to this issue of The Global Citizen are Krista Colleagues; nine of whom have completed their bounded terms of service. Along with our other three contributors, National Public Radio’s Scott Simon, University of Puget Sound Professor Michael Veseth, and Krista Foundation Co-Founder Jim Hunt, all articulate a journey into global citizenship as they take the lessons learned and values fostered during their various service experiences and apply them to life beyond these bounded engagements. Our cover photo was chosen to represent precisely this transition between the Krista Foundation’s two understandings of “engaging the world through service.” Waving goodbye to the communities where one has journeyed to serve may at once signal the end of a sustained period of service and the beginning of a life-long ethic of service, civic engagement and global understanding that defi ne life as a global citizen.
Aaron Ausland
Editor
