Capstone Project Proposal

Seniors at The Bear Creek School spend the last three weeks of their highschool experience working on any project of their choice. This was the fourth revision of my project proposal - it took several meetings with faculty to get it straightened out and articulated in such a way that it would be an acceptable project to bring to this school. Keep in mind as you read that I wrote this considering it part of the project itself: an opportunity to learn how to communicate my idea in a reasonable way to a relatively suborn conservative audience.

Capstone Project Proposal

Student Name: Marié Dippenaar

Name of Project: Engaging Taboo in Christian Community

Proposal – Please describe in detail your anticipated project, process, and, if appropriate, product, giving as many specifics as possible.

Questions aren't bad things inherently, but if people are afraid of sharing them, they brood in the back of their minds and grow into doubts and taboos. For my project, I've chosen three topics – self-injury, homosexuality, and evolution – which represent a range of issues within the church spanning from health-centered to truth-centered. Both the pursuit of health and truth require great integrity, compassion, and wisdom, and each has an obvious place in the Church. Since God is a God of wholeness and rightness, He and His Church should be the place we go to unpack issues that touch us in deep ways. But people are often afraid to go to the Church with controversy, because there's a common unspoken understanding that leaving such things at the foot of the pulpit results in either apocalyptic explosion or quiet dismissal. People fear that they will be ignored, judged, laughed down, called names, or even condemned. Is it possible to engage taboo openly, with Christlike love and grace, while maintaining appropriate confidence and conviction?

My goal is to spend a week on each of these three topics, exploring the ways in which members of the Church have engaged them as part of their calling to serve their communities. Each day I will meet with a minimum of one qualified person to talk about the issue and interview them on their thoughts. Although there are contexts in which it is appropriate and important to unpack the theological debates surrounding homosexuality and evolution, that's not my goal for this project. I intend to explore what Christians think about the way the Church should engage these issues and the people they impact, regardless of the minutia of their respective doctrinal stances. Where relevant and respectful, I will record my interviews with the people I interview so that I can make a short video summarizing my experience at the end of the week. For the official “interview” portion of the meeting, I will have broader, more conceptual questions that will be the same for each interview, but I anticipate that the meetings will expand to include more personal reflections, as well. Any time I spend outside of meetings will be for journaling and supplemental reading, as is recommended.

Below are the interview questions I would use for each group I will be interviewing. (I intend to do the three weeks in the order I've put them below because of the order in which they became relevant issues in my own life.)

EVOLUTION

Explain briefly your basic stance on the issue.

1) To what extent should this issue be important to the Church, and why?

2) What role does/should Science have in our pursuit of truth?

3) How do you engage this topic with people in the Church that think differently than you do?

SELF-INJURY

Explain briefly how you're connected to this issue.

1) How would you sum up the current attitude of self-injurers to the Church? Why is it that way?

2) Why is it important to pay attention to issues like these in the Church?

3) What role does/should the Church, as a whole as well as individual members, play in engaging people in the midst of issues like these?

HOMOSEXUALITY

1. People with traditional views on gender and homosexuality:

1) In a nutshell, what do you believe about the way Christians ought to regard homosexuality and gender-nontraditional people?

2) How would you or do you respond to individuals that come out as gay to you? How do you balance compassion with integrity about your views of morality in the context of this community?

3) How do you approach this subject with other Christians that have differing views from you?

2. People with more liberal views on gender and homosexuality:

1) What has been the role of your Christian faith in coming out as gay or affirming gay people, and vice versa?

2) What assets do you think the gay community and gender-nontraditional people have to contribute to Christian community?

3) How do you approach this subject with other Christians that have differing views from you?

Objectives – Describe the objectives you hope to accomplish through this project. Your objectives should be concrete, measurable, and personally challenging.

I will meet with at least 12 different people to discuss this issue and interview them (according to the above questions) on their stance. I will record the interviews and create a short 10-minute documentary highlighting the different views, attitudes, and experiences I hear about.

Why is this project significant?

As we graduate and move on to diverse college environments, we will need to challenge ourselves to continue applying the Christian framework we have built up for ourselves during our time in high school. All year in Capstone, we've been learning how to look beyond the bookish learning we've received and to apply our Christian worldview to everything we do. The world seems to think that applying Christianity to taboos is like trying to mix oil and water, but I believe it's important to engage them with precisely the same integrity and confidence we would have in any other topic. We can better serve this world – and the Church, for that matter – if we can understand the people in it and are educated about the way they think and communicate. These issues in particular demand a heightened level of sensitivity and competency; fostering a greater understanding of people on all different sides of various controversial issues will help us to develop compassion, move past disagreements, and refocus our attention to our primary identity as children of God. 1 Corinthians 1 comes to mind: regardless of what ideas or whose teachings we follow, it's important to remember that as Christians, we are all united in Christ.