So, a United Methodist and a Jew go to Appalachia . . .

The first day of our spring break trip I noticed how Christian-centric my Facebook feed is. Relaxing after the first achy work day, waiting for dinner, we’d only have one group conversation at that point, but already I was seeing things a little differently.

Rabbi Jake Rubin and I have been colleagues and friends for a few years and we’d casually said, “We should do a trip together sometime.” Last summer we got less casual about it and decided to bring our student leaders into the conversation. After the first meeting, standing in the parking lot talking a bit more, our main Wesley spring break organizer said, “I expect to be challenged and to learn a lot.” We talked about that being a great orienting stance for our group and she expressed the concern that everyone from Wesley would need to be on the same page—this is a service trip together, not an opportunity to convert the Jews. (For the record, we didn’t have any students interested in doing this.)

Saying “service trip” instead of “mission trip” was one of the first things we noticed. The Brody Jewish Center—Hillel at UVA usually refers to their trips as Alternate Spring Break trips and when we asked we realized “mission” has a resoundingly Christian ring to it. So we worked on our language a bit and referred to our joint venture as our “Interfaith Spring Break Service Trip.” Those of us at Wesley started to think more deeply about what we communicate by saying “service trip” or “mission trip.” For many years in our pre-trip meetings, Wesley has stressed the theological understanding that we don’t “bring God” to anyone—we go to see what God is already doing there. Adjusting our language this year helped us to see this even better.