Brother Sister Project

It all started when…

I was in college and I reluctantly joined a fraternity at UW and was working my way to becoming a full time member. After 6 months it was the practice of the community to pair everyone up with another existing member of the fraternity for the remainder of your time at UW. I was given “Big Bro” and then after a year I was assigned a “Little Bro.” The connections were somewhat random, but because we each had just one big and one little, they were special and we each felt an extra measure of care and concern for those individuals. While not a perfect system, the beautiful part was that everyone in the community knew that at least one person had an eye on them and each member knew that they had real responsibility to another person. I was witnessing a beautiful thing among an institution that also had a lot of brokenness.

Fast forward 15 years and after starting a new church here in Seattle I realized that there was a big problem. My very secular and not always morally sound fraternity was doing “brotherhood” (and I had friends in sororities who had the same experience with sisterhood) much better than the church itself — from whom they’d originally borrowed the idea. “Something has to change!” I said to myself. So this little project was born, as we try to share responsibility for one another just as Scripture commands. We will discuss in more detail the nuance of this project during the Family Membership Class, but you are free to read the PDF we will share in that class by clicking the button below.

May we always take serious the call to be brothers and sisters in Christ!