That moment has been made almost legendary by Brethren church members who have been volunteering for years. Serving thy neighbor is deeply rooted in the culture of the Brethren. They believe they are called by the example of Jesus, who washed his disciples' feet and told the story of the Good Samaritan.

 

Brethren had been helping one another and others in the community since their beginnings. They began to do organized volunteer work as early as the 1930s. They continued through World War II and into the post-war years, focusing on relief and reconstruction in Europe. Brethren to this day continue to have a robust program of volunteer effort. The action at the Colorado conference was a dramatic moment that captured, advanced, and symbolized the volunteer spirit of the Brethren that would continue and flourish under many different leaders. But it wasn't the church leaders who brought it to that new level in 1948. It was the youth.

 

Annual Conference the year before, in 1947, met in Orlando, Fla. The executive secretary of the Brethren Service Commission, M. R. Zigler, described his recent experience traveling in Europe to the youth in attendance, who were gathered in a football stadium to hear him speak. He told them of the hunger and homelessness, the illness and misery, the devastated land and leveled cities all over Europe. Brethren historian Donald Durnbaugh described the scene: "Zigler's firsthand accounts of the suffering he had seen in Europe shook his hearers. His message was electrifying. It shocked the youth into a state of horror. Dismay and soul-searching followed, then the questions, 'What can we do?' The decision was to begin praying and wait for an answer."

 

The National Youth Cabinet called for a round-the-clock vigil to pray for peace, inviting all youth and all Conference-goers to participate and keep it going all through Conference week. One evening as some youth and adults lingered to talk, the idea of voluntary service came up. One of the church leaders said, "If you want to get the Brethren interested in the peace movement, you have to get the ideas of the young people out into the churches."

 

Heading home from Conference on a train that summer, several of the young adults decided the prayer vigil was too important to drop. "Let's continue it through the summer," they said. They contacted the Brethren summer camps and assigned each with a different month of prayer. The idea caught fire.

 

Meanwhile about 40 young adults gathered in Salina, Kan., for a work camp and peace institute. They built a community playground and did a door-to-door survey. They studied the Bible, discussed international problems, studied the history of the peace movement, looked at Jesus' teachings, and thought about the post-war needs. They were led by an impressive group of church leaders among whom was Dan West, the founder of Heifer Project -- now known as Heifer International.

 

This was intended to be a two-week event, but it was such a high spiritual adventure that the campers extended it for another two weeks. They were serious about peace and that seriousness fueled their passion for volunteer service. Brethren leader and organizer Dan West challenged them to begin by starting peace caravans. The idea -- to send volunteer groups of young people out across the country to ask Brethren to help spread messages of peace -- caught on.

 

Plans were to keep the caravans going for a whole year. Those who could go, pledged to travel. Others who could not travel, pledged to pray and provide money. On the last night of the work camp, to symbolize their commitment, they lit candles and floated them down a stream.

 

The first group to hit the road were four men and a woman. Soon others joined. They divided into two groups and went to a different church each week, staying in the homes of members, helping with the Sunday service if asked, meeting with the youth and others. They also met with community groups and spoke at high schools. One of the caravan volunteers remembered his self-assurance with some embarrassment, "We young squirts went out and told them what to think. How presuming!" Still, the Brethren received these idealistic and energetic youth with courtesy and appreciation.

 

Ted Chambers, a Manchester College student from Michigan, missed the work camp at Salina, but joined that first 1947 caravan and stayed with it all the way into the following summer. The caravaners went to Brethren churches in Texas, Iowa, Kansas, Oklahoma, Indiana, and Illinois. With a kind of inspired naiveté they even tried to practice their peacemaking by offering to mediate internal disputes in the host churches. In one little congregation where Chambers sensed an internal rift, he gave a speech and invited them to stand up, hold hands, and sing together.

 

Ted had a gift for communicating. He enjoyed the challenge of talking to people who might be less than excited about his peace message. One of his fellow caravaners said, "He could present a program in a way that you'd say, 'Yeah, that's right!' When he visited service clubs, he'd say, 'Gentlemen! I'm going to make you mad, but I'm going to make you think.'"

 

The youth came to the 1948 Annual Conference in June at Colorado Springs, Colo., revved up and excited, with more momentum than anyone realized. They had kept their prayer vigil and their peace caravans going all year. Young leaders from all over the country had met with the National Youth Cabinet in a sort of mini youth conference in Chicago just before heading to Colorado, and they were full of new ideas. After praying and working for peace all year, the youth were saying, "Let's do something! Come on, adults. Get on board."

 

So they arrived at Conference ready to act, but amazingly, without a plan. No one came with a prepared motion. All the revved-up youths had to offer was energy and prayer and talk and activity, and with all of them together at the Conference, something like spontaneous combustion happened.

 

Each day began with an early morning vigil in a local park where the young people would make a circle, hold hands, and pray for direction. Then on Wednesday of Conference week, a local radio station interviewed Dan West along with a young woman from Ohio named Alma Moyers (Long). "I prayed a lot about what I should say," she remembered, "and during that  interview ... I found myself saying that before the end of the week the young people would be proposing a new program for youth concerning peace and service. I just said that! And after I said it, I thought, well, how do I know that? Somehow I just knew. It was just like a gift of the Spirit or something."

Alma, Ted, and two other young adults created a questionnaire that they distributed to more than 100 youth. Ninety-five percent said a volunteer program should be started, and 89 percent said they would join it. Saturday morning, the youth discussed the results in a lar ge meeting. That day, the report of the Brethren Service Commission would be presented to the Conference body in the afternoon session. This would be the time, they decided, to bring up their idea. But someone had to write it up and figure out how to get it on the Conference floor.

 

Dan West helped them hurriedly draft the proposal and coached them on how to present it. They knew it was a long shot -- it was nearly impossible to bring an item of new business to the floor at the last minute. The polity was clear; items were required to go through a standing committee and be placed on the agenda ahead of time. Because Alma was a church delegate, which gave her special status, she had the unenviable job of approaching the moderator, Dr. Calvert N. Ellis, president of Juniata College, to ask that their proposal be considered.

 

"I felt like a mouse against a giant. I told him the young people have an idea they'd like to bring up at Conference. I felt like I was only two inches high."

 

"He said, 'Well, we've never done this before. Standing Committee has to pass on everything.'"

 

Of course, Alma knew that. Dan West had already told them he didn't know if they could get this done. And  Dr. Ellis was a man who appreciated correct procedure. He was not rigid, but he did not quickly abandon practices that had worked well and were designed for a good purpose. He had only a few minutes to make up his mind.

 

There were many other important people on the podium that year - Dr. William Beahm, Dean of Bethany Biblical Seminary; Paul Robinson, pastor of the Hagerstown, Md., congregation and later president of Bethany; and Dr. Paul Bowman, president of Bridgewater College. Beahm and Robinson were willing to bend the rules and allow the item. They sensed its importance and neither was quite as starchy as Dr. Ellis. But it was Paul Bowman, fellow college president, who helped Dr. Ellis make up his mind. "We'd better listen to the young people," Dr. Bowman said.

 

Dr. Ellis knew the call had to be his own because there was no time to run the idea past Standing Committee. The afternoon session was about to begin. The young people had selected Ted Chambers, who was also a delegate -- from his home church in Grand Rapids, Mich., -- to make the proposal. Dr. Ellis made an arrangement with Ted to give him a sign when it was time to bring up the item.  Calvert Ellis didn't let them down. 

 

But there was one small problem. Ted Chambers was very short. How would he reach the microphone? How would he be seen? It was Dan West who came up with the solution. That morning he went out and fetched an orange crate from a nearby grocery store.

 

Everything was ready. Alma and Ted were sitting side by side in the delegate section with the orange crate beside Ted's seat. All the young people gathered in the balcony. Dr. Ellis was explaining that the youth were asking to bring a matter to the conference floor. "The officers have met," he said, "and we believe this is of such importance that it ought to be admitted as business." A vote was taken and the delegates agreed to consider the matter.

 

Calvert Ellis gave Ted the sign and he headed down the aisle carrying his orange crate. He climbed up on the crate, all 4 feet 10 inches of him, looking like a high school kid, and took the microphone. "Ladies and Gentlemen," he said, "I'm Ted Chambers from Grand Rapids, Mich., and believe it or not, I'm 22 years old." People laughed. The ice was broken. "And I have to interrupt this meeting." He went on, reading the motion and then making a speech.

 

One of the extraordinary things about that moment is that beyond those few opening words, no one remembered what Ted said -- not Ted, not Paul Robinson, not Alma Moyers Long. They remembered that it was a persuasive speech, that it generated excitement, that it stirred almost immediate support. Authorized audio recordings of Conference only began the following year, so there is no tape for 1948. It was an historic moment. People remember what it felt like, what they thought, but no one remembers the words that actually made it happen.

 

There were no speeches in opposition, and when the vote was taken, it was unanimous. The motion to create a volunteer service for young people had passed! The youth in the balcony broke into cheers, something Brethren of the time did not do in business sessions or anywhere else. "It took Conference so much by storm," one young man remembers. "It was amazing the support it got almost immediately. Ted really won the support of Conference."

 

 

Dr. Ellis admitted in a conversation many years later, just before he died, that he never expected the program to amount to anything, and how wrong he was.

 

"I don't suppose any of us recognized how significant that moment was," Paul Robinson said. "We never dreamed that Brethren Volunteer Service would become what it has become. But we did think this was an idea whose time had come. If the youth had not been as insistent as they were, if Dan West had not been insistent, probably it would never have come to Conference that year. 

 

"When the young people stood up and cheered," Alma Moyers Long recalled, "the whole Conference was surprised. I remember that evening at supper time everybody was talking about it. It was a big thing ... the Holy Spirit was just so in evidence. It was just like Pentecost! Just like a football game! You could just feel the power of God in that place!"

 

She also remembered Dan West's comment, "This baby's born now! What do we do with it?"

 

A glimpse of Brethren Volunteer Services through the years.

That was in June. By September the program was up and running and its first unit of volunteers was being trained at the Brethren Service Center in New Windsor, Md. When was the last time a major program was created in three months? Since that time, more than 7,000 people have served in 315 units at hundreds of projects in the U.S. and across the world. Currently there are 86 projects in eight countries, ranging from the Asian Rural Institute in Japan; to Lybrook Ministries on a Navajo reservation in New Mexico; to a L'Arche project in Belfast, Northern Ireland; to ministries in Sudan and Nigeria. There is a mentoring project in an inner city neighborhood in Washington, D.C. and a café in Portland, Ore., that offers homeless or destitute customers unique opportunities to purchase and eat a meal with dignity.  When the Peace Corps was created in 1961, BVS was one of the programs the government looked to for ideas.

 

Volunteer work springs out of need and the generosity of the people. Church of the Brethren people have always reached out to their neighbors. Important efforts continued to rise out of the same milieu and energy that produced BVS. In 1960, the Emergency Disaster Fund was begun to support Brethren efforts to respond to disasters. This work really took off in 1972 after Hurricane Agnes struck Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia. More than 2,000 volunteers came forward. Soon an organization was created with each Church of the Brethren district appointing a disaster coordinator. Regular calls for volunteers were sent out in response to each new disaster. That program continues into the present. In 2016, 1,174 volunteers spent 9,324 work days rebuilding devastated areas in New Jersey, Colorado, West Virginia, Michigan, and South Carolina.

 

Disaster response volunteers noticed that children especially suffer when catastrophe strikes. Since 1980, Children's Disaster Services has been setting up child-care centers in shelters and assistance centers, training volunteers to respond to traumatized children, providing a calm, safe, presence in the midst of the chaos caused by natural and human disasters. In 2016, 97 volunteers gave 764 days at 10 disaster sites. Thirty leaders trained 334 participants in CDS workshops.

 

Then there are the summer work camps, a tradition that goes back to the 1930s, beyond that Salina, Kan., work camp in 1947. In 2016, 323 people ranging from junior high to adult participated in 18 work camps in both urban and rural setting across the United States.

 

These organized denominational efforts tell only part of the tale of all that the Church of the Brethren does. And let's not forget that almost everything that happens in a congregation from teaching Sunday school, to planning potlucks, to working in soup kettles, to singing in the choir is through volunteer efforts.

Though the beginning of BVS was a visible and dramatic moment in a growing volunteer movement that continues to this day, it really points to a deeper reality -- that Brethren by their very name consider themselves sisters and brothers to all humans, called to reach out in love and service. So you see, volunteer service is essential to the Church of the Brethren.