Multimedia: White T service puts youth at the helm

Multimedia by Liz Martin

Talk to Tyson Marshall on the telephone and you have to strain to hear his voice.

The 17-year-old North Liberty teen, a senior at Iowa City West High School, is well-mannered and soft-spoken. He answers questions politely and takes compliments graciously.

The persona he takes on while on the stage at Redemption Missionary Baptist Church in Cedar Rapids is a whole different story. Give him a microphone and a ready audience and Marshall's Christian rap music - all of which he writes himself - is loud and assertive. And well-received.

Marshall is one of the youth leaders in the monthly White T service at Redemption, 1510 Second St. SW, in Cedar Rapids. On the last Sunday of every month, the church's teens and preteens lead the service with readings, song and dance.

“We try to make the relationship the youth have with God relevant to them, and to give them a chance to express themselves,” said the Rev. Robert Green, pastor of the church. “We're trying to involve them and use their ideas, trying to listen to them and really hear what they're saying.”

Green created the White T service last summer to empower the church's youth to create better relationships with each other and with God.

“We treat our relationship with God as we would a weekend in jail, we can't wait to get back to our ‘regular' lives,” he said. “We want to teach the principles of the Bible in a way that these kids will take them and live them all week long.”

The service proves to be a popular one; in a church that had 20 to 30 people in attendance on any given Sunday before being flooded in 2008, Green said the White T services are often “standing room only.”

More than 80 people were at the service on Jan. 31, many of them teens and young children.

“Some of those kids I don't even know,” Green said. “Our kids go out there and bring their friends, they pick them up and bring them in. That's what this service does.”

Chasity Green, president of the youth ministry at Redemption and the Rev. Green's sister, keeps a tight rein on the teens before and after the service. They answer her questions with a “Yes, ma'am,” or “No, ma'am.”

Once the service starts, they're dancing down the aisles or singing in the pews, the energy of their youth allowed to break through.

Named for a verse in Revelation about those who “washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb,” the White T service is meant as a challenge to both the church's youth and their youth leaders. Congregants are encouraged to wear white T-shirts.

“I want to challenge them to be creative so that when they're presenting something it's appetizing, it's palatable,” Green said.

Marshall, the North Liberty teen, said bringing church, religion and God into his life has inspired him in other ways. Through his music Marshall has become a peer leader, someone the other youth look up to.

“Instead of being in church and just sitting and listening, we get to be up and be a real part of it,” he said.