It’s you I like

STORM LAKE, Iowa — As he did all week long at Synod School, the Rev. Dr. Matt Sauer shared his inner Fred Rogers on Friday, donning a red sweater to honor the wisdom and caring heart of a Presbyterian pastor influential to the millions of Americans who grew up watching “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.”

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Sauer, pastor of Manitowoc Cooperative Ministry in Wisconsin, shared a clip of Rogers singing “It’s You I Like” to Joan Rivers on “The Tonight Show,” which Rivers found moving.

“In this space I get to be more real than anywhere else,” Sauer told his fellow Synod Schoolers. “It’s a gift you give me every year.” Sauer closed with a clip of Rogers singing his “Goodnight God.”

Led by Synod School Dean Lisa Tarbell, those assembled got to honor one of their own. John Tonje, who grew up attending Synod School, was drafted last month by the Utah Jazz after a stellar basketball career at Wisconsin. Tarbell recorded herself congratulating Tonje and then being cheered by those who filled Schaller Chapel.

Tarbell had another significant announcement: next year’s convocation speaker will be the Rev. Dr. William Yoo, Associate Professor of American Religious and Cultural History at Columbia Theological Seminary and the author of two recent well-regarded books published by Westminster John Knox Press: “Reckoning with History” and “What Kind of Christianity.” The 72^nd Synod School is scheduled for July 26-31, 2026, at Buena Vista University in Storm Lake, Iowa.

Also on Friday, the Rev. MaryAnn McKibben Dana, Synod School’s convocation speaker, sported a tie-dye T-shirt given to her by a youth group in Jacksonville, Illinois. “She’s one of us now,” the youth said.

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Turning to the day’s topic, authenticity, McKibben Dana reported that a Synod School musician shared with her the guidelines for a community band he plays in back home:

• Make a welcoming and joyful noise
• Have your own unique approach to the music
• Read the music by ear, make up a melody or make noise
• Tell one another, “you sound great!”
• Figure stuff out and play wrong notes occasionally
• If a song is feeling too difficult, pick up some percussion.

“In this gathering, I don’t want perfection,” the musician told McKibben Dana. “I want humanity.”

She played a clip (starting at the 17^th minute) of an interview with the novelist, poet and professor Ocean Vuong, who said students — especially students in the U.S. — “are more and more self-conscious of trying.”

“They would say, I want to be a poet, I want to be a good writer, but it’s a bit of a cringe. This cringe culture is, 'I don’t want to be perceived as trying and having an effortful attempt at my dreams.' As a teacher, that’s a horrifying sort of report from the field,” Vuong said. “I think they are scared of judgment. They perform cynicism because cynicism can be misread, as it often is, as intelligence. You are disaffected. You’re too cool. You’ve seen it all. And so they pull back.”

“But in fact, they are deeply hungry for sincere, earnest effort,” Vuong said. “Sincerity is something we deeply hunger for, particularly young people, but we are embarrassed when sincerity is in the room.”

The teacher has the authority to set the tone, Vuong said. “If you set the tone for your students and you welcome them — that you won’t judge them, that [they] can be sincere and honest without being condemned or ridiculed for it, that they can try their best and it won’t be cringy to do so — then you truly liberate them toward their best selves.”

McKibben Dana wondered how we “get past this idea that being myself is somehow cringy and that it’s better to be intelligent and removed.”

Years ago she took a parenting workshop during which young parents were asked to imagine their children at 21 or 25. What are the qualities parents would like their grown children to have? Answers included service to the world, meaningful work, a community that cares for them, a sense of joy and work-life balance.

“Great!” the instructor said. “That’s your list. That’s how you build the self you send into the world as they grow into maturity.”

McKibben Dana displayed a photo of a bumper sticker proclaiming “Non-judgment day is here.”

“Let us go out into the world,” she said. “Let us be encouraged.”

Synod School concluded with a brief worship service led by the Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, who shared her translation of 1 Cor. 13. Included were these words: “If I know all the mysteries of the world and have all the knowledge contained in it — if I believe I can do anything in the world and have all the power but I’m not authentic and I do not do justice and I do not have the love, I am nothing. If I give all my possessions to charity and I’m willing to sacrifice myself to show how great and generous I am, and I do not have love nor a cry for change, just charity, the whole world gains nothing.”

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“Love is concerned with the suffering of the world. Love does not take the easy route. It takes time and struggle, connection and community … Love does not know deserving, undeserving or unprincipledness. Love does not keep a record of wrongs, nor does it ever rejoice over someone else’s hurts. It rejoices at the righting of wrongs. It rejoices in the lifting up from the bottom. … It believes and overcomes all things, hopes all things and endures all things.”

“More than anything, I want us to love each other,” Theoharis told Synod Schoolers before they headed home, “a love that expands our hope, that we can be and do great things, and that we can be and already are doing everything and then some.”

Her prayer was, “We cry justice, we pray freedom and we sing an expanded hope,” phrases she asked those in the Chapel to repeat.

“And so, let’s do it,” Theoharis said. “Let’s just sing, and then we’ll be on our way and we’ll give all the hugs and we’ll go out and proclaim love and justice to the highways and byways.”

Synod School is offered each summer by the Synod of Lakes and Prairies. View posts from participants here.