Important Note: signing up to be on the team needs to be done before December 6th! The registration will only be open for one month, then we’ll begin raising funds for the team.
The below text will have the heartbeat of the trip and the reason why its not local. The link below will answer these items in more detail and will explain travel, missing school, cost, who’s able to go, and safety.
The Heartbeat:
After conversations with the staff and thinking through this upcoming year for our youth community, we came to this conclusion: our knowledge far outweighs our levels of obedience.
The question became: how can we address that?
Although not a ‘silver bullet,’ one of the things we saw that needed change was what our youth community gathered around.
- We want to reemphasize the heartbeat of our youth community being relationships in our gathering weekly. The weekly gathering isn’t the end, but the beginning of our desire for the building of our youth community, friendships, and growing relationships with adults who love us enough to disciple us into Jesus and His Ways.
- We want our camps/events to be fertilizer for our first objective (above).
- The fruit we expect from this is a community of youth that live and love like Jesus.
With that, Summer Camp will remain a large, everyone come, fun week with each other. But we want to change how we do Winter Camps.
One, we want to bring our entire youth family together. Second, we want to gather to work with each other, to minister to others, to practice our knowledge, rather than gaining more in-active knowledge.
This year for our Winter Camp, we’ll be heading to San Francisco to partner with an organization that works with the homeless. This trip is based off our desire for obedience to Jesus and the practice of His Ways. We recognize this won’t be a trip everyone will want to go on. We recognize this won’t be a trip every parent will feel comfortable with sending their child to; however, we do ask every student and every parent (if their child is wanting to go) to consider this trip.
This trip isn’t just for those who are disciples of Jesus. This trip is for people that are currently exploring Jesus, his family, and his ways. And it’s for people that may want nothing to do with ‘church’ but would love to come care for homeless people with us.
Why Not Local?
The original idea for this trip was that we’d be doing work with the local homeless population. The interns, other staff, and I reached out to about 10+ local organizations that are already working with the homeless. The only organization we heard back from said that we could go serve at their food distribution center, organizing food in the back, for two hours on a Saturday.
I reached out to a few other local churches to see if they had any connections, were doing anything themselves for the local homeless, or if they’d be interested in joining me in doing something local: nothing back.
A close friend knew we were looking for an organization to work with. They ended up talking with me about this group. We talked. They got back to me immediately. They’ve been working with groups like ours for 20+ years. They know what they’re doing. They’ve regularly had middle schoolers and high schoolers. The work was more integrated with the local homeless than “here’s your soup.”
That’s what got us to where we’re at.
Now, I’m wanting to take whatever students want to go, whatever leaders want to go, and few of the staff. We’re hoping to use this trip as a way to learn from the organization, to inspire our people into this way of following Jesus, and do something like this, local, next year.
At this point, I’m sure you have more questions about the trip. The link below has more information.
If you still have questions after reading the link below (the registration) please reach out to me.
Email zebf@nview.org