Month: August 2014

Life Changing Experiences

Did the students you took on Serve (or another faith-forming experience) this summer return home with an experience and a teaching that will forever impact how they live their lives? Hopefully your answer is a yes that causes you to celebrate God’s goodness. I know my life was forever changed by a trip I took back in 2011.

I will never forget my hike up Mount Azekah and the teaching I received while sitting up there under a shade tree over looking the Elah valley. The Elah valley is where Israel faced the Philistine army and where David killed Goliath.

One of the many things I learned that day was how this battle was really not about David or Goliath, but rather how God used them to reveal himself. God, through David’s gift and ability (the use of a slingshot), showed how he is greater than any other god. There is many times when I reflect back on that teaching and am reminded how God can reveal himself through me if I am willing to be used.

I believe trips and experiences like the ones created by Youth Unlimited (and many others) can be such a powerful tool to teach, train and point students to the love of Jesus Christ and the joy found in living for him. Therefore, in this issue we are eager to lay out our 2015 summer youth group opportunities.

Many congregations throughout Canada and the United States who are living missionally, will again host a Youth Unlimited Serve mission experience next summer. Our theme for 2015 will be, “The Other 51”, focusing on what it means to live for Jesus after returning home. It will be based on John 20:21-22 where it says, “Again Jesus said, Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, I am sending you. And with that he breathed on them and said, Receive the Holy Spirit”.

The Live It experience, an event where students learn about their value in Christ while exploring how to use their talents to spread God’s love to their friends, community and world, returns in 2015 as well. It will be hosted at Trinity Christian College, near Chicago, IL. Just like Serve, Live It will also use the theme, The Other 51.

As you begin a new year of ministering to students through your church, know that the Youth Unlimited staff will faithfully pray for you as well as be working hard to create those faith-forming experiences that will assist you with such an important calling. If we can assist you in any other way, please ask!

 

Customizing Brings a Crowd

Detroit may be known as the City of Trees or even Hockeytown (did I just hear all of Canada collectively clear their throat?) but it’s the roots of Motown that had over one million people lined up for the Woodward Dream Cruise. Thousands of custom cars lined Woodward Avenue as onlookers admired hotrods, antiques and some bizarre automobiles. The owners of the vehicles each had a varying degree of time, money and interest and you could tell a lot about them by how they customized their car.

 

Have you considered customizing a mission trip? For example, maybe you feel your students need one of the following:

  • A cultural experience – consider heading to an Aboriginal community in Saskatchewan or the Winnebago Tribe in Iowa.
  • To see a suburban Church reaching into an urban area – consider Crown Point, IN.
  • To get away from it all and get a glimpse at rural poverty and a Church responding – consider Minnesota West or Platte, SD.

 

With a Custom Serve experience, the Host Church requests an optimal number of servers, typically between 40 and 60. You, then, can fill the site with your own group (even making it a multi-generational experience) or call a couple friends you know in youth ministry and fill the site with just 2-3 churches.

 

Youth Unlimited strongly recommends using the Host Church Speaker but that is an option for customizing your Serve experience. Other ways to customize include:

  • Picking the dates of your trip (the Host Church will supply two options).
  • Picking who leads worship.
  • Picking your “day away”.

 

The cost of Custom Serve ranges from the typical $340.00 down to $310.00, but filling the site is required because the Host Church as a certain amount of community outreach they are planning to get done.

 

For more information, visit our website or call 616.241.5616 ext. 3040.

Fasting for Serve

My name is John Eigege. I am a church planter from Nigeria working in Houston, Texas. Over the past three years, God has taken my family on a wild ride as we plant a church that connects Houston’s Midtown and Third Ward neighborhoods. These two neighborhoods, separated only by a highway, are polar opposites economically, socially and ethnically. Our church plant, Square Inch Houston, seeks to reconcile, renew, and restore all things through the gospel of Jesus Christ.

 

God has definitely connected my heart with the collective heart of Youth Unlimited. The Serve experience is one that seeks to help youth join Christ in the renewal of all things. During Serve, this intense, catalytic, week long mission experience, youth gather in worship, grow in community and go out to join in Christ’s mission of restoration in our world.

 

Every year, my heart says a resounding yes to the privilege of being the speaker at the Houston Serve site. However, this year was a wee-bit challenging. Houston Serve 2014 fell smack-dab in the middle of the 2014 FIFA World Cup! Remember, I am from Nigeria. Any kind of football (or soccer, as it is called here) is a pretty big deal for me. Since it happens only once every four years, the World Cup is the Holy Grail of sports competitions for me.

 

In ways of poetic justice that only God is capable of, our theme for this year revolved around Isaiah 58. Isaiah 58 is God’s trumpet call to his people to give up “lip-service”, and replace it with true worship and fast. In true worship and fast, we give up something good in order to gain something great! After my initial pity party, it became very evident that The World Cup would have to take the back seat this year. I would have to give up something good for something great.

 

When we give up something good for the greatness of God’s Kingdom, amazing things happen. At Serve, I saw youth from various churches pouring themselves out on behalf of the poor and oppressed. I saw high school students seeking righteousness through right relationships and justice through right actions. I saw host churches becoming catalysts for spiritual and physical revitalization in neighborhoods and the lives of individuals and families.

 

I saw young Christians, broken by guilt, shame, fear and inadequacy at the beginning of the week lay those burdens down at the foot of the cross. I saw the Holy Spirit work in them through worship, relationships and acts of service throughout Serve. By week’s end, I saw these same youth receive a new identity in Christ as powerful sons and daughters of King Jesus. They literally became repairers of broken walls,and restorers of street dwellings.

 

Our acts of service daily ended in worship, and our worship daily lead to acts of service. God used Serve as a catalyst to help us love him with all that we are and love our neighbors as ourselves. Through it all, God used Serve to fulfill his desire; to transform us, in the power of the Holy Spirit, into the image and likeness of his son, Jesus.

 

Right after Serve, my family and I made our scheduled move from Midtown into Houston’s Third Ward. We seek to be agents of transformation in our community. We seek to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. We seek reconciliation, renewal and restoration of all facets of life through the gospel of Jesus Christ. For us, the Serve experience is an invaluable spark that keeps moving our vision and mission of restoration forward the remaining fifty-one weeks of the year. We are carrying the momentum of Serve with us as we learn to forever find our sense of purpose, our identity, and rest in Jesus Christ as his agents of transformation in this world.

 

“Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we can ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, too him be glory in the church, and in Christ Jesus, throughout all generations, forever and ever! Amen.”

My Life’s Work is to Love

In June of 2011, when I was 16 years old, I was the most reluctant person in my youth group to go on a Serve trip. I hated physical labor, and the thought of the Texas heat beating down on me while I worked without pay seemed beyond ridiculous. My parents sent me on the trip despite my best attempts to convince them otherwise, and for that, I will forever be grateful.

I had grown up in the church, so I knew the ‘stuff’ of the Christian faith, and let’s just say I was less than thrilled by it. But Stephenville Serve rocked my world in a way I had never imagined. Thanks to our amazing speaker, Troy Matchett (Buctouche, New Brunswick, Canada), I made a commitment to follow Jesus wherever he would call me to go. That commitment changed my life in so many ways .

Now let me back up. My week at Stephenville Serve was full of new relationships, lots of laughter and a whole lot of Truth. I had the best small group in the history of small groups (shout out to Team Cow 2011!), and we worked at a crisis pregnancy center helping them to arrange a fundraising garage sale. During that week, I grew closer to not only my youth group but also to leaders from other youth groups. I am so thankful to God for bringing people into my life during that week who have played a huge role in my Christian discipleship!

It’s hard to believe three years have passed since my first Serve experience. The Lord has done so many things in my life since I made the choice to say “yes” to Him at Serve in 2011. When I arrived back home, I knew my life would never be the same, and I began to take ownership of a passionate relationship with my Savior. I have been blessed to go on another Serve trip to Washington DC, I have served as a teacher in an after-school program in South Africa, I have laid hands on and prayed for dozens of women all over India, I have started a youth ministry program in Lincoln Nebraska, and this August, I will become the youth pastor at my church in Sioux Center, Iowa. I am currently a youth ministry major at Dordt College, and I’m so thankful to the Lord for calling me to youth ministry as a career. I am amazed at what the Lord can do with a willing heart that simply wants to love him by loving others. It is because of his amazing grace that I can confidently say that my life’s work is love.

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