Presbytery Central Easter Camp at El Rancho
Easter camp is always a hugely significant time for young people across Presbytery Central, and this year was no different. We endeavoured to make a few changes to camp in order to address some of the issues youth ministries and churches are facing and I think we got off to a great start.
This year at camp, instead of bringing in a guest speaker just for the weekend, we felt that God was asking us to do something a little bit different. So we invited three young adults, who have grown up in our churches and youth groups to speak at camp. It might not seem like a radical thing to do, but we believe that it’s so important for our youth to see people who are in the next stage of life to them, living as examples of what it means to love Jesus and be passionate about following him. Nadia Ridesdale, Craig Pollock and Caleb Dominikovich each gave 2 exceptional talks about the easter story, weaving into it their personal experience and love of God. As well as that, they walked along side the youth at camp, as they were all a part of youth groups. The young people got a chance to see the people they know and love, the people who are flawed and make mistakes, being real about the God that they follow. I believe this was extremely powerful. We all learnt a lot about what it means to have young adults as our speakers for camp. It was a great first year and is something want to continue to wrestle with in the future.
We also encouraged churches to send along some people from their congregation to be their youth groups own camp parents, or camp grandparents. Unfortunately we didn’t have many take us up on this invitation, but the ones that came have given us amazing feedback, they loved their time walking with and investing into the lives of the young people from their churches, and we absolutely loved having them at camp with us. We believe that easter camp is a great opportunity to bridge some of those ever growing gaps between youth groups and the churches they are connected to. This is another thing we will be continuing next year and we encourage you to join us in 2020!
This year we welcomed two new churches along to camp, we had a group from Dannevirke and Hastings join us. It was a biggest camp to date, with 170 People attending. We’d like to say a huge thank you to the ministers who came out to camp at various times during the weekend - It’s great to have your presence at camp and we hope you can stay for longer next year!
All in all, it was a great camp. With change there always comes a few kinks to iron out, but we really believe that this change is necessary and we are looking forward to a bigger and better camp next year.
All in all, it was a great camp. With change there always comes a few kinks to iron out, but we really believe that this change is necessary and we are looking forward to a bigger and better camp next year.
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