Kadesh

The theme this year was Revolution. It was a new theme and admittedly hard to deal with for those of us who have been campers, counselors or group leaders. The biggest change was that the rhythm and the schedule of the week was entirely different. Typically the climax of the week is on Thursday night with some kind of big "experience". This week there was no Thursday night experience. Instead all day Wednesday was similar to a retreat and very busy. The week as a whole is always exhausting - physically, mentally and spiritually but it is also a lot of fun. I was worried about going and being pregnant since I am more easily tired than usual. For the most part I did ok and there were times that I was able to get away and rest.

Changes and frustrations aside, I enjoyed and got a lot out of this theme. It focused mainly on the church and how the church needs to change so Christians need to change. We talked about how we have gotten away from the original intention for the church - so often we say we go to church or just attend church rather than thinking that we ARE the church and should belong to the church. We also had a lot of discussions about how we should act as representatives of Christ in order to bring about the Revolution that our world so badly needs - things like be caring and Christ-like to those around us, really worship honestly, and to live a truly revolutionary life that scripture calls us to.

It was good for the teens and they were challenged more than in past years to actually go back home and make some changes rather than just learning what they should do. As a University Church of Christ youth group we came up with some great ideas that the kids are trying to implement now that we are home. Some of those are things like asking the people who live around the church if they need any help with physical things (mowing yards, painting etc) when we go around every few months to ask if we can pray for them. Another idea was to make more of an effort to make our church a "safe place" where people can come and be real and know that they will be loved and accepted where they are at - hopefully this will spill over from the youth group to the church as a whole. For our group, a lot of this theme was stuff that Josh has worked with them on before, this week of Kadesh just took it one step deeper. For a lot of other youth groups I think this idea was entirely new.

Either way, I'm excited to see how God will work in the weeks, months, years to come from this experience.

The first picture below is the University group outside of Highland on Sunday morning. The second is the group of college freshman that Josh and I lead during the week.