A YEAR'S WORTH OF MINISTRY IN A WEEK

Student Camp is awesome for a lot of reasons. It’s a great chance to get students away from normal life and allow them to unplug and really hear from God. Yeah, maybe the food isn’t great and the air conditioner hardly ever works in your cabin. But think about the opportunity for ministry you have!

Let’s say you have 1.5 quality hours a week with your students. That’s probably being generous. Now, let’s assume that your students never miss a week (which isn’t true). That’s 78 hours of ministry you have with your students. Now…think about camp. If your camp is 5 days, and your students sleep 7 hours (which again is probably being generous), camp gives you 85 hours with your students. That’s incredible! When you go to camp, you pretty much have an entire years worth of youth ministry you can accomplish.

This obviously doesn’t mean we should just cancel our weekly gatherings and just cram everything into camp. BUT…..it should make us mindful of the opportunity we have to do some incredible ministry. From conversations during meals & small group discussions, to the teaching & musical worship…we have a very unique opportunity to have a strong influence on the lives of the teenagers we minister to. Even the van ride to and from camp can be a turning point in teenagers’ lives. Think about the times in your life that really impacted you spiritually. There’s a really good chance that it wasn’t in a service with hundreds of people. The more likely scenario is that you were one-on-one with someone who cared about you and they spent time encouraging and teaching you in an informal setting like a van ride.

Those moments matter.

Let’s take advantage of this opportunity and watch God do incredible things!