“Welcome to wide open spaces…” youth sang night after night in worship at Converse University for this year’s PASSPORT camp. It was a fitting theme for our youth ministry as we have now grown large enough to fill a whole church bus with middle and high schoolers. We definitely needed more physical space this year. However, the theme also focused on the spiritual and relational space we need to become who God created us to be.
Since our group doubled in size this year, I was wondering how our students would do with building community. Would we be able to stay together? Would we be able to stick together? Any worries I had about that quickly dissipated when I noticed how much our group valued their time together. And there was a lot we did together: we sang together, played games together, ate together, laughed together, and prayed together. We danced together, ate ice cream together, told silly jokes and stories together, and got to know one another better.
Mallory and Mary, our chaperones, were really great at fostering community among our students and really spent time connecting with them, especially at meal times in the campus cafeteria. Even amid the noise of clanging cups, squeaky sneakers, teenage laughter, and spilled soda, the cafeteria tables became a sacred space. The table–that elemental symbol of our faith– represents togetherness. The table is a wide open space where each of us encounter Christ and one another as equals. As we stopped for Cook Out on the way home, some youth were looking up those bible verses they print on styrofoam cups. But the holiness of the moment wasn’t so much captured by the scripture pixels on cell phone screens as it was in the voices and faces of our young people who bear the image of God to one another. I’m glad to be part of a church community that makes a wide open space for each of them.
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This Sunday our youth and children will be leading the worship service in the sanctuary. We’ll share songs and stories from camp as well as some prayer experiences. It’s a very special day each year to see how our children and youth are not simply participants in worship–they are also worship leaders!
-Kyle
