update from Youth Mission Committee

A few Sundays ago our missions committee held its second meeting in Dan’s office. We discussed ideas from the first meeting and how to put those ideas into effect. First we talked about local service opportunities we could use to spread God’s love in our communities. Among these ideas are: Hillside food outreach, nursing home ministry, can collecting, Salvation Army volunteering, etc.

We also discussed reaching out to missionaries throughout the world and sending and receiving letters to and from them. We want the youth group to understand missions, and what life is like for God’s soldiers in this field. In addition to keeping contact with missionaries, we want the youth group to support and work with them as well.

Many members of the missions committee are also part of the fusion’s creative arts team. In this meeting we set a goal to work with the creative arts team and make good use of its members’ gifts. For instance, one idea we came up with was to create a large-sized map of the world and use thumbtacks to point out where we have done missions as well as future locations we are considering.

Of course we discussed the big mission trips in the summer of 2010 and ’11. We want to focus on maintaining relationships we’ve started in the past. For this reason, the youth group may be revisiting previous locations this summer. It could be in Newark, Boston, or any of the places we’ve been to before. Nothing is set in stone. In 2011, the mission trip is going to be in a very interesting location: Africa. This news has excited many members of Fusion youth group, you can see the post below for details. Finally we talked about someday creating our own mission trips from scratch, not using any organization as a middleman. We would put together the entire thing, choose where we would go and when, and most importantly, choose how the money would be spent. This is only an idea, but over time it will develop and hopefully be put into action.

I hereby declare meeting number two of the BCC youth missions committee to be… a success!

Youth Mission Committee begins!

“The youth mission committee held its first meeting about a week and a half ago, and we covered quite a lot of ground.  The group had some old faces and new (including myself).  The first meeting of the season started off slowly, not too many people were showing up.  After a quick snack break however (which took place about five minutes into the meeting), we were energized and ready to make some progress.

During the meeting we discussed everything having to do with missions.  One of the things we focused on was how our youth group could do missions work in our own communities, in our schools, in the area.  We really want to bring to life the idea that we should be trying to further God’s kingdom as we are going about our daily business.  We shouldn’t just set certain times to be on God’s mission, for example the big trip over the summer, but we should be doing God’s mission every day. To more frequently be working on God’s missions we need more opportunity than the one trip each summer gives us, we need to arrange service events all year long, and the big mission trip will be the exclamation mark.

Much of the time in this meeting was used for brainstorming.  We came up with ideas and developed them, and we took one or two ideas each to look into and discuss in our next meeting.  Some of the things we talked about were collecting cans to recycle and donate the money to charity (which charity?)  We discussed this as well but didn’t come up with a definite conclusion), helping out the salvation army, working with senior citizens and children, holding a youth group sort of event in the park, and many others.

We also discussed the big mission trip that changed the lives of everyone who went this past summer, and the one coming up.  Of course we did not go into specifics, but we made a pros and cons list (although coming up with cons was hard) and developed some ideas about it.

The student run meeting was very successful; we got a lot done.  Our favorite youth pastor, Dan Haugh, unfortunately could not make it that night, but we handled the situation like adults and ran the meeting by ourselves (teenagers? Acting like adults!? No way!)  I must mention that we couldn’t have done it without Sarah Esselborn’s gift of leadership.  She’s experienced in missions ministry with the church, and she did a great job going through the meeting and guiding the discussion.

- Suoz“