Sunday, October 19, 2008

TRU 2008

I just had a GREAT weekend! The youth leadership team from Mennville (and other churches of course) headed to Pinawa this weekend for TRU 2008, a youth leadership conference. It was really good. We learnt alot.

One of the main things that we as a leadership team came away with was, we have been focusing too much on trying to entertain the youth. We are trying to hard to impress them and trying to offer something more exciting and entertaining than the world has to offer. And that just doesn't work. We CANNOT offer more entertainment than the world has. That is impossible in the modern world. We learnt that we need to get our youth to do more service. Lately, we have always been giving them a reward for anything they do. But we realized that part of being a diciple of Christ is to serve. Our job is to teach and train and support our youth and help them to become diciples. So part of that is getting them to serve. We have a few things planned already. I think we were teaching the youth to have the mind set "What can God do for me" instead of "What can I do for God." We want them to learn the latter.'
The weekend also helped us realize that we need to balance our minitry a little better. Not to just focus on service or teaching or entertainment, etc. but to have a balance of all of those things.

I am really excited about what changes we are going to make with the youth. I really hope we can impact their lives. Another thing we learned is that we cannot make them grow in their walk with Jesus, only God can. God can use us, but we should not thing that it is us that will grow them. The passage he used was Mark 4:26-29 : "And He was saying, “The kingdom of God is like a man who casts seed upon the soil;
27 and he goes to bed at night and gets up by day, and the seed sprouts and grows—how, he himself does not know. 28 “The soil produces crops by itself; first the blade, then the head, then the mature grain in the head. 29 “But when the crop permits, he immediately puts in the sickle, because the harvest has come.” "
I also got alot of great fundraising ideas and games ideas and stuff! It was a refreshing weekend. And the food was AMAZING! I will leave off with a bunch of pictures from out trip to the Seven Sisters Hydro Dam! Our car was a tight fit, so Chantal thought it would be more comfy in the hatch!














2 comments:

Jobina said...

Oh, I loved those weekends! We always came back so refreshed, so renewed, so spiritually filled again! I'm glad you came away with a new vision and new ideas. And, that pic of Andrew and the deer is AWESOME!!! Makes me want to live there!

Lindsey Dueck said...

thanks John, I was really wondering where I could get some more info on that...

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