For over 9 months I have been commuting from Chicago, where I currently live, to Kansas City where I work at Youthfront. With each passing trip I have gotten more and more eager for today – the first day of camp.

We have about 230 middle school students with us from mostly the greater Kansas City area, nearly 100 high school and college staff and of course a dozen or so of our Youthfront staff. I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to be in the middle of all this!

Since I left my role as a youth pastor in a church near Minneapolis about 4 years ago I have been missing the direct interaction with students. Yeah, I have spoken at a ton of retreats and conferences over the past 4 years and interacted with students via that privilege. However, to be a part of a team that is joining in the work of God by creating environments for spiritual transformation is something that I have greatly missed.

I have also always had a bit of a pit in my stomach as it relates to the fact that while at Sonlife we really haven’t had a local ministry expression to speak of. We did week-long and weekend events for students (Led by Mike Novelli, and a team of amazing people –and they were stellar) but we really haven’t had the resources to administrate and lead an intense and direct ministry with and to students like we do at Youthfront. I am not solely refferring to the campers but the high school students and college students we will be with all summer who are serving on our staff team. It is in those summer long relationships (and many of them work at our camp for 3 or 4 years in a row and we connect with them throughout the year) that the opportunity to experiment with philosophies and methods of spiritual formation exists.

In the end, I guess you could say that it feels “right” to be training youth workers in a framework for missional youth ministry through Enroute and our other training methods and at the same time have a place to practice what we are teaching and training youth workers…

I love what my majority role is at Youthfront –-training youth workers and overseeing the day to day of our all of our ministry initiatives. I wouldn’t trade it for any other job. However, to have a job in which I get to interact with youth workers around North America and students from a local ministry expression such as Youthfront is truly a sweet thing.