The last two weeks have been exhilarating! They have also been very exhausting — all of us who work with youth this time of year (or any other time of year really) find ourselves quickly consumed by the work and we are left tired hoping to recover sometime before the fall.

Two weeks ago we hosted Merge at our South camp and this past week we hosted about 250 high school students from Lee’s Summit, MO, a suburb of Kansas City. In an effort to accomplish their vision to bring restoration to their community, about half a dozen youth pastors from Lee’s Summit bought out a week at our camp to strategically inspire, equip and challenge their students to live deeper and lean further into God’s story. It was amazing…

At Youthfront we are longing for more of these types of relationships with youth pastors. We love to see students gathering at our camps from the same community, brought by a network of concerned and committed youth workers. We love knowing that students are coming from the same geographical area to experience God together and that they’ll go ‘home’ with one another as well.

There is no scientific data to prove that this is a stronger use of our camp and a more effective outcome of the environments of spiritual transformation we yield to the spirit to create and sustain — but I believe it is. It just has to be.

As a result of that belief, at Youthfront we are becoming more intentional about linking up with youth workers in our region first — and ultimately throughout North America. We do this through our training initiatives, our camps and other events — all of which are most effective when connected to a youth worker and their faith community.

We are passionately positioning ourselves as an organization that’s using it’s camp(s) as a gathering place for thousands of youth workers and students from the same area and faith community to come together to experience God is new and amazing ways — a place of expedition and experience where communities come from and go back to the place where they can be most effective extending God’s love and restoration to their worlds.

While marketing our camps directly to students might prove to be better financially, we don’t believe it is necessarily better for the Kingdom. In the coming months and years, we’ll continue to be intentional about serving and working directly with youth workers to bring youth into a growing relationship with Jesus Christ.