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.

Were hosting Merge this week at Youthfront South. So far — it has been a great week. We are three days into it and it has been fantastic to participate with the youth workers and students in the challenge of throwing ourselves into God’s Story. I have enjoyed very much listening to students share what God is teaching them through their interaction with The Story.

I have been moving this week also so it has been a hectic week to say the least. I have, in between unloading moving trucks with some of our staff, had the privilege to lead the morning gatherings as well as one night of the evening response times. I am always blown away by the creativity, candidness and the humility of the students as they articulate how they are merging with God’s mission and way of life.

Today we are deep into Episode 4 — God-With-Us — and it has been powerful to observe the students as they work their way through a “Kingdom” excersice designed to converse about the mystery of the Kingdom through six different interactive and experiential stations such as, The Upside-Down Kingdom, The Kingdom of the Forgotten, The Emerging Kingdom, The Agents of the Kingdom, etc.

Tonight we’ll be exploring Luke 4 as we reflect on the mission and message of Jesus!

Yesterday I spent the morning over at Youthfront South (our HS camp) training our college staff (some of them pictured below) in the art of storytelling and facilitating conversations. Much of what I have come to understand about the art of storytelling has come from Mike and Caesar over at Echo The Story.

Originally we had Mike Novelli coming in to do the training but schedules got complicated as they tend to do and so we weren’t able to have him. I enjoyed doing the training but it would have been great to have Mike with us.

At Youthfront we are experimenting with and implementing the concepts that I am writing about in my upcoming book, Story, Signs and Sacred Rhythms at camp this year (and for years to come we hope). Actually, we are bringing the concepts into all that we are doing in our training of youth workers, at our ministry site in Mexico and in all of our other local ministry expressions here in Kansas City.

The book has been extremely fun to work on. I am nearly finished with it. The manuscript is due later in the summer so I am thinking about it and writing a bit almost every hour of the day.

The basic idea of the book is to resource those of us (paid youth workers, volunteers, teachers, coaches, parents, etc.) who are consistently creating environments of spiritual transformation with 1) an understanding of what constitutes healthy, valuable environments, 2) a framework or approach to spiritually guiding students within the environments that we create (using a process that begins with helping students engage with God’s story and ultimately ends with helping students develop behaviors and expressions that live out God’s intended ways) and 3) practical tools to help us “environmentalists” implement the proposed approach.

I look forward to interacting with you on the ideas and concepts in the book. I will be doing a seminar at each of the YS conventions this coming fall around many of the ideas in the book so maybe we can connect there to chat about it too…

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.