Hey Warrior Camp Team!
Hope you're all having a great week and growing stronger in your walk. I pray for us all the time.
Here's the tri-monthly update for what's been stirring:
1. Some of my roomates and I are starting to talk about beginning weekly discipleship. It's still taking shape, but we'll probably go through Chesterton's classic (but strangely somewhat unknown) book Orthodoxy together, and pray for each other when we meet once a week. If you haven't heard about Orthodoxy, it's probably one of the greatest Christian books of the last 2 centuries, and is like an autobiographical apologetic of one man's journey to Christ. If you're ready for some spiritual t-bone and ready to move on from spiritual milk, this book is apparently a gourmet feast. Chesterton is also one of the wittiest of authors, which makes it a great and fun read. If you would like jump in on the discipleship, pick up a copy of the book and let me know the 3 times that work best for you during the week. We'll do it.
2. I've written a letter to the camp grant writing agency I mentioned in the last update, and am now awaiting feedback from a professional grant-request writer. I'll keep you posted. Pray for it!
3. Our website has been updated with a new feedback section entitled: "What others are saying." This new section includes feedback and statistics from the warriors of our first warrior camp. It also includes some letters of recommendation which have come in since the last Warrior Camp update. Feel free to check it out under the links section of our website: http://warriorcamp1.googlepages.com
If you personally have camp/youth work experience, kindly request your current or former youth ministry boss to write you a letter of recommendation, and we'll post it on our website to give interested youth pastors a better idea of who our Warrior Camp Team is and what we're about. But do it early rather than later, cause letters of reference have an uncanny reputation for taking weeks or even months to receive!
4. I've emailed 3-5 new churches/youth centers about Warrior Camp this week, including Grace Evangelical Free and The Center. For the Center especially, we would customize Warrior Camp specifically for their venue, and probably bring 2-3 of our best signature games and 1 youth talk for a 1/2 day customized version.
5. The one day version is now being called the Warrior Camp Blitz, instead of the Warrior Camp Marathon. (Blitz sounds better for an action packed 1 day version!)
6. Pretend a youth pastor is planning a Fri/Sat/Sun youth retreat, but doesn't have the time/resources/ideas to pack some awesome games and/or rallies into Saturday. I was thinking about this this week, and want to know what you all think of basically putting on the Warrior Camp Blitz for a youth group on a Saturday, even though the youth group will have a retreat going on the Friday before we get there and the Sunday after we get there. We would basically bring the fun stuff for an all day event Saturday, and maybe even 1-2 rallies at the youth pastor's request. In this way, we would partner with the youth pastor and help make his retreat very fun and spiritually monumental. What do you think?
7. Other Warrior Camp Ideas:
Offering a 1 day father-son heritage building event at a church's property or Peaksview park, where boys and their dads get to do Warrior Camp together, build swords together and compete against other son-father alliances from the same church in the Warrior Camp signature games. The church's pastor could do the speaking, or we could bring the Warrior Camp signature rallies = customizable.
Warrior Camp Birthday Bash: a mom or dad contacts us and books us for 3-4 hours for their teen son's birthday party. We would bring the weapon workshop and every boy at the party would make a sword or blowgun and get to take it home with them. After they make their weapon, we play capture the flag, team slayer, king of the hill etc... in the back yard. (If this was me, it'd be the greatest birthday ever!)
8. Let's be praying for God to prepare us as a team in the duration. This is where our faithfulness or flakeyness emerges - in the early, waiting phase when our team is new, and nobody really knows about us yet. Right now, Warrior Camp seems like more of a vision than a reality and it's a little frustrating because I think most of us are ready to hit the ground running. But when we look at Nehemiah with the Wall, or David with the conviction that Goliath should be challenged, or Christ preparing for ministry for 30 years, for some reason God insures that great things are not cooked in microwaves, but in crockpots, and the feast is all the more magnificent. So lets take heart that God has brought us this far already, encourage each other, hang out as a team, pray for each other, and be growing spiritually with Christ. Then, when we get a hit from a youth pastor, we're ready to rock and roll - cause God has prepared us for it.
Speaking of being ready, here's something I got from John Eldredge this week:
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Ready?
04/03/2008
"A curious warning is given to us in Peter’s first epistle. There he tells us to be ready to give the reason for the hope that lies within us to everyone who asks (3:15). Now, what’s strange about that passage is this: no one ever asks. When was the last time someone stopped you to inquire about the reason for the hope that lies within you? You’re at the market, say, in the frozen food section. A friend you haven’t seen for some time comes up to you, grasps you by both shoulders and pleads, “Please, you’ve got to tell me. Be honest now. How can you live with such hope? Where does it come from? I must know the reason.” In talking with hundreds of Christians, I’ve met only one or two who have experienced something like this. Yet God tells us to be ready, so what’s wrong? To be blunt, nothing about our lives is worth asking about. There’s nothing intriguing about our hopes, nothing to make anyone curious. Not that we don’t have hopes; we do. We hope we’ll have enough after taxes this year to take a summer vacation. We hope our kids don’t wreck the car. We hope our favorite team goes to the World Series. We hope our health doesn’t give out, and so on. Nothing wrong with any of those hopes; nothing unusual, either. Everyone has hopes like that, so why bother asking us? It’s life as usual. Sanctified resignation has become the new abiding place of contemporary Christians. No wonder nobody asks. Do you want the life of any Christian you know?"
- (The Journey of Desire , 64).
See also the Ransomed Heart Podcast at www.ransomedheart.com/podcast
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Stay True and God bless,
Derek
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